"Life is speeding up. Everyone is getting unwell." This may sound like something someone would say today. But in fact, an unknown person who lived in Rome in AD 53 wrote it. 

We all love new inventions. They are exciting, amazing and can even change our lives. But have all these developments really improved the quality of our lives?

    Picture this, you're rushing to finish your homework on the computer. Your mobile phone rings, a QQ message from your friend appears on the screen, the noise from the television is getting louder and louder. Suddenly the computer goes blank and you lose all your work. Now you have to stay up all night to get it done. How happy do you feel?

Inventions have speeded up our lives so much that they often leave up feeling stressed and tired. Why do you think people who live far away from noisy cities, who have no telephones, no car, not even any electricity often seem to be happier? Perhaps because they live a simpler live.

     One family in the UK went "back in time" to see what life was like without all the inventions we have today. The grandparents, with their daughter, and grandsons Benjamin, 10 and Thomas, 7, spent nine weeks in a 1940s house. They had no washing machine, microwave, computer or mobile phones. The grandmother, Lyn, said, "The more things you have, the more difficult life becomes." The boys said they fought less. Probably, they said, because there was less to fight over, such as their computer. Benjamin also noticed that his grandmother had changed from being a "trendy, beer-drinking granny, to one who cooked things"   

    Lockheed Martin, American space system company (空间系统公司) has found a really cool way to inspire the young minds of today to the research fields in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).

    It may look like a normal yellow bus, but all the magic happens once you get inside. Meet the “Mars (火星) Experience Bus,” part of Lockheed Martin's new “Generation Beyond” national education program to get the kids joining in studying what goes on outside of our home planet. The bus offers a virtual reality (VR, 虚拟现实) experience making the teenagers feel like they are driving on Mars.

    The VR experience was developed by taking advantage of software (软件) created for today's best video games, so you can imagine the picture shown is top level. The kids do seem really excited to see the bus take a virtual trip on the red planet and search unknown places. It's certainly a great way of learning about the universe by virtual reality working on a common bus.

    The Lockheed Martin's bus will start a tour in the United States to allow kids from different parts of the country to take a ride in it. The Generation Beyond project also includes an iPhone app for iOS providing real-time information about weather reports for Mars, and there's also a free deep space course for middle school teachers and students.

    There are over 37 000 known kinds of spiders（蜘蛛）in different shapes and sizes in the world. The largest spiders live in the rain forests of South America and are known as the "bird-eating" spiders. These spiders can grow up to 28cm long and they eat small birds. The smallest spiders are from Western Samoa. These tiny spiders are less than 0.5mm long. They live in the plants that grow on mountain rocks.

    Some people like to keep spiders as pets but most people don't like touching them. A great number of people are afraid of them mainly because of their poison—something will make them hurt or even die. But in fact, only thirty kinds of spiders are very dangerous to humans. Spiders provide benefits for humans by catching and eating insects such as flies and mosquitoes (蚊子).

    Spiders are different from other animals because they make webs to catch the small insects for food. The special silk of a spider's web is light and strong—five times(倍)stronger than steel. Some people have tried to raise spiders in order to collect their silk but no one was successful in doing it. One reason is that it takes 670 000 spiders to produce half a kilo of silk and all of these spiders need living insects for their food. Besides, spiders are usually solitary (独自的) animals and they need keeping alone.

    All in all people are amazed to learn that there are so many secrets in spiders!

    There's much to see under the sea, but you need to remember that light behave differently in water than in air. The objects appear closer to you than they exactly are. You might find yourself reaching out to touch something and completely missing it.

    Objects under water will appear larger than they would on the surface, too. Be careful not to tell any stories about the big fish that got away. That fish might not be so big after all! It's just because sometimes things can seem to be as much as about 33 percent bigger in water!

    What's more, in deeper water, colors just don't seem as bright. In fact, it looks as if some colors are missing. Remember the color of an object results from the wavelength (波长) of light that are reflected (反射) from its surface. And light is taken in as it moves down through the water.

    Swimmers wear wet suits to keep warm underwater. Let's take a bright red, yellow, and blue wet suit as an example. These colors are hard to miss on the surface of water. Watch carefully the changes in color as you descend in the water. The red part now looks almost black because the red light wavelengths, the longest among these three colors, are missing. As you go down deeper, the same thing will happen to the yellow part and in the end to the blue part. Even at a place of about 6 to 9 meters underwater, you will look terrible, like a ghost(鬼怪) ! And you have to wait for your return to the surface to enjoy the bright colors again!

    These days haze(雾霾) is around us here and there. In fact, everyone has the power to change their living habits to help reduce it. Many local governments call on their people to take action to make the air cleaner.

    Transport is one of the biggest contributors(促成物) to haze. When, where, bow, why and what you drive all affect air quality. When one drives to work for one year, he uses as much energy as a bus rider uses in 10 years. So walk or ride your bicycle to work or school whenever possible. If it is necessary, you can use public transport instead of your car. Each person using public transport for a year instead of a car can save nearly a tonne of pollutants, including CO₂, from going into the atmosphere.

    Carpooling is another way to reduce carbon emissions (排放). Carpooling is the sharing of car journeys so that more than one person travels in a car. It immediately reduces your car's emissions by half.

    What you do inside your living space can have a big effect on the air quality outside it. You can do a lot of things inside and around your home that will help you pollute less and save some money.

    A large amount of our energy supply comes from burning coal, another contributor to haze. By cutting down your electricity use, you are cutting down on haze. So you may try to reduce your use of electricity by turning off lights, using your air conditioner wisely during the summer months, or updating some of your electrical appliances to low-energy models. For example, you can use energy-saving lamps that require less energy and last 10 times longer than common bulbs.

    The idea of being able to walk on water has long interested humans greatly. Sadly, biological facts prevent us ever accomplishing such a thing without artificial aid-we simply weigh too much, and all our mass pushes down through our relatively small feet, resulting in a lot of pressure that makes us sink.

    However, several types of animals can walk on water. One of the most interesting is the common basilisk Basilicus basilicus, a lizard(蜥蜴) native to Central and South America. It can run across water for a distance of several meters, avoiding getting wet by rapidly hitting the water's surface with its feet. The lizard will take as many as 20 steps per second to keep moving forward. For humans to do this, we'd need huge feet that we could bring up to our ears in order to create adequate "hitting."

    But fortunately there is an alternative: cornflour. By adding enough of this common thickening agent to water (and it does take a tot), you can create a "non-Newtonian" liquid that doesn't behave like normal water. Now, if the surface of the water is hit hard enough, particles(粒子) in the water group together for a moment to make the surface hard. Move quickly enough and put enough force into each step, and you really can walk across the surface of an adequately thick liquid of cornflour.

    Fun though all this may sound, it's still rather messy and better read about in theory than carried out in practice. If you must do it, then keep the water wings handy in case you start to sink and take a shower afterward!