Christian Eijkman, a Dutch doctor, left the Netherlands for the island of Java. Many people on the island had a disease called beri-beri. He was going there to try and find a cure.

    At first, Eijkman thought some kind of germ (细菌) caused beri-beri. He raised some chickens. He didn't eat them, but made experiments on them. The local people were quite surprised at that. One day he noticed that his chickens became sick when they were fed the food most Javanese ate — refined white rice (精炼米). When he fed them with unrefined rice, also known as brown rice, they recovered. Eijkman realized that he had made an important discovery — that some things in food could prevent disease. These things were named vitamins. The Javanese were not getting enough vitamins because they had actually removed the part that contains vitamins. Later, other diseases were also found to be caused by the lack of vitamins in a person's food.

    Today many people know the importance of vitamins and they make sure they have enough vitamins from the food they eat. If they don't, they can also take vitamin pills.

    Do you want to get home from work knowing you have made a real difference in someone's life?

    If yes, don't care about sex or age! Come and join us, then you'll make it!

Position: Volunteer Social Care Assistant

(No Pay with Free Meals)

Place: Manchester

Hours: Part Time

    We arc now looking for volunteers to support people with learning disabilities to live active lives! Only 4 days left. Don't miss the chance of lending your warm hands to help others!

Role:

    You will provide people with learning disabilities with all aspects of their daily lives. You will help them to develop new skills. You will help them to protect their rights and their safety. But your primary concern is to let them know they are valued.

Skills and Experience Required:

    You will have the right values and great listening skills. You will be honest and patient. You will have the ability to drive a car and to communicate in fluent written and spoken English since you'll have to help those people with different learning disabilities. Previous care-related experience will be a great advantage for you.

    Bad news sells.If it bleeds,it leads.No news is good news,and good news is no news.Those are "the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers.But now that information is being spread amt monitored（监控）in different ways,researchers are discovering new rules.By tracking people's e-mails and online posts,scientists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

    "The ‘if it bleeds 'rule works for mass media,"says Jonah Berger,a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. "They want your eyeballs and don't care how you're feeling.But when you share a story with your friends,you care a lot more how they react.You don't want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer."

    Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication—e-mails,Web posts and reviews,face-to-face conversations—found that it tended to be more positive than negative,but that didn't necessarily mean people preferred positive news.Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things?To test for that possibility,Dr.Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times' website.He and a Penn colleague analyzed the "most e-mailed" list for six months.One of his first findings was that articles in the science section were much more likely to make the list than non-science articles.He found that science amazed Times' readers and made them want to share this positive feeling with others.

    Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny,or that inspired negative feelings like anger or anxiety,but not articles that left them merely sad.They needed to be aroused（激发）one way or the other,and they preferred good news to bad.The more positive an article,the more likely it was to be shared as Dr.Berger explains in his new book,"Contagious: Why Things Catch On."

    Are you sick of going to bed late and waking up tired? Then grab your hiking boots and a tent. A new study suggests that camping in the great outdoors for a couple of days can reset your body clock and help you get more sleep.

    The body clock is an internal system that tells our bodies when it's time to go to sleep and when it's time to wake up. Scientists track this clock by measuring the amount of melatonin (褪黑激素) circulating in a person's blood at any given time.

    In a healthy sleeper, melatonin levels rise a few hours before bedtime, stay high through the night, and then settle back down when it's time to wake up.

    In our modern society, however, most of us stay up many hours past sunset and would probably sleep in many hours after sunrise if we could. And the trouble is, your melatonin levels may still be high when your alarm clock goes off in the morning, which leads to fatigue. It may also have other health consequences as well, such as diabetes (糖尿病), overweight and heart disease.

    Professor Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado in the US wanted to see if our body clocks can be reset by a short stay in nature. His team recruited (招募) fourteen physically active volunteers in their 20s and 30s. Nine went on a weekend camping trip, while the other five stayed home. At the end of the weekend, the researchers reported that in just two days, the campers' body clocks had shifted so that their melatonin levels began to rise more than an hour earlier than they did before they left on the trip. By contrast, the body clocks of the group that stayed home shifted even later over the course of the weekend.

    “This tells us we can reset our clocks fast,” Wright said.

    Therefore, if you want to change your sleep patterns you could try to increase your exposure to natural light during the day and decrease the amount of artificial light you see at night. And if that doesn't work，there's always camping.

    There's nothing like a good night's sleep — but what does that really mean? It turns out that the answer depends not only on your age, but also on your lifestyle. Some people are productive and happy with fewer hours of sleep, while others need more. Still, experts can determine guidelines that work for most people. The National Sleep Foundation researched the topic and gave new recommendations this week. The foundation acknowledges that sleep needs will vary — lifestyle and stress should be taken into consideration — but their recommendations offer a general guideline. For example, teenagers (14 —17 years old) need 8—10 hours, sleep every day.

    To create the recommendations, some sleep and medical experts reviewed 312 articles from journals published during the last decade. This is the first time that any professional organization has developed age-specific recommended sleep durations based on a systematic review of the world scientific literature.

    A lack of sleep can be linked to weight gain, because that causes an increase in appetite, according to the foundation. It can also have serious consequences on the brain. People who do not get enough sleep are at increased risk for depression, and can endanger others. Those that become sleepy while driving, for example, risk both their lives and the lives of those around them.

    Researchers also have found in the past that too much sleep can have negative effects. Low socioeconomic status and depression reportedly are significantly associated with longer sleep. However, experts nowadays find that research on oversleeping is still unconvincing and needs more attention. Currently, there is no strong evidence that sleeping too much has health consequences. There is, however, laboratory evidence that short sleep durations of four to five hours have negative consequences. We need similar laboratory studies to determine whether long sleep durations result in physiological changes that could lead to disease before we make any recommendations against sleep extension.

    Perhaps no one knows the power of imagination better than Chinese writer Liu Cixin. Until four years ago, Liu worked full-time as a computer engineer at a power plant in Shanxi province. He only wrote science fiction in his spare time. But it was during this time that Liu's imagination took flight. He did what he might never have the chance to do in real life – wander in space, fight with aliens, and visit planets light-years away.

    But even with such a powerful imagination, Liu, 55, probably hadn't expected that he would become the first Asian to win the Hugo Award, science fiction's highest prize, in 2015. Perhaps neither did he think that former US president Barack Obama would read his novel The Three-Body Problem, nor that on Nov 9 in Washington DC, he would win the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. It's the first time a Chinese writer has ever won the award.

    In his acceptance speech, Liu said that he owed his imagination to Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), a famous UK sci-fi author. He said that reading Clarke's 1968 classic novel 2001: A Space Odyssey in the early 1980s had a great effect on him.

    “My mind opened up like never before. I felt like a narrow river finally seeing the sea,” Liu said. “That night, in my eyes, the starry sky was completely different from the past. For the first time in my life, I was awed (使……敬畏) by the mystery of the universe.”

    But no matter how far away Liu's imagination takes him, somehow his novels always stay rational.

    In The Three-Body Problem, for example, Liu tells a tale of aliens invading Earth. But unlike other alien stories, Liu talks more about relationships between civilizations(文明), rules of survival, and the meanings of life. And in The Wandering Earth, Liu looks ahead to the day when our solar system comes to an end and humans have to look for a new place to live. However, all his visions and solutions are based on “hard science”. Liu's works aren't simply daydreams.