Owning a smartphone may not be as smart as you think. It may let you surf the Internet, listen to music and snap photos wherever you are…but it also turns you into a workaholic, it seems.

    A study suggests that, by giving you access to emails at all times, the all-singing, all-dancing mobile phone adds as much as two hours to your working day. Researchers found that Britons work an additional 460 hours a year on average as they are able to respond to emails on their mobiles.

    The study by technology retailer Pixmania reveals the average UK working day is between 9 and 10 hours, but a further two hours is spent responding to or sending work emails, or making work calls. More than 90 percent of office workers have email-enabled phones, with a third accessing them more than 20 times a day. Almost one in ten admits spending up to three hours outside their normal working day checking work emails. Some workers confess(承认) they are on call almost 24 hours a day, with nine out of ten saying they make work emails and calls outside their normal working hours. The average time for first checking emails is between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., with more than a third checking their first emails in this period, and a quarter checking them between 11 p.m. and midnight.

    Ghadi Hobeika, marketing director of Pixmania, said, “The ability to access literally millions of apps, keep in contact via social networks and take photos and video as well as text and call has made smartphones invaluable for many people. However, there are drawbacks. Many companies expect their employees to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and smartphones mean that people literally cannot get away from work. The more constantly in contact we become , the more is expected of us in a work capacity(容量).”

    A new study has discovered that meditation（冥想）and oxygen sport together reduce depression. The Rutgers University study found that this mind and body combination, done twice a week for only two months, reduced the symptoms for a group of students by 40 percent.

    “We are excited by the findings because we saw such a meaningful improvement in both clinically depressed and non-depressed students,” said lead author Dr. Brandon Alderman. “It is the first time that both of these two behavioral ways have been looked at together for dealing with depression.”

    Researchers believe the two activities have an interactive effect in combating depression. Alderman and Dr. Tracey Shors discovered that a combination of mental and physical training (MAP) enabled students with major depressive disorder not to let problems or negative thoughts defeat them.

    Rutgers researchers say those who participated in the study began with 30 minutes of focused attention meditation followed by 30 minutes of oxygen sport. They were told that if their thoughts drifted to the past or the future they should refocus on their breathing, enabling those with depression to accept moment-to-moment changes in attention.

    Shors, who studies the production of new brain cells in the hippocampus—part of the brain involved in memory and learning—says scientists have shown in animal models that oxygen sport exercise keeps a large number of certain cells alive.

    The idea for the human intervention（干预）came from her laboratory studies, she says, with the main goal of helping individuals acquire new skills so that they can learn to recover from stressful life events.

    By learning to focus their attention and exercise, people who are fighting depression can acquire new learning skills that can help them process information and reduce the overwhelming recollection of memories from the past, Shors says.

    “We know these treatments can be practiced over a lifetime and that they will be effective in improving mental health.” said Alderman. “The good news is that this intervention can be practiced by anyone at any time and at no cost.”

    In most parts of the world, many students help their schools make less pollution. They join “environment clubs”. In an environment club, people work together to make our environment clean.

    Here are some things students often do.

    No-garbage lunches. How much do you throw away after lunch? Environment clubs ask students to bring their lunches in bags that can be used again. Every week they will choose the classes that make the least garbage and report them to the whole school.

    No-car day. On a no-car day, nobody comes to school in a car. Not the students and not the teachers! Cars give pollution to our air, so remember: walk, jump, bike and run. Use your legs! It's lots of fun.

    Turn off the water! Did you know that some toilets can waste twenty to forty cubic (立方) meters of water an hour? In a year, it would fill a small river! In environment clubs, students mend those broken toilets. We love our environment. Let's work together to make it clean.

    With about 100,000 sea animals being choked or injured by plastic every year, the danger produced by the billions of pieces of plastics in our oceans is well-known. However,    given that most of the micro-plastics measure less than 0.5mm, collecting them is a challenge.

    Now, some Dutch environmentalists have created a floating park to catch plastic waste before it reaches the open seas and breaks down. The large floating park is the result of a five-year effort of the Wageningen University and Research, WHIM Architecture, and etc. The team's leader said, "We began by developing a 'plastic fisher(渔船). Fitted with two folding arms with extension of several feet into the water, it uses a net to catch bottles, and any other garbage that floats past."

    The portable equipment took a year and a half to be perfect. It was then placed at the edge of the harbor to collect the urban garbage accumulated in the Meuse, a major European river, which rises in France and passes through Belgium and the Netherlands before it goes into the North Sea. Since Rotterdam's NieuweWaterweg canal links the river the North Sea, it's the ideal place to catch the "fresh" plastic waste before it disappears into the open waters and breaks down.

    The waste collected by the "plastic fisher" was then made into some hexagonal (六边的) floats which were connected to create the floating park. Some of the blocks are open to visitors, while others house various types of plants and even trees for nesting birds. The underside of the floats provides a suitable environment for sea creatures like fish. The environmentalists say the blocks can also be used to build sports areas and public walkways.

    The floating park has achieved great success. The team has launched a similar project in Indonesia to deal with local pollution. They worked with the local government and colleges which have given great support. And the team wants to spread their idea to some other places. When more and more people have better understanding of the project, more countries worldwide will know the advantages of the project and try similar outstanding approaches.

    Researchers at the University of Chicago have trained an artificial intelligence system, to write fake reviews on Yelp, a website showing customers reviews on shopping or something else, and it's pretty hard to tell them apart from a human review.

    Their study, which will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in October, aimed to throw attention onto how easily these systems can write reviews like humans and how damaging they can become if they're not monitored properly.

    Since many small businesses rely on online reviews to help grow and keep their reputation, a future where someone—like a rival or angry customer—could crazily fill their page with negative reviews written by a machine is pretty worrying.

    And, according to the research team, the threat goes far beyond a bunch of fake reviews on Yelp. "In general the threat is bigger," Ben Y. Zhao, one of the authors of the study, said. "I think the threat towards society is large and it really misleads users and shakes our belief in what is real and what is not. I think that's going to be even unimaginable."

    To test how believable these reviews came across, the researchers invited 40 volunteers and had AI generate five fake reviews for 40 actual restaurants. The volunteers were asked how useful they thought the review was and whether or not they thought it was fake. The AI reviews ranked as "effectively indistinguishable" from real reviews，according to the study. Further, the fake reviews were given a 3.15 "usefulness" rating, compared to a 3.28 rating for human reviews.

Students from Oceanside High School in Rockland will be able to sleep in a little longer from this autumn.

Regional School Unit 13 Superintendent (负责人) Lew Collins said during the school's Thursday night meeting that the schedule (时间表) for the schools will be changed. Oceanside East and West will start a half hour later, at 8 a.m. for their new school year.

Research has shown that teenagers' brains are often not fully awake at 6:30 a.m. Collins said the schedule, which is used to get students to school for classes that begin at 7:30 a.m., calls for some to get on buses before 6 a.m. to get to school on time. Teachers are having meetings at 6:40 a.m., which is too early, he thinks.

Collins visited the high schools in Rockland and asked students when they would like classes to begin. Most of them said 8:00 a.m. "I was surprised. I thought they would have said 9:00 or 10:00," he said.

The National Sleep Foundation says on its website that teenagers' biological clocks (生物钟) are designed to stay up later and get up later. The Foundation called for schools to change their schedules, which means a later start as well for elementary students (小学生).

We do not have enough buses to run, since all the high school and elementary school buses run almost at the same time, Collins said. He suggested, "We should buy six more buses and get six more drivers to keep the new schedule working."

Elementary school classes in Rockland now start at 8:30 a.m., but will be moved to 8:45 a.m., starting in the autumn. "I know this is a problem for working parents, but we will see what we can come up with," said Jane Brown, a teacher at Bardonia Elementary School. "Anyway, I believe if students get more sleep they'll be more ready to learn when classes start," she added.