Jane was running late. Jane, 25, had a lot to do at work, plus visitors on the way: her parents were coming in for Thanksgiving from her hometown. But as she hurried down the subway stairs, she started to feel uncomfortably warm. By the time she got to the platform, Jane felt weak and tired—maybe it hadn't been a good idea to give blood the night before, she thought. She rested herself against a post close to the tracks.

    Several yards away, Tom, 43, and his girlfriend, Jennifer, found a spot close to where the front of the train would stop. They were deep in discussion about a house they were thinking of buying.

    But when he heard the scream, followed by someone yelling, "Oh, my God, she fell in!" Tom didn't hesitate. He jumped down to the tracks and ran some 40 feet toward the body lying on the rails. "No! Not you!" his girlfriend screamed after him.

    She was right to be alarmed. By the time Tom reached Jane, he could feel the tracks shaking and see the light coming. The train was about 20 seconds from the station.

    It was hard to lift her. She was just out. But he managed to raise her the four feet to the platform so that bystanders could hold her by the grins and drag her away from the edge. That was where Jane briefly regained consciousness, felt herself being pulled along the ground, and saw someone else holding her purse.

    Jane thought she'd been robbed. A woman held her hand and a man gave his shirt to help stop the blood pouring from her head. And she tried to talk but she couldn't, and that was when she realized how much pain she was in.

    Police and fire officials soon arrived, and Tom told the story to an officer. Jennifer said her boyfriend was calm on their 40-minute train ride downtown-just as he had been seconds after the rescue, which made her think about her reaction at the time. "I saw the train coming and I was thinking he was going to die," she explained.

    No student of a foreign language needs to be told that grammar is complex. By changing the order of the words and by adding a range of auxiliary verbs (助动词) and suffixes (后缀), we can turn a statement into a question, state whether an action has taken place or is soon to take place, and perform many other word tricks to convey different meanings. However, the question which many language experts can't understand and explain is—who created grammar?

    Some recent languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. Since the slaves didn't know each other's languages, they developed a make-shift language called a pidgin. Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowners. They have little in the way of grammar, and speakers need to use too many words to make their meaning understood. Interestingly, however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it at the time when they learn their mother tongue. Slave children didn't simply copy the strings of words used by their elders. They adapted their words to create an expressive language. In this way complex grammar systems which come from pidgins were invented.

    Further evidence can be seen in studying sign languages for the deaf. Sign languages are not simply a group of gestures; they use the same grammatical machinery that is found in spoken languages. The creation of one such language was documented quite recently in Nicaragua. Previously, although deaf children were taught speech and lip reading in the classrooms, in the playgrounds they began to invent their own sign system, using the gestures they used at home. It was basically a pidgin and there was no consistent grammar. However, a new system was born when children who joined the school later developed a quite different sign language. It was based on the signs of the older children, but it was shorter and easier to understand, and it had a large range of special use of grammar to clarify the meaning. What's more, they all used the signs in the same way. So the original pidgin was greatly improved.

    Most experts believe that many of the languages were pidgins at first. They were initially used in different groups of people without standardization and gradually evolved into a widely accepted system. The English past tense—“ed” ending— may have evolved from the verb “do”. “It ended” may once have been “It end-did”. It seems that children have grammatical machinery in their brains. Their minds can serve to create logical and complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.

     Many of us feel uneasy when someone stands too close to us, talks to us too loudly or makes eye contact(接触) with us for too long. But have you ever wondered why those things make you uncomfortable?
      It's all about personal peace, which means not only an imaginary space around the body, but also the space around all the senses. People feel that their space is being violated(侵犯) when they meet with an unwelcome sound, smell or look. This is probably why a man on a crowded bus shouting into his mobile phone or a woman next to you putting on strong perfume(香水) makes you feel angry.

    Whether people have had a stronger wish to protect their personal space in recent times is hard to say. Yet studies of airlines show that people have a strong desire to have space to themselves. In a survey by Trip Advisor, a travel website, people said that if they had to pay more for some extra service, they would rather have larger seats than extra food.

    Although people may need their personal space, some hardly realize it. For example, people on a bus who hold newspapers in front of their faces to read in fact keep a distance from strangers.

    Go and watch a library table. You will notice that one of the corner seats will usually be taken first, because they are the farthest way. What if someone sits opposite to you? Maybe you will pile up books as if to make a wall.

    Preference for personal space is different from culture to culture. Scientists have found that Americans generally prefer more personal space than people from other cultures. In Latin cultures, however, people are more comfortable standing close to each other.

    Songs that make our hearts happy can make them stronger too, US researchers reported on Tuesday.

    They found that when people listened to their favorite music, their blood vessels (血管) dilated in much the same way as when they are laughing, or taking blood medications.

    “We have a pretty impressive effect,” said Dr Michael Miller, director of preventive cardiology (心脏病学) at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.

    “Blood vessel diameter improved,” he said.“The vessel opened up pretty significantly. You can see the vessels opening up with other activities such as exercise.” A similar effect is seen with drugs such as statins.

    When blood vessels open up more, blood flows more smoothly and is less likely to form the clots (凝块) that cause heart attacks and strokes. “We are not saying to stop your statins or not to exercise but rather to add this to an overall program of heart health,” said Miller, who presented his findings to a meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans.

    Miller's team tested 10 healthy, non-smoking men and women, who were told to bring their favorite music.They spent half an hour listening to the recordings and half an hour listening to music they said made them feel anxious while the researchers did ultrasound tests designed to show blood vessel function.

    Compared to their normal baseline measurements, blood vessel diameter increased 26 percent on average when the volunteers heard their joyful music.Listening to music they disliked — in most cases in this group — blood vessels narrowed by six percent, Miller said.

    Miller said he came up with the idea after discovering that laughter caused blood to literally flow more smoothly. “I asked myself what other things make us feel really good, besides calories from dark chocolate of course.Music came to mind. It makes me feel really good,” he said.

    Most of the volunteers chose country music but Miller said the style is not so important rather than what pleases each individual.

    A Chinese scientist's attempt to produce the world's first gene-edited babies who are immune to HIV has caused floods concern.

    In an online video posted on Monday, He Jiankui, a biological researcher, announced that a pair of twin baby girls, Lulu and Nana, was born healthy a few weeks ago with genetic editing technology that can prevent them from being infected with HIV.

    He, who was believed to be in Hong Kong on Monday to attend the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, could not be reached for comment. But his announcement sparked a heated argument concarning medical ethics（伦理）and effectiveness.

    The Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission said on Monday evening that it had not received any ethical assessment application for the study, which is required as a prior condition for such experiments.

    More than 120 scholars from universities and institutes with high status from China and abroad,such as Tsinghua University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),strongly condemned the research in a signed statement, saying the “research” lacks effective ethics inspection, and it amounts to human experimentation,which is “crazy”.

    In the statement, published on Sina Weibo, the scientists said any attempt to make changes to human embryos with genetic editing and give birth to such babies involves high risk as an inevitable part, due to inaccuracies in existing genetic editing technologies.

    “Scientists all over the world dare not make such attempts due to the huge risks and more importantly, ethics. The government must make quick legal moves to strictly supervise（监督）such research. The Pandora's Box has been opened, and we may still have a chance of closing it before it is too late,”the statement said.

    Tsui Lap-chee, president of the Academy of Sciences of Hong Kong, said a lot of issues may occur in gene editing. If one gene is edited, it will affect others that interact with it. And the whole genome, a collection of genes, may also be affected.

    When "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" was first shown to the public last month, a group of excited animal activists gathered on Hollywood Boulevard. But they weren't there to throw red paint on fur-coat-wearing film stars. Instead, one activist, dressed in a full-body monkey suit, had arrived with a sign praising the filmmakers: "Thanks for not using real apes (猿)!"

    The creative team behind "Apes" used motion-capture (动作捕捉) technology to create digitalized animals, spending tens of millions of dollars on technology that I records an actor's performance and later processes it with computer graphics to create a final image (图像). In this case, one of a realistic-looking ape.

    Yet "Apes" is more exception than the rule. In fact, Hollywood has been hot on live animals lately. One nonprofit organization, which monitors the treatment or animals in filmed entertainment, is keeping tabs on more than 2,000 productions this year. Already, a number of films, including "Water for Elephants," "The Hangover Part Ⅱ" and "Zookeeper," have drawn the anger of activists who say the creatures acting in them haven't been treated properly.

    In some cases, it's not so much the treatment of the animals on set in the studio that has activists worried; it's the off-set training and living conditions that are raising concerns. And there are questions about the films made outside the States, which sometimes are not monitored as closely as productions filmed in the Sates.