When I found out I was moving to India, it was beyond a nightmare. It was something I couldn't even imagine. The impression I had of India were only based upon a few summer visits to my grandparents, filled with heat, pollution and dirt. Even though I was only six years old, I know this would be a complete change from my comfortable life in Maryland.

    During my first six months in India, my expectations were met almost exactly. I hated my new apartment; I missed my school and friends back in Maryland, and I was sick of all the dirty marketplaces that filled the streets of New Delhi.

    After those six months were over I finally realized that I was going to be in India for a while. I knew that I had to start making the most of my new life. It was then that I became completely involved in my school. My school, the American Embassy School, was filled with international students: Europeans, Australians, Chinese, and Americans just like me. But they all welcomed me with open arms. It was amazing to be among such diverse students, who had such incredible experiences to share.

    Now, when I look back at my time in India, all I can think about is how fortunate I am to have had such a wonderful experience. My move to India not only allowed me to see a completely different side of the world, but I was also able to establish unbreakable bonds with so many interesting and amazing people. Even now, after quite some years, I am still in contact with my closest friends from the American Embassy School. I cannot even imagine what I would be like without having lived in India. I would have missed out on meeting so many extraordinary people, and I would be a completely different person today.

    When people ask me to name typical British dishes,I have,however,struggled to think of an answer.Yes,we do have our own national dishes.We do have fish and chips,and we have other dishes like roast dinner and shepherd's pie.But how much do we actually eat them?

    Fish and chips,is made up of battered（绞碎的）fish and chips,which is often accompanied by a thick paste（酱）. The majority of British people really do love this dish but it is not something that we would eat,say,on a weekly basis.It's also not usually something that we would cook at home.The British people associate this dish with the seaside and it's something that will usually be eaten on a day trip there,bought from a takeaway fish and chip shop.

    Another favourite British dish is roast dinner.This is made up of roast meat,usually chicken or beef, accompanied by roast vegetables and a meat sauce called gravy（肉汁）.It is usually eaten on a Sunday,perhaps for a special family dinner.It can either be cooked at home or eaten in a traditional pub.We also eat a more elaborate version of this for our Christmas dinner.

    Although we do have our traditional dishes,our diet has been greatly influenced by other countries.You can find a wide range of international foods in the supermarket or varieties of different restaurants on our high streets.A famous saying amongst British people is that our national dish is now chicken tikka masala,a dish which is heavily influenced by Indian cuisine.

    Don't expect to be served a traditional dish if you ever get invited for dinner at a British family's home!

    Optimism May Help People Live Longer

People who have an optimistic view on life are more likely to live longer, a US study said Wednesday.

    The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, analyzed data from 2004 to 2012 from 70,000 women enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study, a long-running US study tracking women's health via surveys every two years.

    The researchers looked at participants' levels of optimism and other factors that might play a role in how optimism may affect mortality risk, such as race, high blood pressure, diet, and physical activity.

    It found the most optimistic women, or the top 25%, had a nearly 30 percent lower risk of dying from any of the diseases analyzed in the study compared with the least optimistic women, or the bottom 25%.

    The most optimistic women had a 16 percent lower risk of dying from cancer; 38 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease; 39 percent lower risk of dying from stroke; 38 percent lower risk of dying from respiratory disease; and 52 percent lower risk of dying from infection.

    Previous studies have linked optimism with reduced risk of early death from cardiovascular (心脑血管的) problems, but this was the first to find a link between optimism and reduced risk from other major causes.

    “While most medical and public health efforts today focus on reducing risk factors for diseases, evidence has been mounting that enhancing psychological resilience (弹性，复原力) may also make a difference,” said Eric Kim, research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-lead author of the study.

    “Our new findings suggest that we should make efforts to boost optimism, which has been shown to be associated with healthier behaviors and healthier ways of coping with life challenges.”

    The study also found that healthy behaviors only partially explain the link between optimism and reduced mortality risk. One other possibility is that higher optimism directly affects our biological systems, Kim said.

    Co-lead author and postdoctoral research fellow Kaitlin Hagan said optimism can be varied with relatively uncomplicated and low-cost interventions (干预), even things as simple as having people write down and think about the best possible outcomes for various areas of their lives, such as careers or friendships.

    “Encouraging use of these interventions could be an innovative way to enhance health in the future,” Hagan said.

    Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children, who are able from a young age to gather their own food.

In the laboratory, chimps don't naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random —he just doesn't care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.

    Human children, on the other hand are extremely cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate in achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.

    There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught .but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive (认知的) skills, at least when compared with chimps. In tests conducted by Tomasello, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.

    The core of what children's minds have and chimps' don't is what Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But beyond that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.

    When we want to tell other people what we think, we can do it with the help of words. We can also do it in many other ways, too. Sometimes we move our heads up and down when we want to say "yes", and we shake our heads when we want to say "no". Some people can't hear or speak. They talk with the help of gestures（手势）. People from other countries often have to do it if they don't know your language.

    Here is a story. An American was once having his holiday in Italy, but he could not speak Italian. One day he went to a restaurant and sat down at a table. When the waiter came, the American opened his mouth, put his fingers in it and took them out again. In this way he wanted to say "Bring me something to eat". The waiter soon brought him a cup of tea. The American shook his head and the waiter understood that he didn't want tea. So he took it away and brought him a glass of milk. The American shook his head again. He was very hungry now and looked sad. He was just going to leave the restaurant when another man came in. When this man saw the waiter, he put his hands on his stomach(胃). In a few minutes there was a large plate of bread and meat on the table in front of him.

    A telescope, called Gaia, is being designed by astronomers in Europe, and it couldn't be more different from Pan-STARRS, which is another telescope being designed. While Pan-STARRS will be looking for asteroids (小行星) and comets headed for Earth, Gaia will be looking at our entire galaxy (银河系).

    Gaia is designed to draw a map of the Milky Way, our home galaxy. Just as a map of your town gives you a picture of where things are located, Gaia's map of the galaxy will tell astronomers where the stars are. Over five years, Gaia will observe (观察) about a billion stars and other objects in our galaxy. Each object will be observed about 70 times.

    Gaia will be sent into space connected to a rocket. It contains two telescopes, each focused at a different angle (角度). These two telescopes act like Gaia's “eyes”. The reason why humans can see things in 3D is that we have two eyes focused on the same object, at slightly different angles. By using two telescopes like eyes, Gaia can produce the first 3D map of the positions of the stars it views.

    Gaia, which is to be sent into space, will be a powerful telescope. If you were to use it on Earth, for example, you could stand 600 miles away from your best friends and still get a clear picture of their hair.

    Gaia is one of more than a dozen telescopes being designed by scientists right now. The next generation of telescopes will reveal new parts of our universe that will seem surprising. The universe, with all its planets, stars and other strange objects, is a puzzle with pieces that we can see by using powerful telescopes.