“I wish we hadn't come on this trip!” Jeff's voice echoed across the narrow canyon （峡谷）. His father stopped, breathing heavily. “This is hard on you, but you've got to come through with courage!” He gently placed his hand on the boy's shoulder. “Now, I don't know if I can make it without stopping every so often. You're young, but you're strong and fast. Do you remember the way back from here to the road, if you had to go alone?”

    Jeff flashed back to the painful scene of Mark, his seventeen-year-old brother at their campsite. He was bitten by a snake yesterday. This morning he couldn't move, and the pain got worse. He needed medical attention right away. They had left their phone in the car, and it must have been out of power by then. Leaving Mark at the campsite and seeking help was their only choice.

“Jeff, could you do it?”

    Jeff looked to the end of the canyon, several miles away. He nodded and a plan began to take hold in his mind. “What is the name of that little town we stopped, Dad?” There must be a hospital there.

    “Flint. We parked at the side of the road a few miles out of Flint.”

    Jeff nodded. Then they continued climbing. Stone by stone, they made their way up the canyon. Gradually, Jeff's father grew smaller and smaller in the distance. Jeff waved to him and then climbed toward the road. Two hours later, he finally reached the road and struggled toward the town, almost exhausted.

    “Can't stop.” He thought. “Mark's in big trouble. Keep going.” Suddenly, he saw a truck heading toward him. “Hey, mister!” He shouted, waving both arms. He began to jog toward the truck, and then broke into a full-speed run.

    His chest was burning with every breath when the truck driver stopped by him. Jeff explained breathlessly. The driver reached for his cellphone as soon as he heard about Mark. “Better get the helicopter in there,” he said immediately. But Jeff wasn't sure about that because everything got unclear and then went black and quiet.

    Hours later, Jeff opened his eyes to find his father on a chair nearby. “You're a hero, son,” his father said with a smile. “You had the helicopter sent into the canyon after Mark. I can't tell you how happy I was when I saw it overhead. They got him to the hospital. He's going to be fine soon. I'm so proud of you!”

    One half of the brain remains on high alert during the first night of sleep in a new space.

    Over the course of three experiments on 35 young, healthy volunteers, researchers measured brain activity during two nights of sleep. They found that part of the left side of the brain remained more active than the right side only on the first night, specifically during a deep sleep stage.

    “When you sleep in a new place for the first time, a part of one side of the brain seems to stay awake, so you could wake up faster if necessary,” said senior study author Yuka Sasaki of Brown University.

    While this may be bad news for business travelers who regularly make brief overnight trips, it may not be as troublesome for people who go away for longer periods of time, Sasaki added by email.

    To see how being in a strange place affects sleep, Sasaki and colleagues performed a series of lab tests on their subjects.

    When they stimulated（刺激） the left side of the brain with sounds in the right ear during deep sleep on the first night, that led to greater possibility of waking and faster action upon waking, than if sounds were played in the left ear to affect the right side of the brain. On the second night, there wasn't any difference in reactions to tests between the left and right sides of the brain, even during deep sleep. This suggests that there is a first-night-only effect specifically in one side of the brain during deep sleep, the authors conclude.

    One limitation of the new study is its focus on healthy volunteers, which means the results may not apply to people with sleep disorders, the authors note.

    While it's possible that the findings may explain poor sleep among frequent travelers, the study wasn't designed to test whether these “first night effects” continue to happen to people every time they hit the road, said Patrick Finan, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

    Now many young people are traveling around the world on their own，not because they have no one to travel with，but because they prefer to go alone.

Kristina Wegscheider from California first traveled alone when she was at college and believes that it is something everyone should do at least once in their life. “It opens up your mind to new things and pushes you out of your comfort zone.” Wegscheider has visited 46 countries covering all seven continents.

    In foreign countries，with no one to help you read a map，look after you if you get ill，or lend you money if your wallet is stolen，it is challenging. This is what drives young people to travel alone. It is seen as character building and a chance to prove that they can make it on their own.

    Chris Richardson decided to leave his sales job in Australia to go traveling last year. He set up a website，The Aussie Nomad，to document his adventures. He says he wished he had traveled alone earlier. “The people you meet，the places you visit，or the things you do，everything is up to you and it forces you to grow as a person，” said the 30-year-old man.

    Richardson describes traveling alone like "a shot in the arm"，which "makes you a more confident person that is ready to deal with anything". He said，"The feeling of having overcome something on my own is a major part of what drives me each day when I'm dealing with a difficult task. I walk around with my head up because I know deep down inside that nothing is impossible if you try.”

    The great 19th century explorer John Muir once said，"Only by going alone in silence can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness."

    Have you ever looked out of the window of a passenger plane from 30,000 feet at the vast expanses of empty ocean and uninhabited land, and wondered how people can have any major effect on the Earth? I have. It is now becoming pretty clear that we are causing a great deal of damage to the natural environment. And the planes which rush us in comfort to destinations around the globe, contribute to one of the biggest environmental problems that we face today— global warming.

    As usual, people in the developing world are having to deal with problems created mainly by those of us in developed countries. Beatrice Schell, a spokeswoman for the European Federation for Transport and Environment says that, "One person flying in an airplane for one hour is responsible for the same greenhouse gas emissions（排放）as a typical Bangladeshi in a whole year." And every year jet aircraft produce almost as much carbon dioxide as the entire African continent does.

    There is a way of offsetting(抵消) the carbon dioxide we produce when we travel by plane. A company called Future Forests offers a service which can relieve the guilty consciences of air travelers. The Future Forest website calculates the amount of CO₂ you are responsible for producing on your flight, and for a small fee will plant a number of trees which will absorb this CO₂.

    Yesterday I returned to Japan from England, and was happy to pay Future Forests 25 pounds to plant the 3 trees which balance my share of the CO₂ produced by my return flight. Now the only thing making me lose sleep is jet lag.

    A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading. It's great first for what it contains：the range of news from local crime to international politics, from sports to business, from fashion to science, and the range of comment and special feature(特写) as well, from editorial page to feature articles and interviews to criticism of books, art theatre and music.

    A newspaper is even greater for the way one reads it：never completely, never straight through, but always by jumping from here to there, in and out, glancing at one piece, reading another article all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the text.

    A good modern newspaper offers a variety(多样性) to attract many different readers, but far more than the reader is interested in. What brings this variety together in one place is its topicality(时事性), its immediate relation to what is happening in your world and your locality now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it also mean that much of what appears in a newspaper has no more than transient(短暂的) value.

    For all these reasons, no two people really read the same paper：what each person does is to put together, out of the pages of that day's paper, his own selection and order, his own newspaper. For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need and without wasting time, demands skill and self-awareness as you change and apply the techniques of reading.

Imagine a school where students are taught by the best teachers in every subject, regardless of location. Imagine a school where students could go on safe field trips to the Amazon rainforest or Everest base camp. Well, such schools are already being built: in virtual(虚拟的)reality. 

Last year, Optima Academy Online, an all-virtual school, delivered courses that aim to improve the hearts and train the minds of young people. These courses are of different levels, attracting 170 full-time students from all over Florida. In the progress of home-schooling, students use headsets for about three hours a day for formal lessons and then do course work independently with digital check-ins. 

Future versions(版本)of VR will doubtless be widely used in education, but the only questions are: for what purpose and at what speed? There are enough reasons to doubt whether VR schools represent the future of education. Sticking a child in their bedroom with a heavy VR headset fastened to their face and no physical social interaction with other kids will fill many of them and their parents with horror. 

A recent report concluded that digital education could significantly improve the quality and equality of schooling systems. But if managed poorly, it could have the opposite effect, turning a digital divide into an educational one. There is growing evidence to suggest that is happening. In Mexico, only 24 percent of 15-year-old students in poor schools have access(使用)to a home computer for schoolwork compared with 87 percent in rich ones. 

Used properly, technology can be great for enabling self-motivated students to access learning resources and connect with fellow students and teachers all over the world, says Beeban Kidron, a member of the UK's Digital Futures Commission. The trouble is that Edtech is too often seen as a shiny new toy that will solve all problems and save money rather than being viewed as a different way to learn, she adds.