Don't you just hate it when you have to take an important phone call and you're surrounded by potential eavesdroppers(潜在偷听者)? You either have to whisper or go outside to keep the conversation private, which is not good. Now Hushme aims to fix this problem by muffling your voice and making you look like Bane in the film Batman.

    Hushme is a strange high-tech mask(口罩)that blocks the sound of the wearer's voice so that people nearby can't hear what is being said. It connects to your phone via Blucetooth and comes with a pair of earphones. When you get a private call, all you have to do is put the mask on and it will do the rest. The pair of thick pads over your mouth does a good job of muffling your voice, but to ensure nothing gets through. Hushme also has speakers that play a variety of sounds when you speak.

    The Hushme mask, which comes in a variety of colors, can be worn around the neck, like a regular pair of earphones, and attaches in front of your mouth thanks to a couple of very powerful magnets(磁铁). It's not yet clear how comfortable speaking with this Bane-like mask over your mouth really is, or how effective its speech muffling ability is, so we know so far is that it makes you look strange. The sound choices for covering your voice currently include wind, ocean, rain, birds, monkey, but new ones could be added in the future.

    Advertised as the “world's first voice mask for mobile phones'. Hushme was showed at CES. At the becoming of this year. Its makers plan to sell it by the end of this year. It will cost about $200.

    There are two types of people in the world. Although they have equal degree of health and wealth and other comforts of life, one becomes happy, the other becomes unhappy. This arises from the different ways in which they consider things, persons, events and the resulting effects upon their minds.

    People who are to be happy fix their attention on the convenience of things. The pleasant parts of conversation, the well prepared dishes, the goodness of the wine, the fine weather. They enjoy all the cheerful things. Those who are to be unhappy think and speak only of the opposite things. Therefore, they are continually dissatisfied. By their remarks, they sour the pleasure of society, offend （hurt）many people, and make themselves disagreeable everywhere. If this turn of mind was founded in nature, such unhappy persons would be the more to be pitied. The intention of criticizing and being disliked is perhaps taken up by imitation. It grows into a habit, unknown to its possessors. The habit may be strong , but it may be cured when those who have it realize its bad effects on their interests and tastes. I hope this little warning may be of service to them, and help them change this habit.

    Although in fact it is chiefly an act of the imagination, it has serious results in life since it brings on deep sorrow and bad luck. Those people offend many others; nobody loves them, and no one treats them with more than the most common politeness and respect. This frequently puts them in bad temper and draws them into arguments. If they aim at getting some advantages in social position or fortune, nobody wishes them success. Nor will anyone start a step or speak a word to favor their hopes. If they bring on themselves public objections, no one will defend or excuse them, and many will join to criticize their wrongdoings. These should change this bad habit and be pleased with what is pleasing, without worrying needlessly about themselves and others. If they do not, it will be good for others to avoid any contact （接触）with them. Otherwise, it can be disagreeable and sometimes very inconvenient, especially when one becomes mixed up in their quarrels.

    Some of the best things in life don't happen until you grow old enough to recognize them. I can say that about tea.

    I didn't start to drink tea until I was 35. What happened before that? The first time I felt a genuine urge to drink tea was in 2003, when I stayed briefly in the United Kingdom. After a time of consuming local food, I started to really like strong black tea. Although it was too strong to my tongue, I felt it was a necessity because it was comforting to my body.

    I took packs of green teas with me as gifts but was disappointed to find my British friends preferred much stronger black teas from Sri Lanka. Later I learned that although people know China for its teas, it ranks only third among the world's black tea exporters, after Sri Lanka and Kenya.

    After I came back to China and started to cover food stories, I met friends in the tea-drinking circle and learned more. Although the majority of the rest of the world drinks black tea, which the Chinese call“red tea”, China produces and drinks mostly green teas.

    I feel lucky to be Chinese because of the great variety of teas available in the country. It is estimated that there are more than 2,000 teas in China if you divide them geographically, including more than 600 locally famous brews. A more simple way to categorize (分类) is by color and extent of fermentation (发酵). That comes down to six main categories—green, white, yellow, dark-greenish (oolong), red and black teas.

    Tasting teas can be compared to our lives. They can be plain and predictable but sometimes they are full of pleasant surprises. Occasionally they can even seem too good to be true. The best thing is, you know there's always more to explore.

    In my bag I always carry the same essential items: my keys, my purse, some loose change, my mobile phone and my little blue vocabulary notebook. This year I am living abroad in Germany and I am trying to learn as much German as possible. I always knew that living abroad would be a great way to learn a foreign language but one thing I didn't realize was how many new words and phrases I would come across every day! I see and hear new words everywhere; the announcements in the train station; menus in cafes; on social media; on the local newspaper and of course from my German-speaking friends.

    At first I was slightly upset by the large amounts of German I didn't understand. Speaking German in Germany is definitely very different from that in the classroom; I kept on looking up new words and by the end of the day I had forgotten most of them already. It was very frustrating. After a month of worrying that I would never be able to improve my language skills, I went to the stationery shop and bought a small notebook which easily fit into my handbag or even into my back pocket! I set myself the goal of writing five new words or phrases a day into my little blue book and soon enough it became one of my most valuable language-learning tools.

    I don't have any rules about which words I write down. Most days I write down words that I learn from my colleagues at work, words that I don't understand in reading or words that I have learned from seeing them in context. For example, I have learned the names of many fruits and vegetables from looking at their labels in the supermarket (a very unexpected source of vocabulary!) and I have learned many words that I have heard on TV or on the radio. It doesn't even matter if I know how to spell a new word straight away. If I hear a word but I don't know how to spell it, I write down how I think it sounds and look it up later.

    My little blue vocabulary book is now like my close friend. We go everywhere together. Setting this small daily goal has made me feel much more in control of my language teaming and I am already seeing an improvement. I will continue to use it for the rest of my stay in Germany and also when I return to university at home in September.

    A pretty face is never forgotten. Do you believe so? But maybe it is untrue! Psychologists believe beautiful people are less likely to be recognized. A new study suggests that attractiveness can actually prevent the recognition of faces, unless a pretty face has particularly distinctive features, such as Angelina Jolie's.

    German psychologists think the recognition of pretty faces is distorted (扭曲) by emotions. Researchers Holger Wiese, Carolin Altmann and Stefan Schweinberger at the University of Jena, Germany, discovered in a study that photos of unattractive people were more easily remembered than pretty ones when they showed them to a group of people.

    For the study, which was published in science magazine Neuropsychologia, the psychologists showed photos of faces to test subjects. Half of the faces were considered to be more attractive and the other half as less attractive, but all of them were being thought of as similarly distinctive looking. The test subjects were shown the faces for just a few seconds to memorize them and were shown them again during the test so that they could decide if they recognized them or not.

    The researchers were surprised by the result. “Until now we assumed that it was generally easier to memorize faces which are being considered as attractive, just because we prefer looking at beautiful faces,” Dr. Wiese said. But the study showed that such a connection cannot be easily proven. He assumes that remembering pretty faces is distorted by emotional influences, which enhance the sense of recognition at a later time. The researchers' idea is backed up by evidence from EEG-recordings (脑电图记录) they used during their experiment which show the brains' electric activity.

    The study also revealed that in the case of attractive faces, considerably more false positive results were detected. In other words, people thought they recognized a face without having seen it before. “We obviously tend to believe that we recognize a face just because we find it attractive.” Dr. Wiese said.

    For many students who desire to move around but not far freely, one of the most common vehicles is the bicycle. For such a seemingly simple invention, its story is not that simple.

    Most historians trace its origin back to 1817, when a German nobleman named Karl von Drais invented a wooden, two­wheeled machine that riders moved forward with their feet. His invention became popular in both England and France, where it eventually became known as the velocipede. Unfortunately, it was eventually banned as a danger to pedestrians and was rarely seen after the early 1820s.

    Things were quiet for several decades until the bicycle development took off in the 1860s. An important milestone happened in Paris in 1863 when pedals were added to the front axle (轴). This occurred in Pierre Michaux's workshop, but it's unclear whether he or his employee, Pierre Lallement, should be given credit for the innovation Lallement moved to the United States, where he obtained a patent for "improvements in velocipedes" in 1866. These new machines proved to be popular, and the name "bicycle" had come into use by 1869. However, many people referred to them as "bone shakers", which described their clunky ride due to a heavy wooden frame and steel wheels.

    In the 1870s, "high wheelers" or "penny­farthings" became popular. However, with a large front wheel and a much smaller rear wheel, they could be dangerous, if riders had to stop suddenly, as they would "take a header" when their momentum (动量) carried them over the front wheel onto their heads. Eventually, English inventor John Kemp Starley designed a "safety bicycle" with two same small wheels, a chain drive, and a set of gears. With tires added in and brake systems bettered in the following decades, bicycle production had skyrocketed to over one million bicycles by 1899.

    Mass production of bicycles increased their popularity greatly, since they became affordable for the average person. Over the course of the 20th century, manufacturers continued to improve the features and design of bicycles as new technologies appeared.