Starting the day on an egg could keep your blood pressure under control, research suggests. Scientists have shown that eggs produce proteins with a function similar to that of powerful blood pressure-lowering drugs.

    The research, from the University of Alberta in Canada, showed that when eggs come in contact with stomach enzymes (酶) they produce a protein that acts in the same way as Ace inhibitors, but more work is needed to show the effects outside a lab and in the human body.

    Earlier this month, British researchers declared that, contrary to popular beliefs, it is healthy to go to work on an egg. They concluded that the type of cholesterol (胆固醇) found in eggs has little effect on increasing heart disease risks.

    Researcher Professor Bruce Griffin, from the University of Surrey, said, "The wrong beliefs linking egg eating to high blood cholesterol and heart disease must be corrected. The amount of fat in our diet has an effect on blood cholesterol that is several times greater than the relatively small amounts of cholesterol found in eggs. The UK public do not need to be limiting the number of eggs they eat. They can be encouraged to include them in a healthy diet as they are one of nature's most nutritious foods."

    The British Heart Foundation dropped its three-egg-a-week limit in 2005. However, almost half of Britons believe the limit still applies.

    Here's a selection of festivals for tourists to the United States in summer.

San Francisco Silent Film Festival

    Films at this odd cinematic event have a variety of musical accompaniments, including piano and violin. It includes some classic silent movies. If you want to see them all, you can buy a festival pass.

May 29 to June 1; www.silent film.org

Union Street Festival

    This popular street fair stretches out over six blocks of the city, in the fashionable shopping area of Union Street. This year, there's beer, wine, biscuits tasting and more separate themes-fashion, cuisine, tech, local, craft, and health and fitness.

    June 7 to 10; www.unionstreetfestival.com

    North Beach Festival

    This is San Francisco's oldest street party, with live entertainment, delicious food and arts and crafts. Situated in the Little Italy district, known for its associations with the “Beat Generation”, festival goers are guaranteed plenty of good Italian food. There is also as the “blessing of the animals”, a San Francisco tradition which takes place at the National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi (610 Vallejo Street) at 2 pm on both days of the festival.

    June 14 to 16; www.sfnorthbeach.org

    Stern Grove Festival

    This is the oldest free summer arts festival of its kind in the United States. It includes a wide variety of acts, from the local symphony orchestra to well known artists such as Smokey Robinson.

    Sundays from June 22 to Aug 24; www.stemgrove.org

    As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. "The woods" was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend's house and found him not at home, his mother might say, "Oh, he's out in the woods," with a tone (语气) of airy acceptance. It's similar to the tone people sometimes use now a days to tell me that someone I'm looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even "away from his desk". For us ten-year-olds, "being out in the woods" was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

    We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring (探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though seemed to have less system than the historic kind something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Indian burial mound.

    Often we got "lost" and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical; the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly-tall beeches easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

    It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence (青春期). In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.

    Downloading music over the Internet is pretty common among high school and college students. However, when students download and share copyrighted music without permission, they are against the law.

    A survey of young people's music ownership has found that teenagers and college students have an average of more than 800 illegally copied songs each on their digital music players. Half of those surveyed share all the music on their hard drive (硬盘), enabling others to copy hundreds of songs at any one time. Some students were found to have randomly linked their personal blogs to music sites, so as to allow free trial listening of copyrighted songs for blog visitors, or adopted some of the songs as the background music for their blogs. Such practices may be easy and free, but there are consequences.

    Sandra Dowd, a student of Central Michigan University, was fined US $7,500 for downloading 501 files from Lime Wire, a peer-to-peer file sharing program. Sandra claimed that she was unaware that her downloads were illegal until she was contacted by authorities. Similarly, Mike Lewinski paid US $4,000 to settle a lawsuit（起诉）against him for copyright violation (违反). Mike expressed shock and couldn't believe that this was happening to him. “I just wanted to save some money and I always thought the threat was just a scare tactic(战术).” “You know, everyone does it,” added Mike.

    The RIAA （Recording Industry Association of America）, the organization that files lawsuits against illegal downloaders, states that suing (控告) students was by no means their first choice. Unfortunately, without the threat of consequences, students are just not changing their behavior. Education alone is not enough to stop the extraordinary growth of the illegal downloading practice.

    Kieron Graham has known from a young age that he was adopted. While he loves his adoptive family, he has always wondered about his birth mother and brother. When his adoptive mom gave him a DNA test tool, they both hoped it might lead to his birth family. But neither guessed it would work so quickly, or that when it did, Graham would learn he and his long-lost brother may have crossed paths every day.

    It took just one week from the time Graham, a college student at Georgia's Kennesaw State University, received his DNA results on Ancestry.com for him to connect with his brother. Graham's DNA results showed that his closest match was a man named Vincent Ghant, and it turned out Ghant lived just a few minutes away.

Graham reached out and learned that the two were in fact long-lost brothers. Their mother, Shawn Ghant, made the difficult decision to place Kieron in adoptive care when he was just a baby. And she has worried and wondered about her youngest son ever since. Graham has since been reunited with his mother and both of his brothers on his mother's side.

    “It's all surreal(离奇的), too many emotions to describe exactly what I'm feeling about the entire situation, but it's a good situation,” Graham tells MNN.

    As fate would have it, Kieron and Vincent are both students at Kennesaw State. They even have the same major: political science. So it's a safe bet the two crossed paths many times over the past three years. And now, thanks to some DNA sleuthing(筛查), the two will cross paths many more times in the years to come.

    “We're getting together on Christmas with everyone, birth mother included,” Graham says. “That's sure to be a very indelible Christmas indeed, which will always be treasured by us.”

    Do you need useful and interesting books? Here we've got plenty for you.

Successful Fishermen

    Fishing is a healthy hobby. You can enjoy fresh air when you go fishing in the countryside. This book will teach you how to choose fishing places and how to make good fishing rods(竿) easily. Many kinds of fishing skills are shown in the book. Read it and you will become a more successful fisherman.

    Best Learners

    This book can give you the answers to the questions most often asked by parents, teachers and students themselves. Read this book and learn:

    What the three difficulties in study are and how to deal with them.

    What to do if you are not interested in a subject you are studying.

    Twenty­six simple exercises to help you study easily and fast.

    You will get more from this book. For younger students, you can buy Learn in Study for Beginners. It is easier to understand.

    How to Keep Pets

    A pet can be our best friend. Do you have pets in your house? Are they in good shape? This book not only offers you many colorful pictures of lovely pets, but also provides you with the knowledge about:

    How to choose right pets for yourself.

    How to build houses or nests(窝) for your pets.

    How to feed the pets and how to keep them clean.

    Buy this book and you will learn more.

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