When I was a kid, I used to spend hours listening to Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky on their Sunday night radio show Loveline. I listened so often that I began to use one of their well-known phrases—"good times"—in my daily conversations. Scientists have a name for this phenomenon: behavioral mimicry.

    You've probably experienced this before: after spending enough time with another person, you might start to pick up on his or her behavior or speech habits. You might even start to develop your friend's habits without realizing it. There is a large body of literature concerning this sort of phenomenon, and it regularly happens for everything from body gesture to accents to drink patterns (模式). For example, one study found that young adults were more likely to drink their drink directly after their same-sex drinking partners, than for the two individuals to drink at their own paces.

And the effect isn't limited to real-life face-to-face activities. Another study found that the same you-drink-then-I-drink pattern held even when watching a movie! In other words, people were more likely to take a drink of their drinks in a theater after watching the actors on the screen enjoy a drink. At least I don't feel so strange anymore, having picked up on Adam Carolla's "good times".

    New research published today in the journal PLOS ONE indicates that the same sort of behavioral mimicry is responsible for social eating, at least among university-age women of normal weight. That's right: the young women were more likely to adjust their eating according to the eating pace of their same-sex dining companion.

As with most experiments, these results raise a whole new set of questions. However, the finding that behavioral mimicry may at least partly explain eating behavior is important, and has real effects on health. The researchers note that "as long as people don't fully recognize such important influences on intake (eating), it will be difficult to make healthy food choices and keep a healthy diet, especially when people are exposed to the eating behavior of others".

    More and more people like bicycling and it is no surprise. It is fun, healthy and good for the environment. Maybe that's why there are 1.4 billion bicycles and only 400 million cars on roads worldwide today. Bikes can take you almost anywhere, and there is no oil cost!

    Get on a bicycle and ride around your neighborhood. You may discover something new all around you. Stopping and getting off a bike is easier than stopping and getting out of your car.

    You can bike to work and benefit from the enjoyable exercise without polluting the environment. You don't even have to ride all the way. Folding (折叠) bikes work well for people who ride the train. Just fold the bike and take it with you. You can do the same on an airplane. A folding bike can be packed in a suitcase. You can also take a common bike with you when you fly. But be sure to look for information by getting on airline websites. Not all airlines are bicycle-friendly to travellers.

Health Benefits of Bicycling:

    It helps to prevent heart diseases.

    Bicycling helps to control your weight.

    A 15-minute bike ride to and from work three times a week burns off five kilos of fat in a year.

    Bicycling can improve your mood (心情).

    Exercise like bicycling has been shown to make people feel better, more relaxed and self-confident.

    Bicycling is healthier than driving.

    Doctors say anger can be an extremely harmful emotion, unless you learn how to deal with it. They warn that angry feeling can lead to heart disease, stomach problems, headaches, emotional problems and possibly cancer.

    Anger is a normal emotion that we all feel from time to time. Some people express anger openly in a calm, reasonable way. Others burst with anger, losing control of themselves. But still other people control their anger. They cannot or will not express it.

    For years many doctors thought that controlling one's anger was more dangerous to a person's health than expressing it. They said that when a person is angry, the brain lets out the same hormones that are produced during tense situations. They speed the heart rate, raise blood pressure, and narrow the blood vessels. In general, the person feels excited and ready to act.

    Doctors said that controlling these feelings only makes the feelings continue. And this can lead to many medical problems. Doctors thought a person could prevent these problems by letting the anger out by expressing it freely. But recently some doctors held a different view. They said that people who express anger too often and violently did become, in fact, more and not less angry. They said this, too, can cause medical problems.

    Some doctors say that both controlling and expressing anger can be dangerous. They believe that those who express anger strongly may be more likely to develop heart disease, and they believe that those who keep their anger inside may face a greater danger of high blood pressure.

    Doctors say the solution is learning how to deal with anger. They say the first step is to admit that you are angry and to recognize the real cause of the anger, then decide if the cause is serious enough to get angry about. If it is, they say, “Do not express your anger while angry. Wait until your anger has cooled down and you are able to express yourself calmly and reasonably.”

    Years ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise advisers urged, "Barbara, be enthusiastic! Enthusiasm will take you further than any amount of experience."

    How right they were. Enthusiastic people can turn a boring drive into an adventure, extra work into opportunity and strangers into friends.

    ''Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is the paste that helps you hang in there when the going gets tough. It is the inner voice that whispers, I can do it! " when others shout, "No, you can't."

    It took years and years for the early work of Barbara McClintock, a geneticist（遗传学家） who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in medicine, to be generally accepted． Yet she didn't let up on her experiments. Work was such a deep pleasure for her that she never thought of stopping.

    Author and poet Samuel Ullman once wrote, "Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul".

    Enthusiastic people also love what they do, regardless of money or title or power. If we cannot do what we love as a full-time career, we can treat it as a part-time interest, like the head of state who paints, the nun(修女) who runs marathons, the official who handcrafts（手工制作）furniture.

    We can't afford to waste tears on "might- have-beens". We need to turn the tears into sweat as we go after ''what-can-be".

    We need to live each moment wholeheartedly, with all our senses—finding pleasure in the fragrance of a back-yard garden, the crayoned（蜡笔的）picture of a six-year-old, the enchanting beauty of a rainbow. It is such enthusiastic love of life that puts a sparkle in our eyes, a lilt in our steps and smooths the wrinkles from our souls.

    Learning any language is hard, but learning English can be especially challenging. Why? Because native speakers use the language in ways that textbooks could never describe. In particular, words that British people use cause many language students to scratch(JT) their heads.

    Here's an example: You happen to hear a Briton calling someone a “wazzock”. But what exactly is a wazzock? This word, in fact, means a foolish person, although there's nothing about it that would help you guess that. There are many strange terms like this in British English - the Oxford English Dictionary would be much smaller without these strange usages filling its pages.

    How can these odd words be explained? Part of the answer is the British sense of humor. Britons don't like to take things too seriously, and this is evident through many British words and phrases. For example, to spend a penny means to use the bathroom. It refers to the days when people had to pay a penny to use a public toilet.

    In an interview for the BBC's website, British linguist David Crystal suggested there may be historical reasons for the sheer number of odd words and phrases in British English. He thinks that they began in the late 16th and. early 17th centuries. This was a great age for the theatre, when Shakespeare and other writers worked hard to keep up with the demand for new plays. The theatre's popularity also created an incentive (刺激) to invent new words.

    With this in mind, perhaps Shakespeare and his peers are to blame for unusual British words such as “codswallop” and “balderdash”—which both, ironically, mean nonsense.

    While these strange words may be confusing to non-native speakers, they certainly make studying English a lot more interesting.

    Camping is a good way to spend time along with your kids and to show them how wonderful nature can be. Through camping, children can discover new things about nature, such as flowers, birds, and other small animals. Camping gives kids time to get away from all the electronics (电子) of today's culture. So it is necessary to plan exciting and enjoyable family camping trips with your children while they are young.

    When planning your family camping trip, consider the activities your kids like: games, hiking, swimming, boating, bicycling, etc. Select a camping place that has some of the activities the kids are interested in. Meal planning is an important part of your camping trip. Plan the meals together, and kids love to choose what they want to eat.

    When starting to pack for your trip, let the kids pack their own items (物品) . Each person should have his/her own sleeping bag with a luggage (行李) bag to put it in. Personal items should be packed with their sleeping bags. Encourage the kids to put their items in a certain place and always return it when they have finished using it.

    When you have arrived at your campsite, make all the camping activities a family activity, which will help children to realize how important team-work is. Everyone can have his/her own job sitting up the campsite. Meal time can be a fun time. So let the older ones help with the cooking on your outdoor camping stove while the younger ones get the picnic table ready.