Try this: For an entire day, forget about the clock. Eat when you're hungry and sleep when you're tired. What do you think will happen?

    You may be surprised to find that your day is much like most other days. You'll probably get hungry when you normally eat and tired when you normally sleep. Even though you don't know what time it is, your body does.

    These patterns of daily life are called circadian rhythms（生理节奏）, and they are more than just habits. Inside our bodies are several clocklike systems that follow a roughly 24-hour cycle. Throughout the day and night, our inner clocks direct changes in temperature, body chemicals, hunger, sleepiness and more.

    Everyone's rhythms are different, which is why you might like to stay up late while your sister always wants to go to bed early. But on the whole, everyone is programmed to fell tired at night and energetic during the day.

    Learning about our body clocks may help scientists understand why problems arise when we act out of step with our circadian rhythms. For example, traveling across time zones can make people wake up in the middle of the night. Regularly staying up late can make kids do worse in tests.

    "There is a growing sense that when we eat and when we sleep are important parts of how healthy we are," says Steven Shea, director of the Sleep Disorders Program at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

    One way to learn about how our body clocks tick is to mess them up and see what happens. That's what neurologist（神经病学家）Frank Scheer and his workmates did in a recent study.

    Staying up night after night, their studies suggest, could make kids extra hungry and more likely to gain weight. And regularly sleeping too little, Scheer says, may be one cause of the recent increase in childhood obesity.

    In the fall of 1959, Freed suffered a bad reputation for rumors of bribery (贿赂行为), and his troubles were too strong to be resisted. When WABC asked Freed to sign a statement swearing that he had never taken bribes, he refused and was fired. Although he later signed such a statement for WNEW-TV, he lost his television show as well.

    Finding himself unwelcome in New York, Freed fled to the West Coast, where he managed to land a daytime disc jockey (流行音乐播音员) job at KDAY in Los Angeles in 1960. Legal problems continued to bother him, though, and he was charged with taking bribes of more than $30,000 from a number of record companies. Publicly, Freed denied that he had ever accepted direct bribes, although he acknowledged that he had accepted gifts from record companies, but only for playing records that he was certain would become hits anyway. After a short time at KDAY, he left when the station management refused to let him promote his live rock ‘n' roll shows. He returned to New York, but not as a broadcaster. At the height of the great enthusiasm for the twist dance, he hosted a Manhattan twist revue (时事讽刺剧), but when this enthusiasm cooled, he found a disc jockey job at WQAM in Miami in 1962. During this difficult period, Freed began drinking heavily and lost his job in Miami after only two months. In December of 1962 he was found guilty in New York of two charges of commercial bribery and was given a six-month sentence and fined $300. This effectively ended his career.

    Freed spent the last years of his life in Palm Springs, California. Although he had redefined what it meant to be a disc jockey and named the music that had become an anthem (圣歌) for the world's youth, he was a disgraced (耻辱的) and broken man, no longer able to work in the business he loved. On January 20, 1965, he died in a hospital in Palm Springs.

    I considered an active social life as basic human necessity. Yet when it dawned on me just how much time I was spending socialising, I realised I may be taking it to an extreme. I calculated that, on average, I was spending 22 hours or more each week on social activities. So, to see what would happen to my work output, health and wellbeing, I decided to try and cut out my social life entirely.

    I knew, at times, I filled my schedule simply out of fear of missing out (FOMO), but also as a way to shift focus away from my work. For one month, I declined all in-person activities with friends: going out for drinks; dinners; parties and non-work related events, to see if it would make me more productive, improve my focus and career prospects.

    On day one of the month-long experiment, I had to fight some anxiety over missing out. But as the days passed, I started to relax. I only had one option to consider for Saturday night—to stay home—and this limitation left me more satisfied in my decision. I felt more content working, reading or watching TV.

    While I found more time to work, I also noticed a change in my overall health. I found myself cooking more at home, doing daily exercise, getting to bed earlier each night, reading, and enjoying moments of rest and boredom throughout the day.

    Having no social life left me more free time than I'd imagine. Such idle moments are vital for creativity, and mind wandering has been linked to creative problem solving. During the experiment I found myself regularly brainstorming new ideas and reimagining existing projects.

    Of course socialising is an important way to build work contacts. While one month of no social life did not impact my relationship with existing clients, if I had continued, it may harm my ability to build new ones.

    Do you love holidays but hate the increase weight that follows? You are not alone.

    Holidays are happy days with pleasure and delicious foods. Many people, however, are worried about the weight that comes along with the delicious foods.

     With proper planning, it is possible to control your weight. The idea is to enjoy the holidays but not to eat too much. You don't have to turn away from the foods that you enjoy. The following suggestions may be of some help to you.

    Do not miss meals. Before you leave home for a feast, have a small, low-fat snack. This may help to keep you from getting too excited before delicious foods.

    Begin with clear soup, fruit or vegetables. A large glass of water before you eat may help you feel full. Use a small plate; a large plate will encourage you to have more than enough.

    Better not have high-fat foods. Dishes that look oily or creamy have much fat in them.

    Choose lean meat. Fill your plate with salad and green vegetables.

    If you have a sweet tooth, try mints and fruit. They don't have fat content as cream and chocolate.

    Don't let exercise take a break during the holidays. A 20-minute walk after a meal can help burn off excess calories.

    More and more travellers in China nowadays prefer homestays rather than traditional hotels, as they seek private living experiences. The house-sharing model was first introduced by the website Couchsurfing, com in 2003. It is still the largest website for travellers to find accommodation(住宿) without much money to spend.

    Encouraged by her great experience of homestays in France, Maggita, 30, considered short-term hire as her first choice in her future trips. She later went back to her hometown Shanghai and ran a "shared accommodation" business.

    The short-term hire idea has been a win-win business model. For travellers, they can rent a special room at a reasonable price and also enjoy a firsthand experience of the local culture, compared with traditional hotels. For owners, they can gain much with daily rental. Now Maggita has quit her last job in an IT company and become a host of some 20 homestays, which enables her to earn a monthly income of around 40,000 —50,000 yuan.

    In recent years, China has seen many homestay booking websites such as Xiaozhu and Tujia. Chen Chi, the founder and CEO of Xiaozhu, said the model is to share rooms or apartments that are not in use with people who need them. Instead of the traditional view that Chinese people feel uncomfortable living with strangers, Chen found that a large number of travellers got along well with house owners.

    However, experts have pointed out a series of problems brought about by the fashion. Lacking supervision(监管) to those accommodation sharing websites, the service quality and accommodation safety cannot be guaranteed(保障).Experts suggest that the online websites should closely work together with communities and local police stations to improve the services.

    With a focus now on the environmental influence over the fashion industry, some bloggers who cut their teeth sharing details of endless clothes and products are changing their direction-enter the "no-buy" movement. The idea is simple: instead of buying new clothes or beauty products, you make a promise to use the things you already own. Some people sign up to a "no-buy year". Others decide not to buy for a few weeks or months or choose "low-buy" with a strict spending cap.

    This life style has caught the attention of many people who struggle to keep up with the latest fashion. Modern people's desire for material things is often not caused by poverty (贫穷) , but by anxiety, which is further enlarged by the rise of social media.

     "Social media puts pressure on people to spend money," says Katherine Ormerod, author of Why Social Media is Ruining Your Life. Many online influencers are given the items they use and wear for free, but Ormerod is determined not to wear any new products she is given. "Really I just want to convince people they don't have to spend a lot of money on fashion to look stylish and there's no such thing as 'last season' anymore," she says. "True style has never been about that anyway."

    However, self-satisfied expressions of minimalist (极简主义的) living have earned plenty of doubts. "Minimalism is a good quality only when it's a choice, and it's telling that its fan base is from the well-off middle class. To people who don't have enough in the first place, celebrations of 'less is more' can sound more like a luxury (奢侈) than a considerable loss." Stephanie Land wrote in The New York Times.