Antarctica(南极洲)'s melting ice, which has caused global sea levels to rise by at least 13.8 millimeters over the past 40 years, was thought to primarily come from the unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet(WAIS). Now, scientists have found that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS)—considered largely unaffected by climate change—may also be melting at an unexpectedly rapid speed.

    The WAIS, whose base is below sea level, has long been considered the most likely to break down. Besides gravity, a deep current of warm water slips beneath the sheet, melting it from below until it becomes a floating shelf at risk of breaking away. In contrast, extreme cold and a base mostly above sea level are thought to keep the EAIS relatively safe from warm waters.

    But as greenhouse gases warm much of the planet, driving stronger polar winds, some scientists think warm water carried by a circular current will start to invade East Antarctica's once unassailable ice. A cooperation of more than 60 scientists last year, published in Nature, estimated that the EAIS actually added about 5 billion tons of ice each year from 1992 to 2017.

    Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues combined 40 years of satellite imagery and climate modeling and found that overall Antarctica now sends six times more ice into the sea each year than it did in 1979, with the majority coming from West Antarctica. But East Antarctica was responsible for more than 30% of Antarctica's contribution to the 13.8-millimeter sea level rise over the past 40 years. “The more we look at this system the more we realize this is fragile,” Rignot says. “Once these glaciers become unstable there is no red button to press to stop it.”

    Rignot hopes the study brings greater attention to a part of Antarctica that has traditionally been understudied. Helen Fricker, a glaciologist (冰川学家) in California, agrees. “We need to monitor the entire Antarctica and we just can't do that without international cooperation.”

    LEADING INTERNATIONAL SCHOOLS 2019

    Jerudong International School(JIS) , Brunei

    “Achieving Excellence” is the motto of JIS, Brunei. A developing boarding school of 1,700 students, 40% Bruneian, JIS has made itself a leading school in Asia. With almost 200 highly qualified teachers primarily from the UK, the 120-acre single campus (校园) close to both coast and rainforest offers a unique educational environment. There is a Performing Arts Centre, 27 science laboratories, libraries and classrooms.

    The American International School (AIS), Austria

Founded in 1959, AIS is the oldest English-language school in Austria. School programs focus on academics, but also on the development of students' creative and leadership abilities and emotional intelligence. The school recognizes students' special learning styles, trying to make instruction different and allowing students to reach their full potential in different areas.

    Singapore American School (SAS), Singapore

    Founded in 1956, it is one of only a few good non-profit schools in Singapore. For over six decades, SAS has provided students from preschool to Grade 12 a good American education with an international view. The school supports professional development financially and continually sends teachers across the globe to discover new ideas and best practices from influential educational institutions.

    Santa Clara International School (SCIS), Spain

    In the school, when you walk into a classroom, you'll see hands raised, small groups assembled (集合), and presentations underway. You'll find teachers creating cooperative partnerships with students, encouraging them to discover and connect. You'll observe children working on meaningful hands-on projects that build skills and excite creativity. The teaching philosophy is that learning happens everywhere: in the classrooms, in the city, in a museum, on a farm, or just a walk around the neighborhood.

    That people often experience trouble sleeping in a different bed in unfamiliar surroundings is a phenomenon known as the 4Tirst-nighf, effect. If a person stays in the same room the following night they tend to sleep more soundly. Yuka Sasaki and her colleagues at Brown University set out to investigate the origins of this effect.

    Dr. Sasaki knew the first-night effect probably has something to do with how humans evolved.

    The puzzle was what benefit would be gained from it when performance might be affected the following day. She also knew from previous work conducted on birds and dolphins that these animals put half of their brains to sleep at a time so that they can rest while remaining alert enough to avoid predators (捕食者). This led her to wonder if people might be doing the same thing. To take a closer look, her team studied 35 healthy people as they slept in the unfamiliar environment of the university's Department of Psychological Sciences. The participants each slept in the department for two nights and were carefully monitored with techniques that looked at the activity of their brains. Dr. Sasaki found, as expected, the participants slept less well on their first night than they did on their second, taking more than twice as long to fall asleep and sleeping less overall. During deep sleep, the participants' brains behaved in a similar manner seen in birds and dolphins. On the first night only, the left hemispheres (半球) of their brains did not sleep nearly as deeply as their right hemispheres did.

    Curious if the left hemispheres were indeed remaining awake to process information detected in the surrounding environment, Dr. Sasaki re-ran the experiment while presenting the sleeping participants with a mix of regularly timed beeps (蜂鸣声) of the same tone and irregular beeps of a different tone during the night. She worked out that, if the left hemisphere was staying alert to keep guard in a strange environment, then it would react to the irregular beeps by stirring people from sleep and would ignore the regularly timed ones. This is precisely what she found.

    Like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I'm a slightly different person in each of my languages­more confident in English, more relaxed in French, more emotional in Czech. Is it possible that, along with these differences, my moral compass (指南针) also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I'm using at the time?

    Psychologists who study moral judgments have become very interested in this question. The findings of several recent studies suggest that when people are faced with moral dilemmas (困境), they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

    In a 2014 paper led by Albert Costa  volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the "trolley problem": imagine that a runaway trolley is moving quickly toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move. You are next to a switch that can move the trolley to a different set of tracks, therefore sparing the five people, but resulting in the death of one who is standing on the side tracks. Do you pull the switch?

    Most people agree that they would. But what if the only way to stop the trolley is by pushing a large stranger off a footbridge into its path? People tend to be very hesitant to say they would do this, even though in both situations, one person is sacrificed to save five. But Costa and his colleagues found that presenting the dilemma in a language that volunteers had learned as a foreign tongue dramatically increased their stated willingness to push the sacrificial person off the footbridge, from fewer than 20% of respondents working in their native language to about 50% of those using the foreign one.

    Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing ways of thinking­one of these, a quick, natural "feeling," and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more careful way simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language signals our cognitive (认知的) system to prepare for difficult activity.

    An alternative explanation is that differences arise between native and foreign tongues because our childhood languages are filled with greater emotions than are those learned in more academic settings. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less filled with the emotional reactions that surface when we use a language learned in childhood.

    There's strong evidence that memory connects a language with the experiences and interactions through which that language was learned. For example, people who are bilingual (双语的) are more likely to recall an experience if reminded in the language in which that event occurred. Our childhood languages, learned in the middle of passionate emotion, become filled with deep feeling. By comparison, languages acquired late in life, especially if they are learned through limited interactions in the classroom or dully delivered over computer screens and headphones, enter our minds lacking the emotionality that is present for their native speakers.

Reading helps kids learn English and kids' books make it easy and enjoyable. Here are some books that are carefully picked for your kids.

Corduroy

It's about a little bear, Corduroy, in a toy shop. He has lost one of his buttons (纽扣). This makes him very sad because he wants to be taken home by a kid. So he decides to find a new button. Corduroy contains some hard words. So you'd better use a dictionary while reading it

 Price: $18; 10% discount (折扣) on Sunday

Curious George

Curious Georgp, a monkey, is a little too interested in everything, which causes humans to bring him from the forest to a big city. However, there he calls the fire department, is put into prison, escapes from prison and is carried into the sky by balloons. Though the book uses a lot of short and simple sentences, some of its words are not simple.

Price: $20; 20% discount on Sunday

The Story of Ferdinand

Ferdinand, a bull, loves to smell the flowers in the grassland. One day people come to pick a male cow for bull fights. Ferdinand doesn't want to be chosen, but a bee stings (叮) him. It causes him to jump around crazily, so he's picked. In Ferdinand's first fight, he lies down to smell the flowers instead of fighting. So he is sent back to the-grassland. The book has many similar stories that bring laughter. And it has everything that makes a children's book great for English learners — simple and hard words.

Price: $16; 10% discount on Sunday

Green Eggs and Ham

In this book, a cat named Sam really likes green eggs and meat. So he offers them to a friend. Read the book to see if his friend likes the meal or not. This book is a poem. Despite having simple vocabulary, the words are used in a way that feels smart.

Price: $15; 5% discount on Sunday