Most academics would view a post at an elite university like Oxford or Harvard as the crowning achievement of a career—bringing both honour and access to better wine cellars. But scholars desire such places for reasons beyond glory. They believe perching on one of the topmost branches of the academic tree will also improve the quality of their work, by bringing them together with other geniuses with whom they can collaborate and who may help spark new ideas. This sounds reasonable. Unfortunately，as Albert Laszlo Barabasi of Northeastern University，in Boston (and also, it must be said, of Harvard), shows in a study published in Scientific Reports, it is not true.

    Dr Barabasi and his team examined the careers of physicists who began publishing between 1950 and 1980 and continued to do so for at least 20 years. They ranked the impact of the institutions these people attended by counting the number of citations each institution's papers received within five years of publication. By tracking the association of individual physicists and counting their citations in a similar way, Dr Barabasi was able to work out whether moving from a low to a high-ranking university improved a physicist's impact. In total, he and his team analysed 2,725 careers.

    They found that, though an average physicist moved once or twice during his career, moving from a low-rank university to an elite one did not increase his scientific impact. Going in the opposite direction, however, did have a small negative influence. The consequence is that elite university do not，at least as far as physicists are concerned，add value to output. That surprising conclusion is one which the authorities in countries such as Britain, who are seeking to concentrate expensive subjects such as physics in fewer, more elite institutions—partly to save money, but also to create what are seen as centers of excellence—might wish to consider.

    Anyone who has ever played the game of Tetris (俄罗斯方块) knows the game's surreal ability to spill into real life. After you shut off the game, you still see those Tetris blocks falling in your mind. You're grocery shopping and find yourself thinking about rearranging items on grocery shelves. Your mind continues to play the game, even when you're physically not.

    Robert Stickgold, a Harvard professor, noticed something similar after a day hiking a mountain. That night, he dreamt he was still going through the motions of mountain hiking. Curious about this, he tried something: he got a group of college students of various skill levels to play Tetris and let them sleep in the Harvard sleep lab.

    Over 60% of the students, including those who suffered from amnesia (健忘症), reported dreams of images of Tetris pieces falling, rotating (旋转), and fitting together. Interestingly, half the Tetris expert students reported such Tetris dreams, while 75% of the beginners did.

    A study found that playing Tetris can grow your brain and make it more efficient. Adolescent girls played the game for an average of 1.5 hours a week over three months. The cerebral cortex (大脑皮层) of the girls grew thicker, while brain activity in other areas decreased. Richard Haier, who had found that there was a "Tetris learning effect", in which the brain consumed less energy as mastery of the game rose, concluded, "The brain is learning which areas not to use."

    Haier's study showed that as the girls practiced playing the game, nerve cells made connections, communicating through synapses (a synapse is a connection between two nerve cells). When you learn something, you change those connections. Every time you reactivate(激活) a circuit, synaptic efficiency increases, and connections become more durable and easier to reactivate. Stickgold says sleep plays a role in this memory process.

    So to sum up, whenever you do specific tasks over and over again, they take up less of your brain power over time. And that's pretty amazing.

    Russ Gremel, now 98 years old, decided it was time to donate $2 million to the Illinois Audubon Society, a charity to purchase nearly 400 acres of land for wildlife protection. Gremel was able to make this amazing donation because he purchased $1,000 worth of Walgreens stock seven decades ago whose value has grown recently.

    "A single man with no kids, Gremel has lived in the same Chicago house for 95 years, and has always lived simply", neighbor Patrick Falso told TODAY. Falso said he heard Gremel say many times the "money wasn't mine to begin with" and that he always intended to give it away.

    The Gremel Wildlife shelter was founded on June 4. Illinois Audubon Society president Jim Herkert said Gremel's donation was extremely generous. "It's allowing us to protect a really valuable and important possession and realize one of Gremel's wishes that we could find a place where people could come out and experience nature the way he did as a kid," Herkert told TODAY.

    After doing all this, this past weekend, Gremel adopted an old Chihuahua（吉娃娃犬）. Winnie the dog was picked up as a homeless dog several months ago. She suffered from a kind of cancer, which was treated—and all she needed was a loving home, which Colleen Collins, the founder of Perfect Pooches Adoption Agency, was determined to find.

    Gremel had lost his own beloved Chihuahua earlier this year. When he reached out to Collins about Winnie, she felt this could be a good match. That feeling grew when she brought Winnie to his house for a meet and greet, and Winnie was introduced not only to Gremel but also some of his friends and neighbors. One had brought over a lot of fresh strawberries; all said they'd be there to help out in any way needed.

    Most of us might only begin to think about dinner in the late afternoon: What should I make today? But Jelena Petrovic begins to think about her big meal early each morning. After morning tea, she and her husband, Milan, begin their plans for a traditional Serbian dish. The cooking method they use probably comes from Jelena's mother or grandmother. Each recipe uses local foods found in Serbian markets.

    Milan goes to the market to get the food they need. And the 69-year-old Jelena makes plans for how she will explain the cooking process to her 150, 000 followers on YouTube. Once she is ready, Jelena films her cooking show from a small kitchen table. Milan holds the camera.

    Jelena has many years of cooking experience at home. Ten years ago, she started an online program, where she shared recipes and cooking suggestions for meat, soup, bread, sweet treats and more.

    Her number of followers grew over time. She decided to start a blog and began also making videos she filmed with her mobile phone. Today, her videos on YouTube have over 50 million views. Last year, "Granny's Kitchen" was named one of the Top 50 YouTube channels in Serbia.

    Now her YouTube channel takes up much of her day. She works from her small kitchen and home office. Colorful plants and flowers fill the room. A bright cloth covers the table where she works. She says she gets tired from cooking long hours each day. But, she said, "My viewers wait for a new recipe every morning. If I am late, they will ask if I am well or what is happening."

    Often, her viewers write that the recipes bring back happy memories of their childhood. "My recipes are all local, traditional home-food recipes," Jelena said. "I make things my mother or grandmother used to make."

    Many people have long dreamed of being able to fly around as simply as riding a bicycle. Yet the safety and strength of a flying bike was always a big problem. Over the past 10 years, developments in technology have moved the dream of personal flying vehicles closer to reality. Now, two groups of inventors say such vehicles may be available soon.

    The British company Malloy Aeronautics has developed a prototype (原型) of its flying bicycle. Grant Stapleton, marketing sales director of Malloy Aeronautics, says the Hoverbike is able to get in and out of small spaces very quickly." It can be moved across continents very quickly because it can be folded and packed," he adds.

    Mr. Stapleton says safety was the company's main concern. He says the designers solved the safety issue by using overlapping rotors to power the vehicle.

    The company is testing a full-size prototype of the Hoverbike, which will most likely be used first by the police and emergency rescue teams.

    In New Zealand, Martin Aircraft Company is also testing a full-size prototype of its personal flying device, called the Jetpack. It can fly for more than 30 minutes, up to 1, 000 meters high and reach a speed of 74 kilometers per hour.

    Peter Coker is the CEO of Martin Aircraft Company. He said the Jetpack "is built around safety from the start". In his words, "Reliability is the most important element of it. We have safety built into the actual structure itself, very similar to a Formula One racing car.

    The Jetpack uses a gasoline-powered engine that produces two powerful jet streams. Mr. Coker says it also has a parachute that would be used, if there should be an emergency. "It starts to work at very low altitude and actually saves both the aircraft and the pilot," he adds. Mr. Coker says the Jetpack will be ready for sale soon.

    Parents should ban electronic media during mealtimes and after bedtime as part of a comprehensive "family media use plan", according to new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics. "Excessive media use is associated with obesity, poor school performance, aggression and lack of sleep", said Marjorie Hogan, co-author of the new policy.

    Families should have a no-device rule during meals and after bedtime, the guidelines say. Parents should also set family rules covering the use of the Internet, cellphones, including, perhaps, which sites can be visited, and who can be called. The policy also restated the existing recommendations: Kids should limit the amount of screen time for entertainment to less than two hours per day; children younger than 2 shouldn't have any TV or Internet exposure. Also, televisions and Internet-accessible devices should be kept out of kids' bedrooms.

    Doctors say parents need to obey the family rules, too, to model healthy behavior. That, some say, may be the toughest part. "If you go to any restaurant, Family 3.0 is Mom and Dad on their devices and the kids on theirs", says Donald, a pediatrician and an AAP spokesman. "Who is talking to each other?"

    Children aged from 8 to 18 spent an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes a day consuming media for fun, including TV, music, video games and other content in 2009, according to a 2010 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The report was based on a survey of 2002 third through twelfth graders, 702 of whom completed a seven-day media use diary. That was up about an hour and 17 minutes a day from five years earlier. About two-thirds of 8 to 18-year-olds said they had no rules on the amount of time they spent watching TV, playing video games or using the computer, the Kaiser report found.

    Use of mobile devices by young kids has soared. A new report from Common Sense Media, a child-advocacy group based in San Francisco, found that 17% of children 8 and younger use mobile devices daily, up from 8% in 2011.