With around 100 students scheduled to be in that 9:00 am Monday morning lecture, it is no surprise that almost 20 people actually make it to the class and only 10 of them are still awake after the first 15 minutes; it is not even a surprise that most of them are still in their pajama's(睡衣). Obviously, students are terrible at adjusting their sleep cycles to their daily schedule.

    All human beings possess a body clock. Along with other alerting systems, this governs the sleep/wake cycle and is therefore one of the main processes which govern sleep behaviour. Typically, the preferred sleep/wake cycle is delayed in adolescents, which leads to many students not feeling sleepy until much later in the evenings. This typical sleep pattern is usually referred to as the “night owl” schedule of sleep.

This is opposed to the “early bird” schedule, and is a kind of disorder where the individual tends to stay up much past midnight. Such a person has great difficulty in waking up in the mornings. Research suggests that night owls feel most alert and function best in the evenings and at night. Research findings have shown that about 20 percent of people can be classified as “night owls” and only 10 percent can be classified as “early birds” —— the other 70 percent are in the middle. Although this is clearly not true for all students, for the ones who are true night owls, this gives them an excellent excuse for missing their lectures which unfortunately fall before midday.

    Anger itself is neither good nor bad. It's what we do when we're angry that matters. Anger is a tool that helps us to read and respond to the social situations that bother us. But how can we keep it under control?

    It's normal to think that getting angry is bad and many times we punish ourselves for doing so. But contrary to popular belief, research indicates that anger increases optimism, creativity and efficiency (效率). In addition, studies suggest that anger can lead to more successful negotiations at work, as well as in our personal lives.

    In fact, suppressing (抑制) anger can be very bad for your health. In this sense, Dr. Ernest Harburg performed a study by monitoring a group of adults and their capacity (最大容量) for anger. What he found is that the men and women who suppressed their anger as a response to an unfair attack had a higher risk of developing bronchitis (支气管炎) or suffering from heart attacks, and were more likely to die before their colleagues who let their anger surface (显现) when they felt bothered.

    When anger arises, we feel the need to either prevent or put an end to this powerful feeling for the benefit of our welfare or the welfare of those we care about. But this act of kindness, mercy, love or justice isn't beneficial in this way. However, it's certainly a good thing to be cautious when anger begins to surface. Expressing your anger can be appropriate with certain people at certain times. The question lies in how to do it without losing control. The key to expressing your anger is finding the appropriate tone for expressing what it is that upsets you. But to avoid unnecessary shouting, hitting, or other violent reactions, it's worth taking a moment to step back and think, even though we may be in the middle of an argument with someone.

    My daughter Kelly is a cautious person. She needs to warm up to situations, and is hesitant to try new things. When with close friends, she becomes a leader who laughs loudly and chants, "Girls rule, boys drool." But when that comfort zone is not around her, she is shy and nervous.

    This has been challenging for me at times. "Shy" is not a word that I think has ever been used to describe me. But this has been a year of firsts for my girl that has filled her with a new sense of confidence. This year she moved to lap lane in swimming where she was preparing for a swim team. This year she learned to ride a bike without training wheels. And this year she completed her first kids' triathlon(三项全能).

    On Saturday, with a thunderstorm coming soon and my son's birthday party later in the day, we all went out in the dark of the morning for Kelly to participate in her first triathlon. We practiced transitions from swim to bike to run with her, we got all the equipment she'd need, and we kept talking about the race. But as we waited the two hours for the older kids to finish before her turn, she held my leg a little harder and told me she loved me a few too many times. She was nervous but trying to keep it together.

    And then it was her turn. From the second she jumped into the water, my heart soared. My daughter transformed into the most confident human being I had ever seen. She dominated that swim, crushed that bike ride and ran to the finish with the biggest smile on her face.

    I can honestly say that I never felt so proud of someone in my entire life. It wasn't because she did a sport or anything like that. It was because she was afraid of something and conquered that fear with confidence and a fire I hadn't seen before.

    All day I would find myself just looking over at her and smiling. She might be wearing the finalist medal but I felt like I won that day. I won the chance to see my girl shine.

    Shine on, sweet baby.

    Summer's here and it won't be long before school-aged kids across America start complaining that they're tired of riding their bikes, playing at the park, swimming in the pool...and all the other awesome activities their parents hoped would keep them pleasant for the next 10 weeks. Well, if it's any comfort, such rapid boredom could suggest that the kids have amazing powers of memory. A new study shows that the better your short-term memory is, the faster you fed sated (过饱的）and decide you've had enough.

    "Though satiation can be physical, like when you feel full after eating too much, we were interested in the psychological (心理学的）side of satiation. Like when you're just tired of something," Noelle Nelson, assistant professor of marketing and consumer behavior. She and her colleague Joseph Redden at the University of Minnesota tried to think outside the lunch box." Something that was interesting to me is that some people get tired of same things at very different speeds. So if you think about pop songs on the radio, some people must still be enjoying them and requesting them even after hearing them a lot. But a lot of other people are really sick of those same songs."

    The difference, the researchers thought, might have to do with memories of past experiences. For example, studies show that people push away from the dinner table sooner when they're asked to describe in detail what they ate earlier for lunch.

    So the researchers tested the memory capacity (能力） of college students, The students then viewed a repeating series of three classic paintings…like The Starry Night, American Gothic, and The Scream...or listened and re-listened to a series of three pop songs...or three pieces of classical music. Throughout the test, the students were asked to rate （定等级） their experience from zero to tan. And the better a participant scored in the memory test, the faster they got bored." We found that people with larger capacities remembered more about the music or art, which led to them getting tired of the music or art more quickly. So remembering more details actually made the students feel like they'd experienced the music or art more often."

    The findings suggest that marketers could control our desire for their products by figuring out ways to keep us from fully remembering our experiences. We could also trick ourselves into eating less junk food by putting ourselves in the memory of a previous (之前的) snack. As for kids easily bored, just tell them to forget about it—it might help them have more fun.

    I was reading these interesting stories behind a group of great logos（商标） in the world. Personally Nike is my favorite one﹣it's so simple. And I liked the stories behind them, which made me forget all other things. McDonald's, Apple, and Mercedes Benz own great logos as well, and they are among my favorites.

    Nike

    In the Greek myth, Nike is the goddess of victory and the source of inspiration for soldiers. This logo represents the wing in the famous statue of the Greek goddess.  Nike's logo was designed by Carolyn Davidson in 1971 for﹩35, and was registered as a trademark in 1995.

    McDonald's

    The logo was designed in 1962 by Jim Schindler to resemble the arch shaped （拱形的） signs on the side of the company's then walk﹣up hamburger stand. Later on, the two golden arches were combined together to form the M. The McDonald's name was added to the logo in 1968.

    Apple

    There are different stories behind Apple's logo. The first logo was a reference to the religious story of Adam and Eve, in which the apple represented the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. One year later, the second logo was designed in 1977 by Steven Jobs and Ronald Wayne, and it described Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. This logo didn't stay long. One year later it was replaced almost immediately by graphic designer Rob Janoff's "rainbow apple",  a rainbow﹣colored silhouette （轮廓） of an apple with a bite taken out of it. And then the rainbow﹣colored apple was replaced by the one﹣colored logo in 1998. It has not been changed so far.

    Mercedes Benz

    The Mercedes Benz logo, which was originally created by Gottlieb Daimler in 1909, consists of a simple description of a three﹣pointed star that represents its rule of the land, the sea and the air. The company was founded by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach. Mercedes is the name of Maybach's elder daughter, while Benz came as a result of a combination with Benz Cie and DMG in 1926.

    Earlier this month a study showed that bees can teach themselves to play football. They can learn by watching and, rather than copy what they have seen, change it to make it better. Bees also have a clever trick for helping their friends find lunch. New research shows that bees leave smelly little footprints on flowers that help them know what flowers they and their family members have recently visited.

    The discovery was made by scientists from University of Bristol who report these smelly footprints help bees distinguish  between their own scent(气味), the scent of a relative and the scent of a stranger. And by using this ability, bees can improve their success at finding good sources of a food and avoid flowers that have already been visited and mined of nutrients.

    The Bristol team performed three separate experiments with bumblebees(大黄蜂)in which they were repeatedly exposed to rewarding and unrewarding flowers at the same time that had footprints from different bees attached to them. Each flower type either carried scent -marks from bumblebees of differing relatedness or were unmarked. The marks were either the bee's own marks, sisters from their nest, or strangers from another nest.

    The study shows that not only can bumblebees tell the marks of their own nest mates from strangers, but they can also discriminate between the smell of their own footprints and those of their nest mate sisters, which could help them to remember which flowers they have visited recently. But it doesn't explain how they use that in the wild. They may detect the footprints of their friends and keep moving on, since that flower may be tapped out. Or they may smell a bit of familiar foot smell and dive in, seeing it as a marker that nectar(花蜜)is present.