If you find yourself checking your phone first thing in the morning, if you find you're text-messaging while driving, checking your phone instead of working on an important assignment—you are addicted.

    Don't worry. The new NoPhone might be just the thing you need. It looks and feels exactly like a smartphone, but it does nothing. It's just a piece of plastic that you can carry around in your hand to fool yourself.

    NoPhone is currently a prototype(手机模型) that will cost only $12 once it hits the market. Its makers are trying to raise $30,000 in order to cover the production and marketing costs.

    Dutch designer Ingmar Larsen, who helped create the NoPhone, said that he had the idea as a joke along with his friends Van Gould and Ben Langveld. To their great surprise, the idea received a lot of attention online and people from all over the world started placing requests for NoPhone of their own, so that's when the three friends decided to raise money for mass production.

David H said," I used to sleep with my phone in my hand, but my night errors would cause me to throw it across the room in an unconscious panic. With the NoPhone, I can still enjoy the comfort of holding a phone in my sleep, without waking up to a shattered screen, thanks, NoPhone."

If you're interested in NoPhone, but concerned about not being able to takeselfies anymore, don't worry. The makers do have an update at no extra charge—the mirror sticker. That way, they say, you can enjoy "real-time" selfies with your friends when they're standing right behind you.

    Where can you go to listen to important people talk about important subjects? BigThink.com is a new website that allows Internet users to discuss certain topics with world experts. Subjects discussed on BigThink include the environment, music and questions about happiness and personal identity. The website has been called a YouTube for thinkers. Victoria Brown and Peter Hopkins created BiThink.com They said that people needed an international place to communicate with each other and discuss the important issues (话题)of our times. On the BigThink website, when you click on (点击)a subject, you will find a video of a person talking about his or her ideas. For example, you can listen to United States Senator Ted Kennedy talking about education and other things. Besides, you can read the comments(评论) and questions written by other visitors to the website. More than one hundred experts have expressed their ideas on the website. BigThink's creators started the website by first getting famous people to agree to be videoed. They began by interviewing several well-known professors from Harvard University. Then they used the names of these professors to gain the trust of others and get them to take part in the project. The website says BigThink belongs to everyone. Its motto(格言) is: "We are what you think." So, go online and start thinking big.

    Americans with small families own a small car or a large one. If both parents are working, they usually have two cars. When the family is large, one of the cars is sold and they will buy a van (住房汽车).

    A small car can hold four persons and a large car can hold six persons but it is very crowded. A van hold seven persons easily, so a family with three children could ask their grandparents to go on a holiday travel. They could all travel together.

    Mr. Hagen and his wife had a third child last year. This made them sell their second car and buy a van. In the van, the sixth and seventh seat are used to put other things, for a family of five must carry many suitcases when they travel. When they arrive at their grandparents' home, the suitcases are removed from the two seats which can then carry the grandparents.

    Americans call vans motor homes. A motor home is always used for holidays. When a family are traveling to the mountains or to the seaside, they can live in their motor home for a few days or weeks. All the members of a big family can enjoy a happier life when they are traveling together. That is why motor homes have become very popular. In America there are many parks for motor homes.

    Teenagers around the world can be happy with the news that the brain will ignore parents' order when they use their smart phones. A new scientific study from the University College London has shown that humans may temporarily go deaf when they're focusing on something visual (视觉的) at the same time.

    The researchers played the normal-volume sounds in the background. And 13 volunteers experienced inattentional deafness as their visual tasks became increasingly difficult. "We found that when volunteers were performing the difficult visual task, they were unable to hear sounds that they would normally hear," Maria Chait said in a statement. "The brain scans showed that people didn't filter out the sounds on purpose. They were not actually hearing them in the first place."

    The findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that the centre of sights and the center of sounds share limited resources. Inattentional deafness is a common everyday experience and the study explains why, according to UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience Professor Nili Lavie.

    If you try to talk to someone focusing on a book, game, or television program and don't receive a response, they aren't necessarily ignoring you. They simply might not hear you at all. This could also explain why you might not hear your bus or train stop being announced if you're lost in your phone, book or newspaper. However, some loud sounds will still be able to break through.

    Some situations could become possibly dangerous when the quieter ones go unheard. As you can imagine, in the operating room, when a doctor concentrates on his work, he might not hear the equipment beeping. It also applies to drivers who center on complex directions. Fortunately, experts have given us some useful tips on preventing such situations.

    As the temperature rises, sweaty humans are making a response that is further worsening the problem of climate change. At present, the world just has 1.6 billion air conditioning units, but these units use a surprising total of ten percent of all global electricity supply. While less than a third of families globally are so equipped, the most AC-addicted countries are Japan (in 91 percent of families), the US (90 percent) and South Korea(86 percent).

    New research by the International Energy Agency (IEA) guesses that the total number of AC units is likely to increase to over 5.6 billion by 2050－equal to ten new units being sold every second for more than 30 years－with sales driven particularly by India, China and Indonesia. This will make the use of air conditioning one of the world's largest demands for energy.

    "Growing electricity demand for air conditioning is one of the most critical blind spots in today's energy debate," argues Faith Birol, executive director of the IEA. "With rising incomes, air conditioner ownership will skyrocket, especially in the developing world. While this will improve daily lives, it is quite necessary that efficiency performance be prioritized."

    Birol and the IEA stress the need for new efficiency standards to ensure that consumers are at least buying units that require significantly less power to function, therefore decreasing the total energy demand. Variations on the traditional "vapor compression" technology, which has formed the basis for AC units for more than a century, may appear really important. A water-based system was recently developed by researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS), which uses 40 percent less electricity and produces only one by-product: drinkable water.

    "Our cooling system can be tailored for all types of weather conditions, from wet climate in the tropics to dry climate in the deserts," says associate professor Ernest Chua at NUS. "While it can be used for indoor living and commercial spaces, it can also be easily used to provide air conditioning for blocks of buildings in an energy-efficient manner."

    As Internet users become more dependent on the Internet to store information, are people remember less？If you know your computer will save information, why store it in your own personal memory, your brain？Experts are wondering if the Internet is changing what we remember and how.

    In a recent study, Professor Betsy Sparrow conducted some experiments. She and her research team wanted to know the Internet is changing memory. In the first experiment, they gave people 40 unimportant facts to type into a computer. The first group of people understood that the computer would save the information. The second group understood that the computer would not save it. Later, the second group remembered the information better. People in the first group knew they could find the information again, so they did not try to remember it.

    In another experiment, the researchers gave people facts to remember, and told them where to find the information on the Internet. The information was in a specific computer folder(文件夹). Surprisingly, people later remember the folder location better than the facts. When people use the Internet, they do not remember the information. Rather, they remember how to find it. This is called "transactive memory (交互记忆)".

    According to Sparrow, we are not becoming people with poor memories as a result of the Internet. Instead, computer users are developing stronger transactive memories; that is, people are learning how to organize huge quantities of information so that they are able to access it at a later date. This doesn't mean we are becoming either more or less intelligent, but there is no doubt that the way we use memory is changing.