In a recent announcement, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology（MIT）said that they have joined forces to offer free online courses in an effort to attract millions of online learners worldwide.

    Beginning this fall, a number of courses developed by teachers at both universities will be offered online through a new $60 million program, known as edX. “Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can use our online courses,” Harvard President Drew Faust said during a meeting to announce the plan.

    MIT has offered a program called OpenCourseWare for ten years that makes materials from more than 2,000 classes free online. It has been used by more than 100 million people. In December, the school announced it also would begin offering a special certificate, known as MITx, for people who complete certain online courses. Harvard has long offered courses to a wider population through a similar program.

    The MITx will serve as the foundation for the new learning platform.

    MIT President Susan Hockfield said more than 120,000 people signed up for the first MITx course. She said Harvard and MIT hope other universities will join them in offering courses on the open-source edX platform.

     “Fasten your seatbelts,” Hockfield said.

    Other universities, including Stanford, Yale and Carnegie-Mellon, have been experimenting with teaching to a global population online.

    The Harvard-MIT program will be monitored by a not-for-profit（非盈利的）organization based in Cambridge, to be owned equally by the two universities. Both MIT and Harvard have provided $30 million to start the program. They also plan to use the edX platform to research how students learn and which teaching methods and tools are most successful.

                                                                                           Taktak tabulaba?

    You probably don't know how to answer that question ─ unless you happen to be one of the about 430 people in the world who speak a language called Matukar Panau. Then you would know it means “ What are we doing?” Matukar Panau is one of the world's rarest languages. It is spoken in just two small coastal villages in Papua New Guinea.

    Several years ago, David Harrison, a language expert, didn't know much about Matukar Panau either. No one had ever recorded or even studied its words and rules. With so few speakers, the language risked disappearing soon. It was endangered.

    Harrison didn't want that to happen to Matukar Panau. So in 2009, he set out for Papua New Guinea. His goal: use modern technology to help the remaining speakers preserve their native tongue.

    But Matukar Panau is not the only language facing loss. Studies suggest that by the end of this century，nearly half of the 7,000 languages now spoken worldwide could disappear. They're in danger partly because the only people left speaking them are elderly adults. When those old men die, their language will die with them. In addition, children may discard a native language and instead use more common global languages, such as Chinese, English or Spanish.

    In the United States alone, 134 native American languages are endangered. “Language hotspots” exist all over the world. These are places with endangered languages that haven't been recorded. They include the state of Oklahoma, pockets of central and eastern Siberia, parts of northern Australia and communities in South America.

    Whenever we see a button on a doorbell or on a remote, we may press it. This is true in most cases. But some buttons are actually fake(假的), like the "close" button on an elevator.

    Many people are in the habit of pressing the "close" button because they don't have the patience to wait for the elevator doors to shut. But according to experts, the buttons are a complete trick—the doors will not close any faster however hard you press.

    It started in the 1990s when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, making sure that all elevators stayed open long enough so that people with disabilities could enter. Only firefighters and maintenance workers(维修工) can use the buttons to speed up the door-closing process if they have a code or special keys. But to normal elevator riders, the buttons aren't completely useless.

    According to psychologists, fake buttons can actually make you feel better by offering you a sense of control. Experts have showed that a lot of buttons that don't do anything exist in our lives for this same purpose. For example, pedestrian crosswalk buttons don't live up to their names. Pressing them used to help make the traffic signals change faster, but that was before computer-controlled traffic signals were introduced.

    But psychologists found it interesting that even when people are aware of these little "white lies". They still continue to push fake buttons because as long as the doors eventually close, it is considered to be worth the effort.

    That habit is here to stay, John Kounios, a psychology professor at Drexel University in the US, told The New York Times. "After all, I've got nothing else to do while waiting. So why not try the chance?"

    For tourists holding the Barcelona Card, the information below will be useful if you plan to admire some artworks or architectures there.

    Sagrada Familia

    Opening hours: 09:00-18:00(October-March); 09:00-20:00(April-September)

    Admission: 11, or 11, or 10 with the Barcelona Card

    The project's vast sale and its special design have made it one of Barcelona's top tourist attractions for many years.

    La Pedrera

    Opening hours: November-February: 09:00-18:30; March-October: 09:00-20:00

    Admission：$ 9.50. Save 20% with the Barcelona Card.

    It is a unique modernist building made of bricks and colorful tiles（瓦）. Visitors can see the amazing 800 square meters attic（阁楼）with 270 brick arches that give you a feeling that you are walking inside the skeleton of a whale.

    Barcelona FC Museum

    Opening hours: 6th April-4th October:10:00-20:00;the rest of the year. 10:00-18:30

    Admission：$8.50 for entry to the museum and $17 for a guided tour.

    When you buy your ticket you have two options: a ticket for the museum to see the football stadium or a special one for $15 where you get to see the stadium and the scenes at the club.

    Picasso Museum

    Opening hours: Check the website for details as they vary depending on the time of the year.

    Admission：$9 for main exhibition-extra for special showings. Save 50% with Barcelona Card.

    The museum has arranged Picasso's paintings from his early days to his final works. Arranging the paintings in this way gives you a fascinating insight into the development of Picasso.

    The pupils of Grangetown High have been busy getting to know their newest and tallest classmate — a 7-meter-tall giraffe outside their school.

    The giraffe is a huge sculpture (雕像). The school's headmaster noticed it in an artist's garden as he drove past one day, and thought it would be perfect for his school. “I knew everyone would love it," he said, "because our basketball team is known as the Grangetown Giraffes, and they wear giraffes on their shirts. So I asked them to write to the artist, asking how much it would cost to buy the giraffe. He was very kind and got it ready to deliver (递送) in six weeks — all for nothing! It was expected to arrive one Sunday morning, so that the pupils would see it when they got to school on Monday — at that time they had no idea that we were getting it."

    The artist, Tom Bennett was a university professor of chemistry before he retired in 2012 and only took up metalwork a couple of years ago. "I've always drawn pictures," he said. I can even remember doing it on my first day at school — I drew a horse. I wanted it to be the best horse picture ever, but I don't think I succeeded."Tom's first metalwork was a bicycle on which he and his wife could go cycling together, “It was the most uncomfortable bike ever created," he said, "so I gave up making bicycles and went into sculpture instead."

    Meanwhile the pupils at Grangetown High are very happy with their new classmate. "We're going to hold a competition to give it a proper name," said one girl. "Everyone likes the expression on its face, so perhaps that will give us some ideas."

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist (生理学家) best known for his discovery of classical conditioning (经典条件反射). During his studies on the digestive systems of dogs, Pavlov found that the animals salivated (流口水) naturally upon the presentation of food. However, he also noticed that the animals began to salivate whenever they saw the white lab coat of an experimental assistant. By associating the presentation of food with the lab assistant, he finally found that a dog would salivate to the presence of a stimulus (刺激物) other than food. He called this response a conditional reflex.

Ivan Pavlov was born in a small village in Ryazan. Russia, where his father was the village minister. His earliest studies were focused on theology (神学), but reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species had a powerful influence on his future interests. He soon stopped his religious studies and devoted himself to the study of science at the University of Saint Petersburg. Pavlov's interests were the study of physiology and natural sciences. He helped found the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and continued to manage the program for the next 45 years.

Pavlov received much praise for his work. He worked in the Russian Academy of Science and won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology. The Soviet government also offered lots of support for Pavlov's work, and the Soviet Union soon became a leading center of research on physiology. While Ivan Pavlov was not a psychologist, and reportedly disliked the field of psychology, his work had a major influence on the field, particularly on the development of behaviorism. His discovery and research on reflexes influenced the growing behaviorist movement. and Pavlov's discovery had a major influence on many thinkers, such as John B. Watson.