China is a country on the move—especially around its Lunar New Year holiday. This year, the holiday crush（客流量） promises to be even heavier than before.

    Government officials estimate that Chinese people will take to the air, roads and railways 3.62 billion times over a 40-day period around the nation's most important holiday this year as people push their way home for family gatherings or to satisfy their new-found passion for travel.

    Getting tickets to all those would-be travelers is a discounting challenge that annually tries patience. And it is the railway system that routinely is most unable to cope. Railways are the transport of choice for low-cost long-distance travel, and that's where the ticketing system routinely falls down.

    Much of the criticism has, focused on the railway's online purchasing system, which has been unable to keep pace with the huge demand and also failed to stop scalpers（票贩子） from ending up with many of the hard-to-find tickets.

    While insisting that online sales were the fairest way to get tickets for travelers, railway officials told reporters that the public need to be patient. Efforts were being made to provide online identity checks that would reduce the ticket scalping problems. While officials had little good news for rail passengers, they did manage to bring a few smiles to those traveling by car as the country's extremely expensive highway tolls （通行费） will be free of charge for the period of the official holiday.

    Across Britain, burnt toast will be served to mothers in bed  this morning as older sons and daughters to deliver their supermarket bunches of flowers, But, according to a new study, we should be placing a higher value on motherhood all year.

    Mothers have long known that their home worked was just heavy as paid work. Now, the new study has shown that if they were paid for their parental labors, they would earn as much as￡172,000 a year.

    The study looked at the range of jobs mothers do, as well as the hours they are working, to determine the figure. This would make their yearly income ￡30, 000 more than the Prime Minister earns.

    By analyzing the numbers, it found the average mother works 119 hours a week,40 of which would usually be paid at a standard rate 79 hours as overtime. After questioning 1,000 mothers with children under 18,it found that ,on most days, mums started their routine work at 7am and finished at around 11pm.

    To calculate just how much mothers would earn from that labor, it suggested some of the roles that mums could take on, including housekeeper, part-time lawyer, personal trainer and entertainer. Being a part-time lawyer, at ￡48.98 an hour, would prove to be the most profitable of the “mum jibs”, with psychologist（心理学家）a close second.

    It also asked mothers about the challenges they face, with 80 percent making emotional（情感的）emand as the hardest thing about motherhood.

Over a third of mums felt they needed more training and around half said they missed going out with friends.

    The study shoes mothers matter all year long and not just on, Mother's Day. The emotional, physical and mental energy mothers devote to their children can be never-ending, but children are also sources of great joy and happiness. Investing（投入）in time for parenting and raising relationships is money well spent.

    The world seems gloomy(阴沉的)and gray when you're feeling blue. In fact, being down might even affect how you perceive(感知)the color blue. A recent study about color was published in the journal Psychological Science. It shows a direct connection between a person's ability to perceive color and their emotions.

    Psychologists have long known that emotions can affect the way people perceive things. That's in part because chemicals from your brain might affect how you process what you see. “Color is such an important part of our experience,” says lead author Christopher Thorstenson, a psychologist at the university of Rochester, in New York. There's reason, he says, that sad people commonly describe the world as “colorless” and “gray”, and happy people use words like “bright” and “colorful”.

    In the experiment, the researchers randomly assigned people to one of two groups. People in the “sadness” group watched a sad scene from The Lion King. Those in the “amusement' group watched a comedy.

    Everyone was then asked to look at red, yellow, green, and blue patches(斑点)that had been changed to a grayish color. “Some of the patches are pretty difficulty to make out,” Thorstenson admits he says it takes some time to figure out their shade. People were scored on how accurate their color perception was. Then they completed an emotional evaluation.

    The result? Sad people had a hard time seeing the difference between shades along the blue-yellow color axis(色轴). But they did no have problems seeing colors in the red-green spectrum(光谱). Thorstenson says this could be the result of an evolutionary need to see red as a response to anger.

    Thorstenson says these results highlight the possible important of dopamine in sight. Dopamine is a chemical that sends signals to the brain. Researchers are hoping to focus more on dopamine in the future. “We know dopamine affects how we see colors, too,” Thorstenson says “How we feel can really influence how we see the world around us” he says.

    Do you often lose things? Don't worry. Now a new tool that can be connected to any object you might lose may be the way to solve your problem. The Tile, a small square connected to your iPhone or iPad by means of Bluetooth, allows you to see how close you are to your missing item, within a 50-to-150-foot range (范围). If the item goes out of your phone's 150-foot range, it can still be found on other smart phones with the same app.

    When you drive the app on your phone, it shows you, with green bars that increase or decrease, how close or far away you are from the Tile. You can also program it to make a sound when you get close to the Tile. And you can connect your phone with up to ten Tiles. And if your lost object—a dog, for example, or a stolen bike—go out of your own phone's 150-foot Bluetooth range, you can set it as a “lost item”. If any of the phones with the Tile app comes within range of your lost item, a message will be sent to your phone, telling you its position. The Tile app also has the ability to remember where it last saw your Tile, so that you can easily find where you left it.

    Since the Tiles use Bluetooth rather than GPS, they are never out of battery or needn't to be charged, and they work for one year before needing to be replaced. And the app works with all generations of iPhones and iPads.

For further information, please visit www.tile666.com.

    For all the technological wonders of modem medicine, health care-with its fax machines and clipboards (写字板) —is out of date. This outdated era is slowly drawing to a close as the industry catches up with the artificial-intelligence (AI) revolution.

    Eric Topol, an expert in heart disease and enthusiast for digital medicine, thinks AI will be particularly useful for such tasks as examining images, observing heart traces for abnormalities or turning doctors' words into patient records. It will be able to use masses of data to work out the best treatments, and improve workflows in hospitals. In short, AI is set to save time, lives and money.

    The fear some people have is that AI will be used to deepen the assembly-line culture of modem medicine. If it gives a "gift of time" to doctors, they argue that this bonus should be used to extend consultations, rather than simply speeding through them more efficiently.

    That is a fine idea, but as health swallows an ever-bigger share of national wealth, greater efficiency is exactly what is needed, at least so far as governments and insurers are concerned. Otherwise, rich societies may fail to cope with the needs of ageing and growing populations. An extra five minutes spent chatting with a patient is costly as well as valuable. The AI revolution will also enable managerial accountants to adjust and evaluate every aspect of treatment. The autonomy of the doctor will surely be weakened, especially, perhaps, in public-health systems which are duty-bound to cut unnecessary costs.

    The Hippocratic Oath (誓言) holds that there is an art to medicine as well as a science and that "warmth, sympathy and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug". There's lots of sense in it: the patients of sympathetic physicians have been shown to recover better. Yet as the supply of human carers fails to satisfy the demand for health care, the future may involve consultations on smartphones and measurements monitored by chatbots. The considerately warmed stethoscope (听诊器), placed gently on a patient's back, may become a relic of the past.