Ways to sleep smarter

    Studies show that poor sleep influences people to make good decisions, concentrate on tasks or even manage a friendly mood(情绪) at work. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Today we've got our top favorite sleep tips and facts.

Set a regular bedtime

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}Choose a time when you normally feel tired. Try not to break this routine(惯例) on weekends when you will probably stay up late. If you want to change your bedtime, make the change gradually, such as 15 minutes earlier or later each day.

Eat the right food

    Some foods are more helpful to a better night's sleep than others.{#blank#}3{#/blank#} Others like bananas, potatoes, and whole-wheat bread are also helpful.

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    Exercising provides lots of good health benefits(好处). A good night's sleep is one of them. But make sure you exercise in the morning or afternoon. The National Sleep Foundation reports that exercise in the morning or afternoon can help deepen sleep. However, those who worked out in the evening hours saw little or no improvement in their sleep.

Reduce(减少) screen time before bed

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} A recent study shows that people who use electronic media(媒体) just before bedtime report lower-quality sleep even when they get as much sleep as those who don't.

A. Avoid the alarm clock.

B. Exercise to improve sleep.

C. Try to solve problems in your sleep.

D. Go to bed at the same time every night.

E. There are many ways to increase the quality of your sleep.

F. Everybody knows that warm milk helps people sleep better.

G. Stop watching TV just before bedtime and you'll sleep better.

    Cancer is a leading cause of death around the world.

    When it comes to cancer, the sooner you know you have it, the better your chances of surviving are.

    A new blood test could change the way doctors and researchers find cancer in patients. Researchers say the test could provide some hints of the early forms of the disease.

    Gareth Jenkins is a professor at the University of Swansea. He says he and his team did not look for cancer. They instead looked for a by-product of cancer, mutated (突变的) red blood cells. They looked for, what Jenkins calls, the collateral (附带的) damage of cancer—the damage left by the disease.

    “In this blood test we don't measure the presence of cancer，we measure the presence of mutated red blood cells which are the collateral damage that occurs—a by-product of the cancer developing.''

    The researchers used normal laboratory equipment to perform the tests. This equipment looks for changes in the structure of millions of red blood cells. Those mutated cells lack a surface protein (蛋白质) that healthy cells normally have.

    “The goal of the test is looking for very rare cells which have picked up a mutation. The number of mutated red blood cells in a healthy person is around 5 or so mutated cells per million; so, you have to look at millions of red blood cells to discover those rare events. The number increases in cancer patients—it goes up to 40 or 50 on average.”

    The researchers tested blood from about 300 people, all of whom have cancer of the esophagus (食管). Patients with esophageal cancer have high levels of mutated red blood cells. Jenkins says that at this point he is not sure if other cancers would produce similar results.

    The hope is that the new test could one day become part of commonly used medical methods to find out if a person has cancer. These new technologies could save millions of lives.

    People aren't walking any more-if they can figure out a way to avoid it.

    I felt superior about this matter until the other day I took my car to mail a small parcel. The journey is a matter of 281 steps. But I used the car. And I wasn't in any hurry, either. I had merely become one more victim of a national sickness: motorosis.

    It is an illness to which T had thought myself immune(免疫的), for I was bred in the tradition of going to places on my own two legs. At that time, we regarded 25 miles as a good day's walk and the ability to cover such a distance in ten hours as a sign of strength and skill. It did not occur to us that walking was a hardship. And the effect was lasting. When I was 45 years old I raced—and beat-a teenage football player the 168 steps up the Statue of Liberty.

    Such enterprises today are regarded by many middle-aged persons as bad for the heart. But a well-known British physician, Sir Adolphe Abrahams, pointed out recently that hearts and bodies need proper exercise. A person who avoids exercise is more likely to have illness than one who exercises regularly. And walking is an ideal form of exercise-the most familiar and natural of all.

    It was Henry Thoreau who showed mankind the richness of going on foot. The man walking can learn the trees, flowers, insects, birds and animals, the significance of seasons, the very feel of himself as a living creature in a living world. He cannot learn in a car.

    The car is convenient means of transport, but we have made it our way of life. Many people don't dare to approach Nature any more; to them the world they were born to enjoy is all threat. To them security is a steel river thundering on a concrete (混凝土) road. And much of their thinking takes place while waiting for the traffic to turn green.

    I say that the green of forests is the mind's best light. And none but the man on foot can evaluate what is basic and everlasting.

    When my brother and I were young, my mom would take us on Transportation Days.

    It goes like this: You can't take any means of transportation more than once. We would start from home, walking two blocks to the rail station. We'd take the train into the city center, then a bus, switching to the tram, then maybe a taxi. We always considered taking a horse carriage in the historic district, but we didn't like the way the horses were treated, so we never did. At the end of the day, we took the subway to our closest station, where Mom's friend was waiting to give us a ride home—our first car ride of the day.

    The good thing about Transportation Days is not only that Mom taught us how to get around. She was born to be multimodal (多方式的). She understood that depending on cars only was a failure of imagination and, above all, a failure of confidence—the product of a childhood not spent exploring subway tunnels.

    Once you learn the route map and step with certainty over the gap between the train and the platform, nothing is frightening anymore. New cities are just light-rail lines to be explored. And your personal car, if you have one, becomes just one more tool in the toolbox—and often an inadequate one, limiting both your mobility and your wallet.

    On Transportation Days, we might stop for lunch on Chestnut Street or buy a new book or toy, but the transportation was the point. First, it was exciting enough to watch the world speed by from the train window. As I got older, my mom helped me unlock the mysteries that would otherwise have paralyzed my first attempts to do it myself: How do I know where to get off? How do I know how much it costs? How do I know when I need tickets, and where to get them? What track, what line, which direction, where's the stop, and will I get wet when we go under the river?

    I'm writing this right now on an airplane, a means we didn't try on our Transportation Days and, we now know, the dirtiest and most polluting of them all. My flight routed me through Philadelphia. My multimodal mom met me for dinner in the airport. She took a train to meet me.

    After attending another parent meeting about my 7-year-old child's behavior, I didn't know what to do. It was the second school we had tried for Nathan and, as always, everything was being done for my child's needs. It was also having bad influence on Nathan. He would come home and say, "Mom, I hate my life. I do not want to live any more." I was afraid that my son was beginning to suffer from depression(抑郁) and that I was losing him. We needed help.

    By the age of seven, Nathan had already had three surgeries (外科手术) for his ears. He was in great pain, which made it difficult for him to learn or pay attention. Despite Nathan's bad condition, the staff at two former schools seemed as if they didn't care. They often forgot to deal with his medication(药剂). As a result of many times of ear infections (感染), Nathan had hearing loss. To make things worse, Nathan's speech was not very good. Children would make fun of him and Nathan began to fall behind in study.

    When I first set foot into Ripley House Charter School, I knew this was the school for my son. It felt positive from the moment I entered. From the start, Mrs. Elsen and her staff heard my concern over Nathan. Mrs. Elsen dealt with my concern, not with empty words but with action.

    That day, Nathan came home from his first day of school saying, "Mom, I love school!" By the end of the week he was saying, "Mom, I like my life. I have a good life." Ripley House Charter School gave me my son back and saved our lives. Thank you for giving me back what we had lost—HOPE.

Recycled, reused and renewable textiles（纺织品）only go so far in solving the fast-fashion crisis, writes Alexandra Carlton. The answer may lie in consumption.

Australia is the world's second-largest consumer of clothing, generating 800,000 tonnes of textile waste yearly. Individuals consume about 27 kilograms of new clothes annually and cast 23 kilograms of waste. Globally, the situation is even more severe, with an estimated 92million tonnes of clothing waste produced each year. This equates to a truckload of clothes entering landfills every second.

If you want to stop our unwanted clothes from jamming the planet, you'd assume that reusing and recycling would lead the discussion. However, full clothes recycling—breaking clothes down to their base fibres to create new ones—is no simple task. Clothes consist of various fibres, fasteners, and decorations that traditionally require painstaking manual（手工的）separation. Yet, innovation is underway, such as the Swedish large-scale sorting facility Siptex, where textiles can be sorted by color and material using infrared（红外线）technology.

Brands like Adelaide's Autark focus on minimizing output. "I keep my collections tightly designed and production numbers slim," says designer Sophia McMahon. Sometimes this means she doesn't have the exact clothes someone wants in store, but customers are patient while she makes items to order because they understand her brand's essence.

Startups like AirRobe are giving clothes a second life and could be part of the solution. The clothing resale market is currently worth 49 billion and is expected to reach 103 billion by 2025. AirRobe lets customers add new purchases to their digital wardrobe so they can be resold later without uploading photos or descriptions. "The ‘re-economy'—the reuse and recycle market sector—will be a real opportunity for us," says Erica Berchtold, CEO of The Iconic.

Researchers Samantha Sharpe and Taylor Brydges from the University of Technology Sydney advocate a widespread shift among consumers towards buying fewer, higher-quality clothes besides these innovations.