A smart home is a home with a communication network. This network connects devices(装置), such as lights and TV sets, and allows them to be controlled from far away through electrical wiring, mobile phone communication or WiFi over the internet.

    More and more people may start to consider owning a smart home, because it makes life much more convenient. It can help keep your room at a certain temperature. It can record what happens inside the home and send the video to your phone. When you are on vacation abroad, you can use a smart home controller to switch on or off the electricity when necessary. Some smart homes can receive a visitor, allowing him to come in and offering him a drink. They can even feed the cat and water the plants.

    Besides, smart homes are easy to fix. Most smart home technology and devices are wireless and can be set up with a minimum of tools,using only the guiding information. When a problem appears,you can deal with it yourself without paying a professional.

    However, for home-users,the smart home technology is far from perfect.It can be rather expensive to own the technology and the devices. Also, because the smart home system(系统) allow its owner to get home information from anywhere, it leaves the home easy to be attacked by hackers(黑客), who may secretly use or change the information in the system.

Now,many scientists are excited at the future of smart home technology. Imagine being able to get fashion advice from your mirror, or receive food shopping suggestions from your refrigerator. While there are others who worry that those smart devices will make people lazier and lonelier. Whatever it is, one thing is for sure—smart home technology will change the way we live and work.

    Better think twice before choosing a password for email, online bank or shopping. Simple passwords are easy to be stolen.

    A password is like a key to your home. If someone steals it, he'll get chances to steal something else. We use passwords everywhere in our life. We are so used to passwords that we don't pay any attention to them until we lose or forget one.

    A study of 28，000 passwords recently stolen from a popular website showed that people often do the easy thing. It found that 16% took a first name as a password. Another 14% used the easiest keyboard combinations such as “12345678” or QWERTY. 5% of the stolen passwords were names of television shows or stars popular with young people. 3% of the passwords expressed feelings like “I don't care，” “Whatever，” “I love you，” or their opposite, “I hate you.”

    Robert Graham, who did the study, advises people to choose a password that is longer than eight characters with one capital letter and one symbol.

    Of course, safe passwords don't mean those hard to remember. Forgetting your password is sometimes a big headache for you. Maybe, the perfect password is easy for you and hard for others.

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    Do you and your friends ever talk about your dreams with each other? If you do, you might have noticed something interesting – some of your friends seldom remember their dreams, but some can always describe their dreams so clearly that it seems like they're describing things that really happened to them. What makes those people different?

    The answer is simple. There are two different types of dreamers – low dream recallers（回忆者）and high dream recallers.

    Low dream recallers usually remember their dreams only twice a month. But high dream recallers are able to remember them about five mornings a week. And a new study suggests that activity in a certain part of the brain could have something to do with it, reported The Huffington Post.

    Perrine Ruby, a French researcher at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, studied 41 people (21 high dream recallers and 20 low dream recallers) and recorded their brain activity.

    She found that a part of the brain called the temporo-parietal junction (颞顶联合区) was more active in high dream recallers than in low dream recallers – both when they were sleeping and awake.

    This brain area collects and processes（编程）information from the outside world. This means that high dream recallers know more about what's happening around them. For example, when they are awake, they respond (对……有反应) more strongly to hearing their own names, and when they are sleeping, they are woken more easily by sounds and movements.

    By closely studying people's brain activities, Ruby found that high dream recallers have twice as much “wakefulness time” during sleep as low dream recallers do. And it is during these short times of wakefulness that the brain remembers dreams.

    “The sleeping brain is not able to remember new information,” Ruby told The Washington Post. “It needs to wake up to be able to do that.”

    This is not hard to understand. Just try to think of your own sleeping experiences. If you are worried during the night, you are more likely to remember your dreams, but if you sleep well, you will remember little in the morning, and this is because “you never get a chance to remember”, Robert Stickgold, a Harvard Medical School researcher, told The Washington Post.

    Why do plants grow in some places but not in others? Why does some land have so many plants growing on it, while other land has almost no plants growing on it at all?

    To grow, plants need several things. One is warmth. In very cold places almost nothing grows. Plants also need water. In very dry parts of the Earth only a few unusual plants can grow. That's why there are almost no trees or grass in dry deserts.

    Plants must also have a place to put down their roots and grow. They find it difficult to grow on hard land. The town is built(被建立) on hard land. The plants there have only the soil between the cracks of the stones to grow in.

    Another thing plants must have before they can grow is food. What will happen if we try to make things grow on the sandy beach? A few plants, such as grass, will grow in sand, but most plants won't. Even if the weather is warm enough and we water the plants each day, many of them will die because the sand on this beach has almost no food for plants.

    Can dolphins (海豚) talk? Maybe they can not talk with words, but they can talk with sounds. They show their feelings with sounds. Dolphins travel in a group. We call a group of fish a "school". They do not study, but they travel together. Dolphins are mammals (哺乳动物), not fish, but they swim together like fish in a school. Dolphins talk to the other dolphins in the school. They give information to the others. They talk when they are happy, sad or afraid. They say "welcome" when a dolphin comes back to the school. They talk when they play.

    They make some sounds above water. They make many more sounds under water. People cannot hear these sounds because they are very, very high. Scientists make tapes of the sounds and study them. Sometimes people catch dolphins for a large aquarium (水族宫). People can watch dolphins in a show. Dolphins do not like to be away from their school in an aquarium. They are sad and lonely. There are many stories about dolphins. They help people. Sometimes they save somebody's life. Dolphins' meat is good, but people do not like to kill them. They say that dolphins bring good luck. Many people believe this.

    If you're ever apart from your children, a new study says just talking on the phone will help just as much as a hug(拥抱).

    If you're a parent who spends long hours on the job, you probably feel sorry for spending so much time away from your kids. But the results of a new study show that a mother's voice alone can be just as comforting to an anxious child as physical contact(接触).

    In an experiment, researchers from the University of Wisconsin Madison asked a group of girls between the ages of 7 and 12 to solve math problems in front of judges—a stressful situation for anyone. Before the girls were set to give their answers, the researchers measured their levels of two hormones(荷尔蒙): cortisol, which goes up during stressful periods, and oxytocin, the "love" hormone, which goes down at the same time.

    After the girls finished the problems, some of them got to meet up with their mothers right away. The moms came in and hugged the girls. Another group of the girls didn't see their mothers, but received phone calls from them, in which their mothers told them how well they'd done. The final group had no contact with their mothers, but instead watched an animal movie, March of the Penguins.

    Finally, the girls' hormone levels were measured again. Although the movie was interesting, it did nothing to reduce the children's anxiety—but, surprisingly, both the physical contact and phone calls from their mothers had the same effect on reducing the girls' stress levels.

    So, no matter how old you are, if you're feeling stressed about something in your life, a phone call to Mom might be just the key to help you feel better.