Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new “species” of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name˗˗˗˗phubbers(低头族).

    Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight(聚光灯). In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfie(自拍) in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events eventually leads to the destruction of the world.

    Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real.

    Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. “Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck,” Guangming Daily quoted doctors as saying, “the neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching.” Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stare at their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

    It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

    People have been enjoying the benefits of cycling（骑自行车） in Amsterdam(阿姆斯特丹) for years. It is a good city for cycling because it is flat and there are plenty of places for bicycle parking. Today some people call Amsterdam "City of Bicycles" because of the convenience for bicycles there.

    In the 1960s, a group of cycling fans had an idea. They believed that it would be better for everybody if cars weren't allowed in the city center and only bicycles were. They were hopeful that this would help to save energy, reduce pollution and provide free public transport. The group painted hundreds of bicycles white and placed them in lots of neighborhoods around Amsterdam for people to use. Then a problem came-- thieves took all the bicycles within weeks!

    However, more than thirty years later, the "white bike' is back in town--this time with a computer chip（芯片） to record its every move! To take a bicycle, you have to insert(插入) a special card. The new "white bike" is not actually white but is an unusual design with bright colours. The bikes are parked at special parking places and people who want to use them have to take them to another special parking place that has enough room.

    There is already less traffic in central Amsterdam, because both locals and tourists have been using the white bikes. Instead, thanks to the good ideas of lots of people, like the cycling fans in the 1960s, many people around the world have been enjoying city centre streets without cars many years.

    One February afternoon, Jesus Delgado was on break behind T2 Tacos, where he works as a cook, when he heard a commotion(骚动). He ran to the front of the Los Angeles Taco stand and saw a man and a woman arguing. She was screaming for help and had two young boys at her side. All of a sudden, the man hit her in the mouth, seized the smaller boy, and ran down the street.

    "I followed my judgement and chased him." Jesus, 35, told the Argonaut newspaper. The older boy ran in the other direction to get help. A group of teenagers who had witnessed the attack assisted the woman, Lauren Kornacki, and called 911. She told them that she was the boys' babysitter.

    Within a few blocks, Jesus caught up to the man, Andron Gazarov, 33. They fought, and Jesus wrestled (抢夺) the young boy from Gazarov's arms. Then Gazarov threw himself onto the sidewalk. "He was yelling at me that the kid didn't belong to me. I was telling him the kid didn't belong to him," Jesus told the Argonaut.

    Minutes later, Los Angeles police officers arrived and arrested Gazarov, who was charged with kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, and attack. He faces up to 12 years in prison, if convicted (定罪). The kids, Brendan O'Brien, 6, and Grady O' Brien, 4, were unharmed.

    The next night, the boys' father, Tom O'Brien, went to the Taco stand to thank Jesus for his actions. He also started an online fund to help Jesus pay the medical expenses for his special-needs daughter. By May, more than $27,000 had been raised.

    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.

    Allen Cook and his daughter Melissa were renovating(整修) her house, when they found a beautiful, heart-warming love story. "The envelope in the ceiling was old and yellow. It had never been opened, It was unbelievable when my son-in-low started reading it. In the letter she was talking about the baby she was going to have," Allen Cook said.

    The story began in May 4, 1945, the typed letter was written by a woman named Virginia to her husband, Rolf Christoffersen. At the time, he was a sailor in the Norwegian navy. The envelope was marked "return to sender" and never found its way to her husband. Allen's daughter used the Internet to find the phone number of someone named Rolf Christoffersen and gave him a call, leading her to his son in Santa Barbara, California.

    "Someone called me at my office. They just googled my name because I have the same name as my father. Melissa asked me where I grew up and I told her. She told me she had the letter," Christoffersen's son, 66 now, said. The younger Christoffersen wasn't yet born when his mother Virginia wrote the letter, but he said her words were very special to him. His mother, who died six years ago, wrote about her love for her husband.

    "I love you Rolf, as I love the warm sun, and that is what you are for my life, the sun about which everything else revolves around me," she wrote. Seventy-two years later, her words were finally heard by her husband. Christoffersen immediately called his father, who is now 96. And read the letter to him over the phone. "I was so surprised after all these years. I was very emotional," the elder Christoffersen said.

    The long-lost letter was finally received just before Mother's Day; it was another tangible connection to Virginia Christoffersen. "It's Mother's Day and reading her words reminded me just what a wonderful person she was and how much she loved us" her son said, through tears.

Many people have long believed that bright lights draw, or attract flying insects. But that is not exactly what is going on, a new study suggests.

Researchers believe that artificial lights at night may cause problems with flying insects' natural navigation systems. As a result, the creatures fly in confusion around porch lamps, street lights and other artificial lights. "Insects have a navigational problem," said Tyson Hedrick of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He added, "They're accustomed to using light as a cue（提示）to know which way is up."

Insects do not fly directly toward a light source, but actually "tilt（倾斜）their backs toward the light," said Sam Fabian of Imperial College London. Fabian was a co-writer of the study that appeared recently in Nature Communications. This tilting action would make sense if the strongest light source was in the sky. But in the presence of artificial lights, the result is midair confusion.

For the study, researchers attached very small sensors to moths and dragonflies in a laboratory. They then filmed "motion-capture" video of flight—similar to how filmmakers attach sensors to actors to follow their movements. Researchers also used high-resolution cameras to film insects flying around lights at a field in Costa Rica. Such films permitted researchers to study in detail how dragonflies circle endlessly around light sources, positioning themselves with their backs facing the light. Researchers also documented that some insects fly upside down—and often crash land—in the presence of lights that shine straight upward like search lights. Insect flight was least disrupted by bright lights that shine straight downward, the researchers found.

"For millions of years, insects oriented themselves by sensing that the sky is light, the ground is dark—until people invented artificial lights", said Avalon Owens of Harvard University.