As the new semester begins, millions of college students across the country are trying hard to remember how best to write a paper or, more likely, how best to delay that paper.

    Procrastination is the thief of time and a lot of students suffer form it. They can spend whole days in the library doing nothing but staring into space, eating snacks, surfing the Internet, watching videos and looking at other students sitting around them, who, most likely are doing nothing either.

    Paralyzed (使失去活力) by their habit to procrastinate, they write micro blogs about their fears, asking their online friends if they sometimes have the same issue. But this does nothing to break the spell (魔咒).

    According to a recent report, 95 percent of us procrastinate at some point and 20 percent of the world's population are always procrastinating. The figures are disappointing. Procrastinators are less wealthy, less healthy and less happy than those who don't delay. Procrastinators like to find excuses to justify their behavior, but BBC columnist Rowan Pelling says they are all wrong.

    Many procrastinators tell themselves they are perfectionists who work best under pressure. Pelling says this is non sense, as work done at the last minute is more likely to have mistakes than work done on time. The behavior of procrastinators often makes them feel ashamed, inconveniences others and annoys loved ones.

    Pelling also points out that procrastination feels particularly delinquent（过失的） in a society that thinks of speedy action as admirable, and, at times, even as a moral good.

    Fortunately, social scientists have thrown their weight behind efforts to understand this behavioral mistake and offer strategies to control it. Piers Steel, a Canadian social scientist and author of The Procrastination Equation, believes human is “designed” to procrastinate. Nevertheless, he suggests a couple of good ways to get through the task at hand.

    FITNESS CENTRE

    The fitness centre offers a variety of activities for members of all ages throughout the week.

    Activities for Monday 12 July, 2017:

    Learn to swim. Classes for preschool children aged five and under start at 10:00 am. Classes last 30 minutes and parents must attend with their children. Don't forget to book in advance, as places are limited, and to pack some warm clothes for after the lesson.

    Woman's aerobics (有氧运动). Sessions are for one hour and begin at 10:45 am, led by Melissa. Come along and join us every Monday for an exhilarating hour of exercise and fun. Leave your kids at the nursery and take time out for yourself. Wear a track-suit or something similar.

    Lunchtime yoga. Take a break at lunchtime (1:00—2:00 pm) for an hour of meditation and yoga. Enjoy the peace and quiet of our meditation room, and relaxing sessions designed for active people with busy lives. Use your own mat for floor work or hire one from us for a small sum.

    Family Shootaround. 10:00—5:30 pm. Family Shootaround is open for members and guests to bring the family out for basketball. Half court games are only during this time. There are no full court games during Family Shootaround hours. All participants must sign in at the front desk and wear a wristband during the play.

    Winter sports tend to be more dangerous than summer sports — they take place mostly outside at the mercy of ice or snow, involving (牵涉) metal edges, extreme speeds and crashes. Skeleton (俯视冰梭), however, stands apart as one of the most difficult and least accessible of all the winter sports. Adam Edelman, Israel's first Olympic skeleton athlete, would like to change that.

    Edelman was the 10th athlete named to the 2018 Israeli Olympic Team. Qualifying for the Olympics in any sport is impressive. But it's more impressive if you qualify for the Olympics after only four years in the sport — and without a coach.

    Edelman was first introduced to skeleton watching the game on television in late 2013. Sports have always been a part of his life. He grew up playing football and was a goalkeeper on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology football team. Ready for a new challenge, he set his sights on the Olympics.

Without a coach, Edelman learned to drive by watching endless hours of YouTube videos and taking more runs than anybody else on the track. “When everybody else would take three runs per day, I would take six to eight.” he recalled.

    Succeeding in skeleton takes a large amount of athletic ability and technical skill, but there's one more element (因素) required, one that can't be taught. “These tracks but built in the middle of nowhere, and it's gray and cold. You haven't seen your family in seven months and you really just want to give up. To continue, it takes tenacity.” Edelman said.

    Edelman is already looking beyond Pyeongchang. The 2022 Olympics could be in his future, but whether he continues to compete or not, he promises to stay in Israeli sports as long as possible-as instructor or as a coach.

Friends play an important part in our lives, and although we may take friendship for granted, we often don't clearly understand how to make friends. While we get on well with a number of people, we are usually friends with only a very few — for example, the average among students is about 6 per person. In all the cases of friendly relationships, two people like one another and enjoy being together, but beyond that, the degree of intimacy between them and the reasons for their shared interests vary greatly. As we get to know people, we take into account things like age, race, economic condition, social position, and intelligence. Although these factors are not of great importance, it is more difficult to get on with people when there is a marked difference in age and background.

Some friendly relationships can be kept on argument and discussion, but it is usual for close friends to have similar ideas and beliefs, the same opinions and interests — they often talk about "being on the same wavelength". It generally takes time to reach this point. And the more intimately involved people become, the more they depend on one another. People who want to be friends have to learn to put up with annoying habits and to stand differences.

In contrast with marriage, there are no friendship ceremonies to strengthen the association between two people. But the supporting and understanding of each other that results from shared experiences and emotions does seem to create a powerful bond, which can overcome differences in background, and break down barriers of age, class or race.

Every year, thousands of teenagers participate in programs at their local art museums. But do any of them remember their time at museum events later in life? A new report suggests that the answer is yes--and finds that arts-based museum programs are credited with changing the course of alumni's（毕业生的） lives, even years after the fact. 

The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles recently asked researchers to conduct à study to find out how effective their long-standing teen art programs really are. They involved over 300 former participants of four programs for teens that have been in existence since the 1990s. Alumni, whose current ages range from 18 to 36, were invited to find out how they viewed their participation years after the fact. 

Among the alumni surveyed, 75 percent of them thought the teen art program experience had the most favorable impact on their own lives, beating the family, school and their neighborhoods. Nearly 55 percent thought that it was one of the most important experiences they had ever had, regardless of age. And two-thirds said that they were often in situations where their experience in museums affected their actions or thoughts. 

It turns out that participating in art programs also helps keep teens keen about culture even after they reach adulthood: Ninety-six percent of participants had visited an art museum within the last two years, and 68 percent had visited an art museum five or more times within the last two years. Thirty-two percent of alumni work in the arts as adults. 

Though the study is the first of its kind to explore the impact of teen-specific art programs in museums, it reflects other research on the important benefits of engaging with the arts. A decade of surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts found that the childhood experience with the arts is significantly associated with people's income and educational achievements as adults. Other studies have linked arts education to everything from lower dropout rates to improvement in critical thinking skills. 

The blue whale holds the current record as the largest creature to live on Earth, but a collection of bones found in Per u might break that record. Researchers have identified a whale species called Perucetus colossus in the publication Nature. Bones from this species, including backbones weighing over 100 kilograms each and ribs measuring nearly 1. 4 meters long, were found by Mario Urbina in 2012 in the Ica desert.

The area where the bones were found was once underwater, making it a rich source of ocean fossils. The find resulted in 13 backbone vertebrae(脊椎), four ribs and a hip bone. The large fossils date back to around 39 million years ago. Alberto Collareta, a lead writer of the study, described the fossils as unlike anything he had ever seen before.

The researchers used 3D scanners to study the bones' surface and also looked inside. Based on the incomplete skeleton, the team estimated that the ancient creature weighed somewhere between 85 and 340 metric tons. Comparatively, the largest blue whales found fell within that range, at around 180 metric tons. The Perucetus colossus measured about 20meters long, while blue whales can reach 30 meters in length. This means the newly discovered whale was "feasibly the heaviest animal ever," said Alberto Collareta. But he added, "it was most likely not the longest animal ever."

Interestingly, the density and weight of the Perucetus colossus' bones were much higher than those of a blue whale. This suggests that the colossal whale may have inhabited shallower coastal waters, similar to other coastal animals with heavy bones.

Another researcher, Amson, said, without the skull, it is hard to know what the whale was eating to support such a huge body. It is possible that the large creature sought food along the seafloor, the researchers said. Or it could have eaten up tons of smaller sea life in the ocean. Swiesen, a paleontologist, added that he would not be surprised "if this thing actually fed in a totally different way that we would never imagine."