Children in kinder gardens have a lot of chances to interact（互动）with other children at their age．If your child is not in it, it can be fun and helpful to create chances to play with others．Here are some things you can do to support your child's early partner relationship.

    Schedule regular playmates.

    Start when your child is around one year of age, set aside a few times a week for playtime with partners．{#blank#}1{#/blank#} .Even so, you still might want to give your baby a chance observe and communicate with children who are at the same developmental level.

    Join a playgroup.

    Many communities have organized playgroups for young children．{#blank#}2{#/blank#}，and learn to feel comfortable in a new setting．As an added benefit, while your child plays, you can talk with other parents who have children the same age as your own.

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    You can organize a playground in your own home．It may involve just one other child, or as many as three or four．{#blank#}4{#/blank#}.Remember: safety first.

    Offer guidance when needed.

    If you see a child playing in a way that might hurt another, certainly you need to help her find a safer way to have fun．{#blank#}5{#/blank#}．But remember that some children need to watch for a while before they feel comfortable joining in —encourage everyone to join the fun, but don't push.

Do you think you could learn a language in an hour?

    We know, we know! We would expect you to be skeptical. It's ridiculous to think you can learn a language in 60 minutes. You wouldn't even get through the As in a bilingual dictionary in that amount of time! Best-case situation: in an hour, most of us could probably stuff a few words and ready-made phrases into our short-term memory (with a high likelihood of forgetting it all by the following day). Accomplishing anything more than that in one hour? Impossible. Unless…

    We posed the one-hour language challenge to four polyglots(通晓数种语言的人) who are experts on how to study languages. To keep the challenge from becoming completely impossible, we gave them a bit of a break: to learn Romanian in one hour. Why Romanian? Because it's a Romance language and shares many similarities with the languages that the polyglots already know: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. And to make sure their hour of learning was as effective as possible, all of them were assigned a personal Romanian tutor to help coach them on their way to success.

    Although each polyglot has a different technique for picking up and remembering a new language, all four methods offer valuable insights to anyone, from casual learners to hard-core language enthusiasts.

Alex Rawlings — UK

    "I'm a bit nervous. This is probably the craziest language-learning thing I've ever done, but learning languages has always been about fun. I expect that, after this, I'll be prepared to have a simple chat over a coffee in Romanian. Is that reasonable?"

    Method: Learn the verbs first

    With only an hour until he had to start demonstrating his grasp of Romanian, Alex knew he had to start talking quickly. He chose to focus first on commonly used verbs and how to conjugate（动词变形） them. Once he had some verbs down, he could start collecting nouns from his tutor and plugging them in to make more interesting and relevant sentences.

Luca Lampariello — Italy

    "Every time I have a conversation with native speakers, it really motivates me. Human contact is really important when learning a language."

Method: Start speaking right away

    Speaking doesn't mean speaking perfectly. Speaking even a little bit is a huge confidence boost. When you can say something in a new language and people actually understand you, it's very motivating. Yes, you'll make mistakes, but you'll also learn faster than if you try to get it all perfect in your head first.

Michael Youlden — UK

    "We all speak a variety of Romance languages which I think will help us get into Romanian quickly."

Method: Write everything down

    Language learning is about recall; there's no use learning something if you don't remember it. Speaking new words aloud is very important, but so is writing them down — after all, words exist as sounds and in written form. Taking notes is a proven way to put new vocabulary and grammar into your memory. Writing supports memorizing which supports speaking... it's a cycle. Plus, you have an easy reference when you want to review what you've learned.

Matthew Youlden — UK

    "I'm going to look for the patterns and similarities with languages I already know. We won't be able to speak fluently after an hour of study, but we should be able to get by with some basic vocabulary and phrases."

Method: Look for cognates

    Cognates are words in different languages that look and sound similar and have the same meaning, due to a common origin. Almost every language combination contains cognates (even if two languages aren't seemingly related), but languages from the same language family have many more. Whichever language you are learning, identify the familiar words and then use them to anchor the new words that aren't so familiar. To use English as an example, because it's a sort of Germanic-Romance hybrid, English already has many words that cognate with German, Dutch and Swedish on one hand, and on the other hand it also has lots of words that cognate with French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and, of course, Romanian!

    Learn a language with courses designed by the experts. Start here, today!

    Pick a language to learn. German, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Swedish.

    Whether you prefer burning the midnight oil or going to bed early so you can get up at the break of dawn depends on your genes, according to experts.

    I jump out of bed each morning, eager to start an active day. But I can hear my neighbor's alarm clock ringing non-stop every morning and I doubt he gets to work on time.

    A lot of noise comes from his flat in the evening. He's happy to stay up watching TV till after midnight, while I go to bed early and try to sleep.

    Well, it might not be his fault after all. I'm called“a lark (百灵鸟)”and my neighbor“an owl (猫头鹰)”

    We all have inside “clocks”in the brain to control all kinds of bodily functions and it is reset every day by light. These inside clocks run to a different schedule in “larks” and “owls”. If you have a fast clock, you like to do things early, and if you have a slow clock, you like to do things late.

    Because we live in a 24/7 world, scientists believe it's important to understand a person's “chronotype?—the time of the day when they function the best. It could help us lead a healthier life.

    A US professor has studied sleeping patterns and thinks work times should be changed and made more individual to fit in with our chronotypes.

    And he has advice for those who can't choose their working hours:“If that's not possible, we should be more careful about light exposure,” says the professor. “You should try to go to work not in a covered vehicle but on a bike. The minute the sun sets we should use things that have no blue light, like computer, screens and other electronic devices.”

    Increasingly, over the past ten years, people-especially young people have become aware of the need to change their eating habits, because much of the food they eat, particularly processed food, is not good for the health. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in natural foods: foods which do not contain chemical additives and which have not been affected by chemical fertilizers（化肥）widely used in farming today.

    Natural foods, for example, are vegetables, fruit and grain which have been grown in soil that is rich in organic matter. In simple terms, this means that the soil has been nourished by unused vegetable matter, which provides it with essential vitamins and minerals. This in itself is a natural process compared with the use of chemicals and fertilizers, the main purpose of which is to increase the amount but not the quality of foods grown in commercial farming areas.

    Natural foods also include animals which have been allowed to feed and move freely in healthy pastures（生活状况）. Compare this with what happens in the mass production of poultry（家禽）: there are battery farms, for example, where thousands of chickens live crowded together in one building and are fed on food which is little than rubbish. Chickens kept in this way are not only tasteless as food; they also produce eggs which lack important vitamins.

    There are other aspects of healthy eating which are now receiving increasing attention from experts in diet. Take, for example, the question of sugar. This is actually a nonessential food! It is not that sugar is harmful in itself. But it does seem to be additive: the quantity we use has grown steadily and in Britain today each person consumes an average of 200 pounds a year! Yet all it does is provide us with energy, in the form of calories. There are no vitamins in it, no minerals and no fibre.

Los Angeles Could Be One Of The Few Cities The Olympics Can't Ruin

    In just the past several years, six cities—Boston; Rome; Stockholm; Hamburg, Germany; Krakow, Poland; and Oslo, Norway—have decisively rejected the idea of hosting the Olympics.

    The games' high costs, damaging effects on poor communities in the places that have recently hosted them have turned cities, against them—fostering the belief that "nobody wants to host the Olympic Games anymore."

    But Los Angeles is different. And on Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council made final decision to try to get the chance to host the 2024 Olympics, taking the step Boston and many others never did. In LA, organizers promise they can hold an Olympics that stays within its $5.3 billion budget Organizers in every possible host city make the same promise. But when it comes to LA, where residents greatly support the plan, even people who doubt the Olympics believe that success in hosting the Olympics without any loss might be possible. "It's basically sound," said Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist, who wrote the book on the financial risks the Olympics bring to cities and their taxpayers. "I think they'll be able to do it without any financial downside, although there is always some risk attached."

    There's another reason to believe LA could succeed: It's done it before. It last hosted the Olympics in 1984, when the Olympic turned a small profit. No host since has replicated that feat.

    The Los Angeles Coliseum, which was used for the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, will again serve as the place of the games, along with a new NFL stadium set to open in Inglewood in 2019. There's no need for a new Olympic village, thanks to dorms at UCLA. When LA announced its final three stadiums this month, chairman Casey Wasserman said proudly that a Los Angeles Olympics won't require any new construction—instead, it will rely entirely on already planned or temporary (临时的) places.

    Tiny microbes(微生物)are at the heart of a new agricultural technique to manage harmful greenhouse gas. Scientists have discovered how microbes can be used to turn carbon dioxide into soil-enriching limestone(石灰石), with the help of a type of tree that grows in tropical areas, such as West Africa.

    Researchers have found that when the Iroko tree is grown in dry, acidic soil and treated with a combination of natural fungi(霉菌)and other bacteria, not only does the tree grow well, it also produces the mineral limestone in the soil around its root.

    The Iroko tree makes a mineral by combining Ca from the earth with CO2 from the atmosphere. The bacteria then create the conditions under which this mineral turns into limestone. The discovery offers a new way to lock carbon into the soil, keeping it out of the atmosphere. In addition to storing carbon in the trees, leaves and in the form of limestone, the mineral in the soil makes it more suitable for agriculture.

    The discovery could lead to reforestation(重新造林)projects in tropical countries, and help reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the developing world. It has already been used in West Africa and is being tested in Bolivia, Haiti and India.

    The findings were made in a three-year project involving researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh, Granada, Lausanne and Delft University of Technology. The project examined several microbiological methods of locking CO2 as limestone, and the Iroko-bacteria way showed best results. Work was funded by the European Commission under the Future Emerging Technologies (FET) scheme.

    Dr Bryne Ngwenya of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, who led the research, said: "By taking advantage of this natural limestone-producing process, we have a low-tech, safe, readily employed and easily operating way to lock carbon out of the atmosphere, while improving farming conditions in tropical countries?