The Queen's English is now sounding less upper-class, a scientific study of the Queen's Christmas broadcasts had found. Researchers have studied each of her messages to the Commonwealth countries since 1952 to find out the change in her pronunciation from the noble Upper Received to the Standard Received.

    Jonathan Harrington, a professor at Germany's University of Munich, wanted to discover whether accent  changes recorded over the past half century would take place within one person. “As far as I know, there just is nobody else for whom there is this sort of broadcast records,” he said.

    He said the noble way of pronouncing vowels (元音) had gradually lost ground as the noble upper-class accent over the past years. “Her accent sounds slightly less noble than it did 50 years ago. But these are very, very small and slow changes that we don't notice from year to year.”

    “We may be able to relate it to changes in the social classes,” he told The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper. “In 1952 she would have been heard saying ‘thet men in the bleck het'. Now it would be ‘that man in the black hat'. Similarly, she would have spoken of ‘citay ' and  ‘dutay' , rather than ‘citee' and ‘dutee' and ‘hame' rather than ‘home'. In the 1950s she would have been ‘lorst', but by the 1970s ‘lost'.”

    The Queen's broadcast is a personal message to the Commonwealth countries. Each Christmas, the 10-minute broadcast is put on TV at 3 pm in Britain as many families are recovering from their traditional turkey lunch.

    The results were published in the Journal of Phonetics.

Current Culture: Is Common Culture Alive?

    The digitizing and globalizing world is changing the working of culture. As some see it, cities and nations are losing their common culture and their general spirit: people can no longer count on those around them valuing any of the same music or films. Others argue that a common culture is not dying so much as changing forms: it is less and less attached to a particular area and ever more linked to global networks.

    The facts lead to the change that anyone can become a cultural producer today, that the culture is increasingly available everywhere you want it, and whenever you want it, not just in the two months after the movie or book came out. Cultural possibilities have multiplied as a result, but the change also means fewer cultural moments. It is easy to find the change in terms of loss of diversity of society. So what will it mean if globalization turns us into one wide world culture?

    For the enthusiasts of these changes, culture is not about popular artists or books, but centers on platforms like Google and Wikipedia, where every variety of culture brings about the exchange of knowledge and ideas, and makes connections across boundaries. It is perhaps debatable whether two people who have participated in such websites, but in totally different corners of them, have had a cultural experience in common. In fact, these platforms become very successful with a large crowd of people, who build things together, share information, and forward articles back and forth. Here are still more questions. What does it mean for the future of countries that culture now goes beyond the limits of the nation? Is there anything to defend and preserve in the passing cultural world, or is that merely to favor pen over printing press, horse over automobile?

    Up to now a growing quantity of culture has been globally spreading and developing. More individuals (个人) than ever have the chances to be makers of culture, even if that means more to choose from and fewer standards to be reached in common. What it means is this strange feeling: that of being more connected than ever, with one-click access to so much of the cultural harvest around the world, and yet, of being starved for having similar interests and opinions with others, concerned only with ourselves.

What brings a nation together? Of the four choices — shared values, language, history, and religion, it's shared values. In our latest poll (民意调査), seven out of 16 countries chose values as the greatest factor (因素）bringing a nation together, and six preferred language. Both choices scored high in the poll, suggesting that our values and how we express them are closely linked Still, history was not forgotten in some countries, particularly in Mexico and Russia. Even Canada and the United States chose national histories as the second-most important factor uniting their people. The biggest surprise? Not one country picked religion as its top choice.

    Typing with one hand when the other one is occupied can be a real pain, so imagine having to type with just one foot. It's got to be a nightmare, but 21-year-old Hu Huiyuan from China's Anhui Province is using her only functional foot to write not just a few sentences, but an entire fiction novel!

    Born prematurely(过早地), Hu was diagnosed with cerebral palsy(脑瘫) when she was only 10 months old. This left her permanently paralyzed—the only parts of her body she can move are her head and left foot. As she grew older, she learned how to perform everyday tasks using her foot.

    Despite not having received formal education, Hu is surprisingly well-spoken. Over the years, with the help of her mother, she taught herself to read and write. “I'm not a genius, but I'm very focused,” she said, modestly. “When I watched TV in my childhood, I often learned words on the screen.”

    “When I was teaching her how to speak, I had to repeat every single word a thousand times before she got it, ”Hu's mother said. “But once she mastered the word. I felt satisfied.”

    With time going by, Hu's language got so proficient that she set out to write a story about the pursuit of dreams and love. She's doing this by typing out every single word on her computer using only one foot.

    In spite of all these setbacks, Hu is able to type 20 to 30 words a minute. She has already written six chapters—that's 60,000 words—and says she only has two more chapters to go before the novel is complete.

    People with bigger brains tend to score higher on standardized tests of intelligence, according to new study findings.

    However, the study author Dr. Michael A.McDaniel of the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond emphasized that these findings represent a general trend, and people with small heads should not automatically believe they are less intelligent. For instance, Albert Einstein's brain was "not particularly large", McDaniel noted." There's some relationship between brain size and intelligence on the average, but there's plenty of room for exceptions," he said.

    Interest in the relationship between brain size and intelligence grew in the1830s, when German anatomist(解剖学家) Frederich Tiedmann wrote that he believed there was "an unquestionable connection between the size of the brain and the mental energy displayed by the individual man". Since that statement, scientists have conducted numerous studies to determine if Tiedmann's assertion was correct. Most studies have looked into the link between head size and intelligence. More recently, however, researchers have published additional studies on brain size and intelligence, measured using MRI scan(核磁共振成像扫描).

    For his study, McDaniel analyzed more than 20 studies that looked into the relationship between brain size and intelligence in a total of 1,530 people. The studies showed that on the average, people with larger brain volume tended to be more intelligent. The relationship between brain volume and intelligence was stronger in women than men, and in adults than in children. McDaniel notes in the journal Intelligence.

    McDaniel is not sure why the relationship was stronger for adults and women. "Other research has shown that women, on the average, tend to have smaller brains than men, but score just as well—if not higher—in tests of intelligence," he said.

    McDaniel insisted that the relationship between brain size and intelligence is not a "perfect" one. "One can certainly find lots of examples of smaller-sized people who are highly intelligent," he said, "But, on the average, the relationship holds."

Elon Musk is a symbol of passion, hard work and success. A person may work hard in his life, but when hard work goes along with passion and a new idea, then something is created that astonishes the world. As the founder of big companies like PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, Elon Musk is a guide and inspiration for the youth around the world. 

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. He was the eldest of three children. His father Errol Musk, a British-born South African, was an engineer. Musk spent his childhood in South Africa and at the age of 9, he got his first personal computer. This got Elon interested in programming and he started to learn on his own. At the age of 12, he made his first computer game, Blaster, which earned him $500 when he sold the source code to a magazine. 

When he was 17, he decided to leave home and had wanted to move to the United States after graduating from a secondary school in Pretoria. However, he was unable to move to the United States. In 1989, Elon Musk moved to Canada, where his mother's relatives lived. After obtaining Canadian citizenship, Musk went to Montreal. Due to a lack of money, he found a low-paying job. At the age of 19, he entered Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, studying there for two years. Finally, in 1992, his dream came true—he moved to the United States. 

As a teenager, Musk struggled with depression. But then he realized that the most important thing was presenting himself with the right questions. The day he started doing this, everything started to get easier. 

Musk thought that a human being had to expand the limits of his consciousness—to ask the right questions and get answers to them; thus he asked the best question of all: what will have the greatest impact on the future of humans? Musk found that these things were the Internet and space exploration. 

The life of Elon Musk is inspiring. He found success on the Internet, without much formal learning. By reading books and using his willpower and dedication, he reached a level of knowledge that is difficult to imagine. He did not give up until he achieved his dreams. Elon Musk truly stands out among other billionaires because of his leadership abilities, positive attitude, ability to know when to take risks, and belief in futuristic technologies.