Staying positive through the cold season could be your best defense against getting ill,a new American study suggests.

    In an experiment that exposed healthy volunteers to a cold or flu virus,researchers found that people with a generally sunny character were less likely to fail ill.The findings,published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, build on evidence that a “positive emotional style” can help ward off the common cold and other illness.

    Researchers believe the reasons may be both objective―as in happiness improving immune function―and subjective―as in happy people being less troubled by a sore throat or runny nose.“People with a positive emotional style may have different immune responses to the virus,” explained lead study author Dr Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.“And when they do get a cold,they may interpret their illness as being less severe.”

    Cohen and his colleagues has found in a previous study that happier people seemed less likely to catch a cold, but some questions remained as to whether the emotional quality itself had the effect.

    For the new study,the researchers had 193 healthy adults complete standard measures of personality qualities, physicals health,and emotional “style”.Those who tended to be happy,energetic and easy –going were judged as having a positive emotional style,while those who were often unhappy,tense,and hostile had a negative style.

    Afterwards,the researchers gave them nose drops containing either a cold virus or a particular flu virus.Over the next six days,the volunteers reported on any aches,pains,sneezing they had,while the researchers collected objective data.Cohen and his colleagues found that happy people were less likely to develop a cold.

    What's more,when happy folks did develop a cold,their symptoms were less severe than expected based on objective measures.

    On the contrary,people with negative characters were not at increased risk of developing a cold based on objective measures,though they did tend to get down about their symptoms.

    “We find that it's really positive emotions that have the big effect,” Cohen said,“not the negative ones.”

    So can a bad-tempered person fight a cold by deciding to be happy?

    Why can some people sleep through noises like a honking car or flushing toilet, while others are awakened by the lightest sound?

    To find the answer, sleep researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital conducted an unusual study of 12 self-described deep sleepers. After tests confirmed that the healthy volunteers were solid sleepers, they took part in a three-night study in the university's sleep laboratory. The participants spent the night in a big and comfortable room. But the room also included four speakers positioned near the top of the bed.

    During the night, the deep sleepers were subjected to 14 different recorded sounds, like street traffic, toilets flushing, and an airplane flying overhead. Next door, the researchers monitored their sleep patterns and brain waves.

    As expected, all of the participants slept relatively well, but there were differences in how they responded to the noisy interruptions. Some of the sleepers didn't wake up even when a sound was blasted at 70 decibels（分贝）; others were awakened by sounds at 40 or 50 decibels.

    The researchers discovered that the difference in a sleeper's reaction to noise could be predicted by the level of brain activity called "sleep spindles（纺锤体）". A sleep spindle is a burst of high-frequency brain activity coming from deep inside the brain during sleep. The source of the spindles is the thalamus（丘脑）, a part of the brain that sends sensory information to the rest of the cortex（皮层）.

    Before the study, the Massachusetts researchers theorized that the spindles are the brain's way of preventing sensory information from passing through the thalamus and waking the rest of the brain during sleep. They found that sleepers who experienced the most sleep spindles during the night were also the soundest sleepers and were least likely to be awakened by noise.

    Scientists already know that most people become lighter sleepers with age, most likely because older people experience less "slow wave sleep", which is the deepest stage of sleep. People also produce fewer sleep spindles as they age. But even when controlling for the stage of sleep a person was in, the number of sleep spindles still predicted their risk for awakening because of noise.

    More research is needed, but the findings suggest that a better understanding of sleep spindles could lead to new behavioral or drug therapies for people with sleep disorders. For example, future studies may try to determine whether diet, exercise or other behaviors may influence the number of sleep spindles a person produces during the night.

    There are many weird sports that are present from around the world. From each region of the world, along with the very popular common sports, there are also those really popular but very weird kinds of sports.

    The Ultimate Test between Man and Horse:

    This indeed a very strange kind of sport that tests your stamina. You will learn how to be agiler while competing against a horse. This game originated in Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells. This sport really has to do with strength. You will require great agility and strength in order to take part in this. Marathon human contestants are put to test against those mounted on horses. This is how the marathon testing takes place.

    Love Locked Race

    This is a sports event that was first introduced in Finland. This is all about a male competitor racing with a female in a certain way. There would be many obstructions and blocks on the way which would definitely bring you challenges. The person to win would have to finish the race without losing his female partner in the course of overcoming the obstacles even for once. This race takes place really fast and the obstacles are set that way.

    Toe sport

    This is yet another weird sport that welcomes you to use your toes. This is quite the same kind of sport that you used to play as a child which involved toe wrestling. This has now been turned into a major sport that even has a World Toe Wrestling Competition. It first originated in a pub of Derbyshire.

    The locals took this sport with great enjoyment and then made this so popular that it soon had its own championship. The individuals who participate have only got to use their feet in locks but then this is tougher than it may sound.

    The Mud Pit Belly Flop

    This is a kind of game where even the spectators get splashed in mud but in fact that is quite the fun. The very annual Summer Redneck Games in East Dublin brings about this game and brings about some of the greatest hubcap discus throws with it. This is also a great sport to show the strength and dexterity of your feet.

    Who is the greatest teacher in Chinese history? Many people would think of Confucius, whose birthday was September 28. Although he lived over 2,000 years ago, people still remember and respect him for his contribution to the education today.

    Confucius lived in the Kingdom of Lu, which lies in Shandong Province. He lived during the Spring and Autumn Period. He had a hard childhood. His father died when he was only 3. His mother brought him up. As a child, he had to work to help his mother, but young Confucius didn't give up studying. He visited many famous teachers and learned music, history, poetry and sports.

    Later, he became a teacher and started the first public school in Chinese history. At that time only children from noble families could go to school, but Confucius believed everyone should go to school if they wanted to learn. He had about 3,000 students in his lifetime.

    Today, people still follow Confucius' lessons. He told us that we all have something worthy to be learned. “When I am with three people, one of them must be better than me in some areas. I choose their good qualities and follow them.”

    He also taught us that thinking is very important in study. “All study but no thinking makes people puzzled. All thinking but no study makes people lazy.”

    Confucius is not only a great teacher, but also a famous thinker with wise thoughts about the world and society. His most important teachings are about kindness and good manners. “A person should be strict with himself, but be kind to others.” he said.

    Millions of people all over the world use the word okay. In fact，some people say the word is used more often than any other word in the world.

    It may be common，but no one can seem to agree on how the “OK” came to be.

    Okay means “all right” or “acceptable”. It expresses agreement or approval. You might ask your brother，“Is it okay if I borrow your car?” Or if someone asks you to do something，you might say，“Okay ， I will.” Still，language experts do not agree about where the word came from.

    Some people say it came from the Native American Indian tribe known as the Choctaw. The Choctaw word “okeh” means the same as the American word okay. Experts say early explorers in the American West spoke the Choctaw language in the nineteenth century. The language spread across the country.

    But many people dispute(不同意)this.

    Language expert Allen Walker Read wrote about the word okay in reports published in the 1960s.He said the word began being used in the 1830s.It was a short way of writing a different spelling of the words “all correct.” Some foreign-born people wrote “all correct” as“o-l-l k-o-r-r-e-c-t.” and used the letters O.K.

    Other people say a railroad worker named Obadiah Kelly invented the word long ago. They said he put the first letters of his names—O and K—on each object people gave him to send on the train.

    Still others say a political organization invented the word. The organization supported Martin Van Buren for president in 1840.They called their group，the O.K. Club. The letters were taken from the name of the town where Martin Van Buren was born—Old Kinderhook，New York.

    Not everyone agrees with this explanation，either. But experts do agree that the word is purely American. And it has spread to almost every country on Earth.

At school, I was in the top set for maths. My teachers recommended that I study economics and statistics as my A-level subjects, but I had my mind set on a life fulfilled by the arts.

In fact, I was a victim of a gender stereotype made stronger since birth, that men do science and maths and women do arts or languages. Computer science, technology and physics just did not figure in my teenage world view. Nobody popular in my school chose to study those subjects.

Reality struck hard when I began attending job interviews and interviewers would say: "It's great that you speak foreign languages, but what else do you do?" Nobody asked my friends who had studied science or technology those questions.

A survey recently showed that three of the best-paid jobs for women are in the technology sector. It's a sector that really can change the world. We must show girls that technology has an effect on every industry out there, from fashion to architecture to journalism. Anybody can learn to code and these days it's as important as reading and writing. I've realized that at university I'd achieved the wrong kind of literacy. Not being able to code limit your impact on the world far more than an ignorance of great literature.

Now I have a five-year-old daughter. I don't want her to blindly follow gender roles the way I did. I want her to know the fact that a science or technical degree will not limit her creativity but expand it and broaden her horizons far more than my arts background could. I'm exposing her to Minecraft and apps, which help improve analytical thinking and problem solving skills. I'm hoping that my daughter will discover and accept her potentials in science and want to change the world.