“We all know that exercise is good for us, but can you get the benefits without actually doing the exercise?” asks Michael Mosley.

    Having a hot bath or a sauna is a good way to soothe your limbs after exercise, but what happens if you do it instead of exercise? Dr. Steve Faulkner of Loughborough University asked me to take part in an experiment comparing the relative benefits of having a long, hot bath versus an hour of hard pedalling.

    For this study I join a group of volunteers who have all been fitted with monitors which continuously record blood sugar levels. Keeping your blood sugar levels within the normal range is an important measure of your “metabolic” fitness.

    The first part of the experiment is very relaxing, consisting of having a long, hot bath. While I sit in the bath, which they keep at 40℃, Steve closely monitors my core temperature. Once it has risen and stayed there, I am allowed out.

    A couple of hours after my bath I have a light meal. Since we want to see how having a hot bath compares with exercise we repeat the experiment.

    So what's the result?

    “One of the first things that we were looking at,” Steve says, “is the energy expenditure while you're in the bath and what we found was an 80% increase in energy expenditure just as a result of sitting in the bath for the course of an hour.”

    This is nothing like as many calories as cycling for an hour (which comes out at an average of 630 calories) but we do burn 140 calories, the equivalent of a brisk 30-minute walk.

    Charlie is a teacher and his wife, Maria is an artist. The night before last, just before the longest day of the year, Charlie was sitting in a deckchair enjoying the warm summer air when Maria touched his shoulder and he could tell immediately she was a little worried about something. He asked her what the matter was and she replied that there was a strange thing on the jacket that was hanging in the bedroom. They had both lived in the West Indies (西印度群岛) and had seen a lot of strange creatures in their house before. But now they were living in England and so Charlie just laughed and said he would have a look at the “thing”.

    He walked to the bedroom. He saw a jacket hanging in the bedroom and went up to it to have a closer look at the “thing”. The moment he touched it, the thing sprang into life. Now Charlie experiences fear like the rest of us but when this creature opened its wings, he jumped out of his skin and ran screaming from the room like a small child doing about 100 miles an hour.

    For a moment the next-door neighbours thought that Charlie was murdering his wife because of the noise they could hear. In fact, it was a bat that frightened Charlie.

Eventually Charlie managed to trap the bat in a box and took it to the garden to let the bat fly. Maria, who had been playing the guitar while Charlie was upstairs, asked Charlie if he had found out what the thing was. “Oh, nothing to worry about”, he said casually hoping that the terror could not be seen in his eyes, “it was just a bat.”

    My teacher, Mr. August J. Bachmann, was the most influential teacher I ever had.

    I had gotten into trouble in his class: Another student had pushed me for fun, and I became angry and began to hit him. Mr. Bachmann stopped the fight, but instead of sending me to the office, he sat me down and asked a simple question,“Penna, why are you wasting your life？ Why aren't you going to college？”

    I didn't know anything about colleges or scholarships. No one had ever considered that a fatherless boy from the poorest neighborhood had a future. That day, instead of rushing off for lunch, he stayed and explained possible education options to me. At the end of our talk, he sent me to see a secretary who had a child at a state college. This was in 1962 at Emerson High School in Union City, New Jersey.

    Well, 55 years have passed, and what have I done with the knowledge he gave me？I gained a PhD from Fordham University when I was only 29.I taught English and social studies and then moved up the chain of command from teacher to principal(校长).

    I've sat on the board for Magnet Schools of America and represented that organization at the United Nations. I've won a number of great educational awards. But where would I be if a truly caring teacher had not taken the time out of his lunch period to speak to me？ It was without question only his confidence in me that helped me forward.

    I have repaid his kindness hundreds of times by encouraging misguided youngsters to aim higher. If I have saved any children, it is because of him. If I have been a successful educator, it is because I had a great role model in Mr. Bachmann.

    Over millions of years, African penguins have developed a keen sense of where to find food. Once they're old enough, they set off from the shores on which they were hatched（孵化） for the first time and swim long distances in search of tasty fish like anchovies and sardines. But they don't search directly for the fish themselves. When African penguins head out to sea, they look for areas with low surface temperatures and high chlorophyll（叶绿素）. Because those conditions signal the presence of algae（藻类）. And lots of algae means lots of plankton（浮游动物）, which in turn means lots of their favorite fish. Well, that's what it used to mean.

    Climate change plus overfishing have made the penguin feeding grounds a mirage（海市蜃楼）. The habitat is indeed plankton﹣rich, but now it's fish﹣poor. Researchers call this an "ecological trap." "It's a situation where you have a signal that previously pointed an animal towards good﹣quality habitat. That habitat has been changed, usually by human pressures. The signal stays, but the quality in the environment gets worse."

    Richard Sherley, a zoologist at the University of Exeter and his team used satellite imaging to track the African penguins from eight sites along southern Africa. Historically, the birds benefited from tons of fish off the coasts of Angola, Namibia and western South Africa, but now they're going hungry.

    "I was really hoping we'd see them going east, and finding areas which the fish had moved to but it ends up being quite a sad story for the penguins." said Richard.

    The researchers calculate that by falling into this ecological trap, African penguin populations on South Africa's Western Cape have declined by around 80 percent.

    Some research groups are exploring the idea of moving them to a place where they can't get trapped, like the Eastern Cape. But Sherley thinks that a solution in the long run means making and carrying out rules to create more sustainable（可持续的） fishing industry, which needs public support.

    A long-term American study shows the importance of early education for poor children. The study is known as the Abecedarian(初步的) Project. It involved more than one-hundred young children from poor families in North Carolina.

    Half of the children attended an all-day program at a high-quality childcare center. The center offered educational, health and social programs. Children took part in games and activities to increase their thinking and language skills and social and emotional development. The program also included health foods for the children.

    The children attended the program from when they were a few weeks old until the age of five years. The other group of children did not attend the childcare center. After the age of five, both groups attended public school.

    Researchers compared the two groups of children. When they were babies, both groups had similar results in tests for mental and physical skills. However, from the age of eighteen months, the children in the educational child care program did much better in tests.

    The researchers tested the children again when they were twelve and fifteen years old. The tests found that the children who had been in the childcare center continued to have higher average test results. These children did much better on tests of reading and mathematics.

    A few years ago, organizers of the Abecedarian Project tested the students again. At the time, each student was twenty-one years old. They were tested for thinking and educational ability, employment, parenting and social skills. The researchers found that the young adults who had the early education still did better in reading and mathematics tests. They were more than two times as likely to go to college or to have completed college. In addition, the children who received early education were older on average, when their first child was born.

    The study offers more evidence that learning during the first months and years of life is important for all later development.

    The researchers of the Abecedarian Project believe their study shows a need for lawmakers to spend money on public early education. They believe these kinds of programs could reduce the number of children who do not complete school and are unemployed.

    Daniel stays home on workdays. He starts his personal computer in order to connect with the office which is about three hundred miles away in another city. After work, he puts on his headphones, watches a movie on his home video recorder, or plays baseball on the computer. On many days, Daniel doesn't talk to any other human beings, and he doesn't see any people except the ones on television. Daniel is imaginary, but his lifestyle is very possible. The inventions of modern technology seem to be cutting us off from contact with our fellow human beings.

    The world of business is one area in which technology is separating us. Experts say, for example, that many people will soon be able to work at home. With access to a large central computer, employees such as office clerks, insurance agents, and accountants could do their jobs at display terminals (终端) in their own homes. They would never have to actually see the people they're dealing with. In addition, the way employees are paid will change. Workers' salaries will be automatically paid into their bank accounts, making paper checks unnecessary. No workers will stand in line to receive their pay or cash their checks. Personal banking will change, too. Customers will deal with machines to put in or take out money from their accounts. Many companies and consumers have already changed the way they sell or buy products. E-commerce, or business done on the Internet, is becoming more and more popular. This, therefore, makes it possible for people to do shopping without going out of their homes.

    Another area that technology is changing is entertainment. Music for example, was once a group experience. People listened to music at concert halls or in small social gatherings. For many people now, however, music is an individual experience. Walking along the street or sitting in their living-rooms, they wear headphones to build a wall of music around them. Movie entertainment is changing as well. Movies used to be social events. Now, fewer people are going out to see a movie. Many more are choosing to wait for a film to appear on television or are borrowing videotapes to watch at home. Instead of laughing with others, viewers watch movies in their own living-rooms.