People seem to have a natural need for friends and with good reason, friends increase your enjoyment of life and relieve feelings of loneliness. They even can help reduce stress and improve your health. Having good friends is especially helpful when you are going through any kind of hard time such as when you are experiencing anxiety, panic(恐慌) attacks, or depression.

    When you are with good friends, you feel good about yourself, and you are glad to be with them. A friends is someone who—

●you like, respect, and trust, and who likes, expects and trusts you, doesn't always understand you, but accepts and likes you as you are, even as you grow and change, allows you the space to change, grow, make decisions, and even make mistakes.

●listens to you and shares with you both the good times and the bad times.

●respects your need for secrets, so you can tell them anything.

●lets you freely express your feelings and emotions without judging, laughing at or criticizing you.

●accepts the limitations you have put on yourself and helps you to remove them.

    A person once said. "Friendship is a continuing source of bonding(连接),releasing, and creating in yourself and with the other person, there is an emotional bond between the two people."

    A good friend or supporter may or may not be the same age or the same sex as you, and may not have the same educational, cultural, or religious background, or share interests that are similar to yours. Friendships also have different depths(深度). Some are closer to the heart and some more superficial, but they're all useful and good.

    The New York Times——Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament(天空)of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology(宇宙论)and inspired global audiences in the millions, has died aged 76. His family released a statement in the early hours of Wednesday morning confirming his death at his home in Cambridge. Hawking's children, Lucy, Robert and Tim said in a statement: "We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today." "He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years to come. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humor inspired people across the world."

    When Hawking was diagnosed with motor neuronal (神经元的)disease in 1963 at the age of 21, doctors expected him to live for only two more years. But Hawking had a form of the disease that progressed more slowly than usual. He survived for more than half a century and long enough for his disability to define him. His popularity would surely have been diminished without it. Those who live in the shadow of death are often those who live most.

    For Hawking, the early diagnosis of his terminal disease, and witnessing the death from leukaemia of a boy who he knew in hospital, ignited(点燃)a fresh sense of pursue. "Although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before. I began to make progress with my research," he once said. Embarking (着手) on his career in earnest, he declared: "My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."

    Measles (麻疹) is only found in human beings. There is a highly effective and safe vaccine (疫苗) for the disease. So, in theory, measles could be destroyed.

    Yet the number of measles cases is on the rise.

    The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that, in the first three months of 2019, the number of cases is three times higher than it was last year. Africa alone has had a 700 percent increase compared to last year.

    The Democratic Republic of Congo reported 67,000 measles cases and 901 measles-related deaths in 2018. This year, WHO officials have noted more than 40, 000 suspected measles cases in the country. That number includes 284 measles-related deaths in the first weeks of 2019. Between September 2018 and February 2019, Madagascar reported over 67, 000 measles cases, including 828 deaths.

    Dr. Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in the USA, said that one in 10 children who get infected with measles will get an ear infection that could cause deafness. One in 20 would get pneumonia. One in a thousand would get brain swelling, and one to three per thousand would die. To say that measles is a slight disease is completely incorrect.

    Walter Orenstein is with the Emory University Vaccine Center in Atlanta, Georgia. He has spent his life working to end measles. Orenstein says possible effects of the disease are worse in poor countries. In those countries children are already at greater risk. They may be malnourished (营养不良的). They may have damaged immune systems. They may be underweight and may have no access to health care so measles is a big killer, he said.

    You have a 90 percent chance of getting measles if you have not been vaccinated and you come in contact with someone who has it. Dr. Rebecca Martin is the Director of the Center for Global Health at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. She is working to remove measles from Africa completely. It is very infectious. It will find nearly everybody who is not protected against measles, Martin said.

    Health experts advise patients to get two treatments of the measles vaccine. U.S. health officials say educating parents about both the disease and the vaccine is an important step in stopping the spread. Equally important is making vaccination a top goal of health systems worldwide.

    Are you afraid of going to the dentist(牙医)? If so, you're not alone.

    These fears could just be in our heads, however. According to a recent survey by Martin Tickle, a professor at the University of Manchester in the UK, the pain isn't felt most of the time in dental surgeries(牙科手术). In fact, among the 451 interviewed patients, 75％reported no pain at all during their visits, including situations when they had their teeth pulled out.

    Could it be the sound of the drill(钻头)then?

    "I found that the sound of drilling can evoke deep worry in dental patients. Actually they don't have any pain, "Hiroyuki Karibe, a scientist at Nippon Dental University in Tokyo, told The Guardian.

    To find the reason why a drill might bring on a racing heart, Karibe divided the volunteers into low-fear and high-fear groups based on how much they feared a trip to the dentist. Volunteers were played the sound of a drill while their brain activities were watched by a machine.

    What Karibe found in the low-fear group was increased activity in the areas of the brain relative to auditory processing(听觉处理), which means, for these people, the sound of dental drills is no different from other sounds.

    In the high-fear group, however, the brain area that was activated(激活)was different. It was the area that carries out a number of duties, including learning, feelings and, most importantly, memory. This means that these volunteers not only heard the sound, but they remembered it—they made connections between the sound of a drill and the worry it produced in the past, causing their worry to return.

    Understanding how brains reply to the sounds of dentists' drills could help scientists find ways to make patients more relaxed, according to Karibe, because patients who worry about going to the dentist might keep putting off their visits. But the best way is to keep your teeth healthy.

    Spending money on time-saving services reduces stress and boosts(增进）happiness, according to a new research, but shockingly, few of us do it.

    Whillans, a professor at HBS said, "Buying time helps to protect us from the stress in our lives caused by time pressure, and the feeling that we don't have enough minutes in the day to complete our tasks."

    The effect was clearest in the Canadian experiment, in which 60 working adults were given $40 to spend in two different ways. One weekend, they were told to spend the money on a material purchase—a gift for themselves. The next weekend, they were instructed to spend the $40 on anything that saved them time, from paying the neighbor ' s kid to run errands (跑腿）to taking an Uber instead of a bus.

    〇n the day they made the time-saving purchase, they felt happier, in a better mood, and lower feelings of time stress than on the day they bought a material purchase," said Whillans.

    The biggest surprise to the researchers was how few people would spend money on time-saving services. When they asked 98 working adults how they would spend a "windfall" of $40, only two percent named a purchase that would save them time.

    "One reason," said Whillans, is that we're very bad at remembering how much we hate doing certain tasks once the suffering has passed. That makes us less likely to take active steps to avoid that overburdened feeling in the future. "But another possible cause is good old-fashioned guilt." If you feel guilty about getting someone to clean your house for you, then you might get less happiness from outsourcing (夕卜包）that task," said Whillans, "or you might just be less likely to spend your money in that way."