If you live in the U.S., you're probably used to throwing banana peel into the trash. But people in other countries, including India, have been taking advantages of their nutritional benefits for many years.

    While the flesh of a banana is soft and sweet, the skin is thick, hard and slightly bitter. To eat the peel, you can fry, bake, or boil it for at least 10 minutes. Also, the riper bananas get, the thinner and sweeter banana peel will become. That's because of a natural plant hormone(激素) called ethylene(乙烯) that fruits release as they ripen. Ethylene interacts with the sugars and fiber in the banana skin, changing complex sugars into simple sugars and breaking down pectin, a form of fiber in bananas that keeps them stiff. That's why the older your banana is, the flimsier(不结实的) it feels.

    The sweet flesh of a medium-sized banana contains great percentages of your daily recommended intake of various nutrients, such as:

·12% of your daily fiber, which helps with digestion and may help lower your risk of diabetes(糖尿病)

·17% of your vitamin C, which is important for your immune system as well as your growth

·20% of your vitamin B6, which aids the body's ability to turn food into energy

·12% of your potassium, which helps with the development of cells, tissues, and organs throughout the body

    If you eat the skin along with the flesh, you will get an even bigger increase in these same nutrients.

    Eating the peel is not only good for your body but also better for the earth. The average American ate 11.4 pounds of bananas in 2014. Since a medium-sized banana weighs about 0.3 pounds, that equates to about 38 bananas per person, or about 12 billion for the whole of the U.S. And since most of us throw away the peel, that also means a lot of organic waste.

It's long been thought that in order to succeed in life you need to think only of yourself and ignore the needs of others. New research,however,suggests the exact opposite is true and being nice to others actually makes you more likely to be successful. The scientists found that ‘givers' were more likely to share knowledge,and in turn gain more information themselves.

    Researchers divided participants into three groups based on a personality test: givers, takers and matchers. In a social dilemma task, participants were given a made-up donation which was equal to the amount of ￡ 240( $400). They were then asked to decide how much of their money they would give to a shared group pool. They were told that the money in the pool would be doubled and divided equally among all group members. Thus,it would be more beneficial to the group as a whole if everyone contributed their individual donations. However, it would be more beneficial for the individual if everyone else from the group contributed,while the individual kept his or her own money. The researchers used this strategic (策略的) information sharing task to examine how much and which pieces of information participants shared:the less important and already known information or the really important information only known by the individual.

    The results showed that givers are less self-centered and self-loving than takers. Givers shared not only more money with the group, but they also shared important information. Takers on the other hand kept both the money as well as different types of information.

    The findings suggest that it may not be enough to simply provide knowledge management tools in order to make the best of knowledge exchange in a group of people. It may be necessary for leaders and managers to keep in mind the personality styles of their employees. Specifically, they should be aware that takers may keep the important information for themselves.

    No rows of desks in this classroom, and no teacher lecturing at the front. In fact, that's something Barrie teacher Liz Collett rarely does. Instead, she's on the move, talking to students about their work, from the small group sitting on the floor playing games to others nearby figuring out a math problem.

    The children in this class do not take a spelling test all year－in fact, the school avoids all pencil-and-paper tests－nor do they get assigned homework. Instead, their teacher gives them immediate feedback（反馈）on their work throughout the day.

    Welcome to the school of the 21st century, a place where teachers and students cooperate all the time. Such advanced classrooms are trying things, which some might consider as coddling kids－letting students give a voice-recorded essay instead of a written one or even allowing teens to design their own courses.

    Though some people blame（谴责）schools for dumbing things down（降低教育标准）, others will say such changes are actually based on the newest research on how to attract today's youth and increase not only their interests, but also their achievements. Many of today's school are not holding kid's interests. And if they Ye not interested, they're not learning－and isn't that the point?

“Students today say they want their education to be useful and valuable, and don't want it to be simply repeating the facts. That's the kind of learning that be happening for many kids,” says Penny Milton, a researcher. “What we could argue is that to become good learners, they need to become thinkers.”

    Jan Olson, anther researcher, says schools have been operating the same way since the Industrial Revolution. But the digital age is bringing an education revolution. While using technology is a part of it, what's important for students is being able to use information and understand it, not just remembering it.

    Today's learner needs fewer traditional tests and more “effective” feedback, ongoing discussion with a teacher, which studies have found is the number one factor in improving achievement.

    It is a cold and dry winter morning. When you wake up, you feel that your throat hurts. You begin to sneeze and later you may cough. You must have a cold! Wait a moment. Could it just be a common cold or the flu that's been going around?

    A cold gives you a runny nose and cough. But it's usually easy to deal with. Some take medicine while others drink herbal tea or chicken soup. Usually you feel better after a week.

    On the other hand, the flu can be much more dangerous. It usually gives you fever.

    Sometimes it can cause death. According to an American magazine, the worst flu killed about 50 million people from 1918 to 1919.

    Don't worry. If you get a flu vaccine（疫苗）, it can stop you from getting the virus. Flu vaccines work by giving the body a small amount of flu viruses. This causes your body to develop antibodies. So next time you get the flu, the antibodies should help you.

    The flu virus changes every few years. Therefore, there are so many types of flu, such as H1N1 and H5N1. The antibodies for one type of flu can't help us against all types of flu. That's why we need to get vaccine every year.

    However, good health habits may also help stop you developing a cold or flu. Washing your hands often helps stop you from getting viruses. It is also important to get regular exercise and eat healthy food. All these can help you strengthen your immune system.

    Engineers have put a huge garbage collector to gather plastic material in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, the world's largest spread of garbage, twice the size of the state of Texas.

    The Ocean Cleanup organization created the collector. The group's founder, Boyan Slat, an inventor born in 1994, was just 16 when he was moved to clean up the oceans when he was on a dive and saw more plastic bags than fish

    Last Saturday, a ship pulling the pipe-shaped floating barrier left San Francisco. Attached to it is a screening skirt that hangs three meters down in the water. The screen is designed to collect the plastic as it moves through the water. Sea animals can safely swim under the barrier.

    The cleanup system also comes with lights powered by the sun, cameras, and other special devices, so the system can communicate its position at all times. That way a support ship can find it every few months to remove the plastic that has been collected.

    Shipping containers will hold all the plastic gathered, including bottles and fishing equipment and are expected to be back on land within a year. Then the plastic will be recycled. The free-floating barriers are made to survive extreme weather conditions and damage from continual use. They will stay in the water for twenty years, thus collecting 90% of the garbage in the area.

    The Ocean Cleanup has received $ 35 million in donations to pay for the project, hoping to put 60 free-floating barriers in the Pacific Ocean by 2020. "It's important to turn off the taps on plastic entering the ocean, but I also think people can do more than one thing at a time to deal with this problem," Slat said.

    For the first time, China's South Pole researchers can eat fresh vegetables grown regularly, according to Wang Zheng, the grower, who came home last month after a 400-day mission in Antarctica.

    "Growing vegetables in Antarctica reminded me of The Martian, a sci-fi movie about an astronaut who survives alone on Mars by eating potatoes he grows there," Wang said on Friday. "I totally understand the main character of the movie, I understand how he feels when he watches a small green plant grow in a fragile man-made environment,'' said the 40-year-old doctor. But he admitted that the conditions he faced in the Antarctic were much better than those in the film.

    Wang said the growth chamber(生长室) at the Zhongshan Station, had only a low yield when it was established in 2013. The amount was too small to make it possible for researchers to have vegetable dishes. To increase the yield, he reduced the number of vegetable varieties and focused on only some fast-growing ones, which makes the output stable. As a result, during much of his stay there, at least one vegetable dish, such as cucumbers, lettuce or cabbage, was served at every meal for a group of 18 researchers.

    Wang, an orthopedist, said he knew nothing about botany or farming before he arrived at the station in December, 2014. "I was given this job probably because my office is next to the growth chamber, and as a doctor, I had more spare time than others," Wang said. He considered many factors, such as light, temperature and humidity. Light music is played in the 16-square - meter greenhouse around the clock. "Mild music is good for vegetable growth," he said. "We also played Buddhist music, which has soft melody."

    "Growers before me did very good work. My job was to maintain the chamber and keep everything working." Before the  harvest, researchers had a very limited vegetable supply—mostly potatoes and cabbage, which taste awful after months of storage. "Because of our success in growing vegetables, we can have fresh vegetables every day," he said. "The Russian station is no more than one kilometer away from ours. We even had enough vegetables to invite our Russian colleagues for dinner."