"If you want to see a thing well, reach out and touch it!"

That may seem a strange thing to say. But touching things can help you to see them better.

    Your eyes can tell you that a glass ball is round. But by holding it in your hands, you can feel how smooth and cool the ball is. You can feel how heavy the glass is. When you feel all these about the ball, you really see it. With your skin, you can feel better. For example, your fingers can tell (辨别) the difference between two coins in your pocket. You can feel a little drop of water on the back of your hand, too. You can even feel sounds against your skin. Have you ever wanted to know why some people like very loud music? They must like to feel the sounds of music.

    All children soon learn what "Don't touch!" means. They hear it often. Yet most of us keep on touching things as we grow up. In shops, we touch things we might buy: food, clothes. To see something well, we have to touch it. The bottoms of our feet can feel things, too. You know this when you walk on warm sand, cool grass or a hard floor. All feel different under your feet.

    There are ways of learning to see well by feeling. One way is to close your eyes and try to feel everything that is touching your skin. Feel the shoes on your feet, the clothes on your body, the air on your skin. At first, it is not easy to feel these things. You are too used to them!

    Most museums are just for looking. But today some museums have some things to touch. Their signs say, "Do touch!" There you can feel everything on show.

    If you want to see better, reach out and touch. Then you will really see!

    The World Health Organization report compared the “obesity-related behaviors” for youngsters across 42 nations. And it reveals UK kids are among the laziest.

    Among teenage girls, the Scots topped the league table for most screen time, with 80 per cent spending at least two hours a day on computers. Wales came fourth with 76 per cent, and England seventh with 75 per cent. Girls in Armenia and Albania were least likely to spend hours idling online.

    Screen time figures for boys were even higher. Wales was second in the European “couch potato” league, with 85 per cent glued to their screens for at least two hours. Scotland was third with 84 per cent, and England 15th with 77 per cent. Boys in Switzerland and Portugal were least likely to dedicate two hours a day to sitting in front of a computer.

    Lead researcher Dr. Jo Inchley, from the University of St Andrews, said social media was impacting on kids' health. She said,“ We know there are risks, such as cyber bullying and impact on mental health. Also, there are longer-term impacts on physical health from being sedentary. One of the main challenges is that this kind of activity (social media and computer use) is so much part of young people's lives these days.” She said more needs to be done to get kids moving throughout the day.

    Dr. Steven Mann, research director for UK Active said the findings were “alarming”. He said, “Modern life has changed, but when teens are spending hours having fun with Facebook, Instagram and videogames, they simply aren't getting the exercise that they need. These alarming inactivity figures show that playtime is over before it has started for too many children, putting them at far greater risk of future conditions like heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes.”

    Tam Fry, from the National Obesity Forum, warned Brit teens are now “slaves to hand-held devices”. And the WHO warns four in five fat teens will continue to struggle with their weight throughout life. The report also shows less than half of UK youngsters consume fruit or veg daily.

    Self-driving vehicles(车辆) will rely on cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence (人工智能) to recognize and respond to road and traffic conditions, but sensing is the most effective for objects and movement in the neighborhood of the vehicle. Not everything important in a car's environment will be caught by the vehicle's camera. Another vehicle approaching at high speed on a collision (碰撞) track might not be visible until it's too late. This is why vehicle-to-vehicle communication is undergoing rapid development. Our research shows that cars will need to be able to chat and cooperate on the road, although the technical challenges are still great.

    The usages of vehicle-to-vehicle communication contain vehicles driving together in a row, as well as safety messages about nearby emergency vehicles. Vehicles could alert each other to avoid collisions or share notices about passers-by and bicycles. From as far as several hundred metres away, vehicles could exchange messages with one another or receive information from roadside units（RSUs）about nearby incidents or dangerous road conditions through 4G network. A high level of AI seems required for such vehicles, not only to self-drive from A to B, but also to react intelligently to messages received. Vehicles will need to plan, reason, strategize and adapt according to information received in real time and to carry out cooperative behaviors. For example, a group of autonomous vehicles might avoid a route together because of possible risks, or a vehicle could decide to drop someone off earlier due to messages received, a foreseen crowding ahead.

    Further applications(应用) of vehicle-to-vehicle communication are still being researched, including how to perform cooperative behavior.

    People are always looking for lost cities and occasionally one is found: Borobudur in Indonesia, for example. But perhaps some of the places people look for never existed — or did they? Here are just a few famous mythical (传说中的) cities.

    El Dorado

    El Dorado is a story that began in 1537, when Spanish explorers found the Muisca people in the mountains of what is now Colombia. They heard the story of a man who covered himself with gold and dived into a lake. Then people began to talk of El Dorado — 'the golden man'. Soon people started to think of El Dorado as a place, too — a city of gold and amazing riches. Nowadays, the name 'El Dorado' is still used to mean 'a place where you can get rich quickly'.

    Atlantis

    There was once an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It was the mythical island of Atlantis. The people of the island were very rich, thanks to the natural resources (资源) on their island. For hundreds of years, they lived simple lives. But slowly they began to change. They started to want power. So the gods decided to destroy Atlantis. Suddenly, the island and its people were swallowed (淹没) by the sea and were never seen again.

    Shambhala

    In Tibetan Buddhist tradition, Shambhala is a mystical (神秘的) country that is hidden somewhere behind the Himalayas. Shambhala is a word from an old language that means 'place of peace' or 'place of happiness'. It is said that there is no war in Shambhala, and in the future, when the world is full of war, a huge army will come out of Shambhala, destroy the world's bad rulers, and start a new Golden Age. Some people say this will happen in 2424.

    At some point in life, many people suffer a mental problem. While most people get over it, for others it doesn't go away easily.

    The World Health Organization (WHO) says that about 20 percent of children and teenagers across the globe suffer from mental illness. It's thought that the number of children and teenagers with mental illness around the world will increase by half by 2020. It will become one of the main causes of disease, disabilities and even death.

The reason for mental problems among young people may be the increasing pressure in life. Study and relationships have always caused huge stresses for school children. For instance, they experience school bullying(欺凌)and academic pressure.

    In China, the picture isn't bright, either. About 30 million Chinese children and teenagers under the age of 17, or 10 percent of children and teenagers in China, have a mental health challenge, reported China Daily.

    Also, according to China Daily, Chinese people don't seek help with their mental problems. They fear that others will think less of them if they admit that they are in trouble. Many Chinese people are ashamed of their mental problems and mental illness is taboo(禁忌)in any Chinese families.

    In the UK, over three-quarters of young people believe their mental health problems have a social shame and a quarter of young UK people wouldn't ask for help if they developed a mental problem.

    Young people who don't seek help for their condition may be creating problems for themselves in the future. If you feel something is wrong within you – seek help.

Feeling down? Here are three things to try if you feel low.

    Go to a psychology teacher. The teacher will listen to you and offer help – for free!

    Call 800-810-1100. It's the number of a hotline run by the Mental Health Research and Prevention Center. The line is open 24 hours a day.

    Tell your parents and visit the hospital if the situation gets out of control.

    As any plane passenger will confirm, a crying baby is almost impossible to ignore, no matter how hard you try. Now scientists believe they may have worked out why. A baby's cry pulls at the heartstrings(扣人心弦) in a way while other cries don't, researchers found.

    Researchers found that a baby's cry can trigger unique emotional responses in the brain, making it impossible for us to ignore them—whether we are parents or not. Other types of cries, including calls of animals in great pain, fail to get the same response—suggesting the brain is programmed to respond specifically to a baby' cry.

    A team of Oxford University scientists scanned the brains of 28 men and women as they listened to a variety of calls and cries. After 100 milliseconds—roughly the time to blink(眨眼)—two parts of the brain that respond to emotion lit up. Their response to a baby's cry was particularly strong. The response was seen in both men and women—even if they had no children.

    Researcher Dr Christine Parsons said, “You might read that men should just notice a baby and step over it and not see it, but it's not true. There is a special processing in men and women, which makes sense from an evolutionary view that both men and women would be responding to these cries.” The study was in people who were not parents, yet they are all responding at 100ms to these particular cries, so this might be a fundamental response present in all of us regardless of parental status.

    Fellow researcher Katie Young said it may take a bit longer for someone to recognize their own child's cries because they need to do more “fine-grained analysis”. The team had previously found that our reactions speed up when we hear a baby crying. Adults performed better on computer games when they heard the sound of a baby crying than after they heard recordings of adults crying.