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A warm drink of milkbefore bed has long been the best choice for those wanting a good night'ssleep. But now a study has found it really does help people nod off—if it ismilked from a cow at night.

  Researchers have discovered that“night milk” contains more melatonin(褪黑激素), which has been proven tohelp people feel sleepy and reduce anxiety.

  The study, by researchersfrom Seoul, South Korea, involved mice being fed with dried milk powder madefrom cows milked both during the day and at night.

  Those given night milk, whichcontained 10 times the amount of melatonin, were less active and less anxiousthan those fed with the milk collected during daytime, according to the studypublished in The Journal of MedicinalFood.

   Night milk quickened the startof sleep and caused the mice to sleep longer.

   While the effect of cowsmilk harvested at different time has not been tested on humans up to now,taking melatonin drugs has been suggested to those who are struggling to fallasleep at night.

   Previous studies have alsoindicated that milk can be excellent for helping sleep because of the calciumcontent, which helps people to relax.

  Milk is also sugar-free andadditive-free with nutritionists recommending skimmed milk as the best choicebefore bed as it is the least fattening. The more fat you take in beforebedtime, the greater burden you will put on your body at night.

    When you're having a hard time with your homework or when you're preparing for your term paper, these student-focused websites can help you with just about anything you need. The key to getting the most out of these online resources is to know how they can best be used to your advantage.

Facebook

    Although Facebook can be one of your biggest time-wasters and distractions when you are supposed to be getting work done, it can also be one of your most valuable resources. Most of your classmates will probably have a Facebook account, so anyone you need to connect with about a class you missed or about a problem is usually just a few clicks away.

SparkNotes

    With a free library of history timeline, philosophy study guides and library summaries, SparkNotes has covered just about any reading-related jam you find yourself in. Just run a search for the book, play, or short summary of the material you are supposed to read.

Amazon.com

    Do you finish every term with many expensive textbooks you will never open again? Instead of letting the money spent go to waste, get back some of your cash by selling your books on Amazon.

RateMyProfessors.com

    Choosing new classes can sometimes be like trying to pick out your clothes in the dark, a total guessing game. Which teacher gives out the hardest problem sets? How much homework will that history professor give you every week? At RateMyProfessors.com, students all over the country rate their professors on quality, helpfulness, and how hard their classes are.

 Wikipedia

    While Wikipedia isn't aimed specifically at students, it is difficult to think of another website that does more to reduce the pain of paper writing and researching. Wikipedia gives you a quick way to find sources and get the details of almost any topic you need to research — all without walking to the library.

    It may sound strange, but cutting down a real tree for Christmas is actually greener than going with the artificial kind, one scientist says.

    “It is a little confusing to people,” said Clint Springer, a biologist at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. Because of concerns over deforestation（砍伐森林）around the world, many people naturally worry that buying a real tree might contribute to that problem. But most Christmas trees for sale these days are grown not in the forest but on tree farms for the purpose of being cut.

    Moreover, from the viewpoint of greenhouse gases, real trees are “the obvious choice”. Live trees actively release oxygen as they grow, and meanwhile remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. After they have been cut and Christmas is over, they're usually cut into smaller pieces for mulch（覆盖物）. As mulch, the bits of trees very slowly release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. So in the end, a real Christmas tree is carbon neutral, putting the same amount of carbon dioxide back into the air as it took out (although much more slowly).

    The tree farms that grow the trees also replant after the trees are cut.  Artificial trees, on the other hand, don't come out even in the carbon balance. Petroleum（石油）is used to make the plastics in artificial trees and lots of carbon dioxide-creating energy is required to make and transport them. Because these trees just end up in the places where waste is buried under the ground after use, “those greenhouse gases are lost forever,” Springer said.

    Music is not just a set of sounds and rhythms. Its influence on the brain is much deeper than any other human experience. Keep on reading to know all those amazing powers of music.

    A recent study suggests that preterm (早产的) babies appear to experience less pain and feed more when listening to music. Experts led by Dr. Manoj Kumar of the University of Alberta, Canada, found that music had a beneficial effect on reducing pain for preterm babies experiencing painful medical tests. It also appeared to benefit full-term babies during operations.

    Many people experiencing brain damage have speech and movement-related problems. Music can help recover from brain injuries. As a different and effective treatment, doctors often advise such patients to listen to good music to improve the parts of the brain responsible for these two functions. When people with neurological (神经的) disorders hear a musical beat, it helps them to regain a balanced walk.

    Though music cannot make deafness disappear, it really can stave off the loss of hearing. There was an experiment involving 163 people where 74 were musicians. Participants were asked to pass some listening tests. Musicians heard the sounds better than non-musicians, and this difference gets clearer with age. This means that a 70-year-old musician hears better than a 50-year-old non-musician, even in a noisy environment.

    Besides, music mends a broken heart. It is not about a thrown-away love, but about a heart attack. The matter is that music can help people recover from a heart attack or heart operation by reducing blood pressure, slowing down the heartbeat rate, and reducing anxiety. Listening to the quality music produces positive emotions, improves the movement of blood, and expands blood vessels, thus, promoting quick recovery of the whole cardiovascular (心血管的) system.

    It seems that you can hardly go to any bookstore without encountering Charles Dickens. From Oliver Twist to A Tale of Two Cites, Dickens' works still enjoy great popularity today and are placed on notable shelves.

    As someone who teaches Dickens, the question of why we still read him is often on my min. Nearly 10 years ago, I told my students that Dickens, works started crazes in Victorian readers. Then a hand shot up in the middle of the room. “But why should we still read his stuff?” A student asked. I was speechless because I had never considered the question myself. The answer I gave was only acceptable. “Because he teaches you how to think,” I said.

    The question annoyed me for years, and for years I told myself answers, but never with complete satisfaction. We read Dickens because he not only was a man of his own times, but also is a man for our times. We read Dickens because his exploration of the human mind is deep. We read Dickens because we can learn from the experiences of his characters. These are all wonderful reasons, but not exactly the reasons why I read Dickens.

    My search for an answer continued in vain, until one day a text message came from a student of mine. “We still read Dickens' novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us why we are what we are.” Simple as it was, that was the explanation I had thought for years.

    Like most people, I think I knew who I was without knowing it. I was Oliver Twist, always wanting and asking for more. I was Nicholas Nickleby, convinced that my father was watching me from beyond the grave. I was Pip, in love with someone far beyond my reach. I was all of these characters, and I began to understand more about why I was who I was because Dickens had told me so much about human beings. Dickens shines a light on who we are during the best and worst of times. That's why we still need to read him today.

    The Earth is facing a climate crisis, but it's also getting greener and leafier. According to new research, the rise is largely due to China and India.

    A study by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), based on extensive satellite photographs and published in the journal Nature Sustainability, has revealed that the two countries with the world's biggest populations are also responsible for the largest increase in greenness.

    Since 2000, the planet's green leaf area has increased by 5 percent, or over 2 million square miles. That's an area equivalent to the sum total of the Amazon rainforests, NASA says. But researchers stressed that the new greenery does not neutralize deforestation and its negative impacts on ecosystems elsewhere.

    A third of the leaf increase is thanks to China and India, due to the implementation of major tree-planting projects alongside a vast increase in agriculture.

    Using the data from a NASA sensor, researchers discovered that China is the source of a quarter of the increase in green leaf area, despite possessing only 6.6 percent of the world's vegetated area (植被区). Forests account for 42 percent of that increase, while croplands make up a further 32 percent. China's increase in forest area is the result of forest preservation and expansion programs, NASA said, established to fight against the impacts of climate change, air pollution and soil erosion (水土流失). India has contributed a further 6.8 percent rise in green leaf area, with 82 percent from croplands and 4.4 percent from forests.

    Rama Nemani, a co-author of the study and a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center, said in a statement, "When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to more leaf growth in northern forests, for instance." "Now, with the data that lets us understand the phenomenon at really small scales, we see that humans are also contributing," Nemani said. "This will help scientists make better predictions about the behavior of different Earth systems, which will help countries make better decisions about how and when to take action."

    Thomas Pugh, a professor at the University of Birmingham's School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, said the NASA report expands scientists' understanding of the causes behind global greening. But he also cautioned that a direct line cannot be drawn between an increase in global greening and a decrease in negative impacts of climate change.