A woman lost the sight in one eye after going swimming in a pool at a hotel wearing contact lenses（隐形眼镜）. Jennie Hurst, from Southampton, suffered from a rare and painful infection caused by amoeba（变形虫）in water. The infection causes people to be sensitive to light and the 28-year-old said she had to stay in a dark room for three months. She is now warning of the dangers of swimming or showering wearing contacts.

    Ms Hurst experienced four operations and a treatment in which she had eye drops every half hour. "During that time I stayed in my bedroom with black curtains at the window. The only thing I could do was to listen to the radio. One evening, I was so eager to look out of window to get a look of the outside world that I opened my curtains in the middle of the night. As soon as I did this the moon shone in my eyes and it really hurt. I didn't do that again. I have been left with no sight in my left eye and the damage to my right eye could be lasting," she said.

    Ms Hurst had been wearing contact lenses for five years. "I don't even like swimming,"she said. "My friends were quite surprised that I had gone swimming and probably thought that I had been a bit lazy. I wasn't aware of the problem at all — it didn't even enter my brain to take them out. I felt responsible that I had let it happen when actually I could have just taken my contacts out."

Venom(毒液）from a local scorpion(蝎子）in Cuba is being used by Cuban scientists as an effective weapon to fight cancer. The venom, with stopping pain, anti-inflammatory (炎症） and anti-cancer properties, is the active ingredient in the medicine “Vidatox 30 CH“ which can be used to treat liver, brain, lung and other cancers. The treatment has been successfully used for more than four years in humans after being first tested in biological models. Labiofam, a Cuban laboratory, has breeding(繁殖)centers for both the Red Scorpion and Blue Scorpion. Each month, some 30,000 scorpions in Las Minas town, 270 km east of Havana are made to give the venom. After two years, the scorpions are released back into their natural habitat.

Denyer Sanchez, a biologist from Labiofam, explained that the conditions are adjusted for reproduction, proved by the high number of breeding female scorpions. He said when the offspring(后代）becomes able to live in the environment, we release them because they do not have the necessary size yet to remove their venom, said Sanchez. Sanchez also said that there is still much to research on the exploitation process of scorpions, such as female death rate or the ability to survive of the released scorpions.

Cuban research on the scorpion's venom began at the end of 1980s in Guantanamo province, the island's eastern tip, where a group of biologists and doctors became interested in the stories told by the peasants about the venom's benefits. However，the first discovery was made by Cuban biologist Misael Bordier. In 2001, Bordier visited Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM) and presented the research progress in a professional journal. Bordier died in 2005, one year before Cuba's Industrial Property Office gave Labiofam the rights to exploit the patent related to the venom.

    California has become the first U.S. state to approve plans to require newly-built homes to include solar equipment.

    The state's Energy Commission voted 5-0 to approve the new rules, which are to take effect in 2020. The rules will deal with most newly-built residential (住宅的) buildings up to three stories high.

    The move is California's latest step aimed at reaching renewable energy targets and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

    California has set a goal of filling half of its electricity needs with renewable energy by 2030. Officials said they had reached 30 percent by the end of 2017. The state's Governor, Jerry Brown, plans to hold an international climate meeting in September.

    ①The Energy Commission said the cost of adding solar equipment to a single-family home would be about $9,500. But, the group added that homeowners would save at least $19,000 in energy costs over 30 years.

    Robert Raymer is the technical director for the California Building Industry Association. He says the action is a step forward for the wider use of solar power in the U.S. "You can bet every other of the 49 states will be watching closely to see what happens," he told the Associated Press.

    ②Solar companies praised the new requirements, which officials have said will likely raise demand for solar equipment in California by 10-15 percent.

    The Solar Energy Industries Association called it a "historic decision for the state and the U.S." It estimated the action would produce "huge economic and environmental benefits," including bringing tens of billions of dollars into California.

    ③Some legislative and community leaders argued that Californians cannot afford to pay any more for housing in what is already an extremely high-priced market.

    "That's just going to drive the cost up and make California, once again, not affordable to live in," said California Assemblyman Brian Dahle.

    ④Severin Borenstein is an energy economist at the University of California, in Berkeley. He sent an email to the head of California's Energy Commission to urge the state to reconsider its decision.

    He expressed his belief that it is a mistake for California to approve such a policy instead of centering on efforts to develop large solar farms to produce renewable energy. He said these farms would cost much less to operate.

    "Every energy economist I know is shaking their head at this," he told the Wall Street Journal. "In many ways, this is setting the wrong example," he added.

    Computer programmer David Jones earns £35,000 a year designing new computer games, yet he cannot find a bank ready to let him have a credit card(信用卡). Instead, he has been told to wait another two years, until he is 18.

    The 16-year-old works for a small firm in Liverpool, where the problem of most young people of his age is finding a job. David's firm releases(推出) two new games for the fast throwing computer market each month.

    But David's biggest headache is what to do with his money. Even though he earns a lot, he cannot drive a car, take out a mortgage(抵押贷款), or get credit cards. David got his job with the Liverpool-based company four months ago, a year after leaving school with six O-levels and working for a time in a computer shop. "I got the job because the people who run the firm knew I had already written some programs," he said. David spends some of his money on records and clothes, and gives his mother 50 pounds a week. But most of his spare time is spent working.

    "Unfortunately, computing was not part of our studies at school," he said. "But I had been studying it in books and magazines for four years in my spare time. I knew what I wanted to do and never considered staying on at school. Most people in this business are fairly young, anyway." David added: "I would like to earn a million and I suppose early retirement(退休) is a possibility. You never know when the market might disappear."

Learning New Vocabulary during Deep Sleep

    Sleeping time is sometimes considered unproductive time. This raises the question whether the time spent asleep could be used more productively, e.g. for learning a new language? Up-to-now sleep research focused on the stabilization and strengthening of memories that had been formed during wakefulness. However, learning during sleep has rarely been examined. There is enough evidence for wake-learned information undergoing a revision by replay in the sleeping brain. The replay during sleep strengthens the still weak memory and leaves the newly acquired information in the pre-existing store of knowledge.

    If re-play during sleep improves the storage of wake-learned information, then first-play, i.e. the initial processing of new information, should also be possible during sleep.

    The research group of Katharina Henke examined whether a sleeping person is able to form new semantic（语义的）associations between played foreign words and translation words during the brain cells' active states, the so-called "Up-states." It turned out to be that what they thought was reasonable. When we reach deep sleep stages, our brain cells progressively coordinate their activity. During deep sleep, the brain cells are commonly active for a brief period of time before they jointly enter into a state of brief inactivity. The active state is called "Up-state" and the inactive state "Down-state". The two states alternate（交替）about every half-second.

    New evidence for sleep-learning challenges current theories of sleep and theories of memory. The concept of sleep that we are separated from the physical environment is no longer reasonable. "It's false that complex learning be impossible during deep sleep," says Simon Ruch, co-first-author. "In how far and with what consequences deep sleep can be applied for the acquisition of new information will be a topic of research in upcoming years," says Katharina Henke.

    The research group of Katharina Henke is part of the Interfaculty Research Cooperation (IRC). Thirteen research groups in medicine, biology and psychology are part of the IRC. The aim of these research groups is to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms（原理）involved in sleep and consciousness.

    The school year has barely started in Denver, and French teacher Tiffany Choi is already worried that her students are suffering from absent-mindedness. The problem isn't texting, playing video games or passing notes. It's Denver's ongoing heat wave.

    "Today was a little bit hot, so I noticed kids were very sleepy and they were having to get up to drink water quite often." said Choi, who works at Denver's East High School. "If you lose too much water, and you have to keep going to the water fountain, that can take away from their classroom experience." While nodding off in class on a warm day may seem like a right of passage for the average teen, Choi's observation carries a bigger consequence than parched (干燥的) lips.

    "There's been quite a few media reports about teachers noticing that students weren't able to focus on hotter days," said R Jisung Park, a researcher, "Does a hotter climate during the school year actually affect the rate of learning?" The drops in academic achievement couldn't be explained by hotter weekends or hotter summers, but the trend was connected to higher temperatures on school days alone.

    The connection between lost learning and a greater number of hot days is one more example of how climate change is already affecting our lives-and it's an alarm bell for what we stand to lose in the future. Humans still have time to lessen the worst consequences of continued global warming. But unless significant changes occur in the next decade-which seem more and more unlikely—the world will be locked into an inescapable period of heat waves unlike our species has ever seen.