How to improve your happiness

    Recent research has shown that people who value their time over the pursuit of wealth are happier. So how can you best make, save and use your time — and ensure you keep a smile on your face?

● Pay someone to do the housework you hate

Why waste precious hours on housework or gardening if you can get someone else to do it?

● Set time limits on tasks you can't avoid

    Give yourself 20 minutes for necessary cleaning or 10 to hang out the washing. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

● Enjoy standing in that queue

    With three people in front of you at the checkout, think about how busy you usually are and see the wait as a gift, not a bore(烦人的事情). {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

● Take on one new activity at a time

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}At work and at home, be careful about the duties you take on. If you already feel stressed at work, don't do more at home.

● Learn to say no

    Be firm by declining a new project, or telling someone you can't talk right now or that you can only talk for a couple of minutes.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

● Make lists your friend

    Start a wish list of the things you'd like to do and do more of the items that simply make you feel happy. Keep your daily to-do list manageable by putting it on an index card.{#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. Be friendly but firm.

B. Make sure you start with an easy task.

C. This will get boring jobs out of the way faster.

D. Intending to do several things at once can be tiring.

E. Think about things that interest you, or wait patiently.

F. Trying to master too many new things at once can be unpleasing.

G. Recall things you're grateful for, talk to another customer or read a magazine.

    Scientists from the University of East Anglia have identified four new man-made gases that are contributing to the damage to the ozone(臭氧) layer. Two of the gases are accumulating at a rate that is causing concern among researchers.

    Worries over the growing ozone hole have seen the production of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases restricted since the mid 1980s. But the precise origin of these new, similar substances remains a mystery.

    Lying in the atmosphere, the ozone layer plays a critical role in blocking harmful UV rays, which cause cancers in humans and reproductive problems in animals.

    Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey were the first to discover a huge “hole” in the ozone over Antarctica in 1985. The evidence quickly pointed to CFC gases, which were invented in the 1920s, and were widely used in refrigeration. Extraordinarily, global action was rapidly agreed to deal with CFCs and the Montreal Protocol to limit these substances came into being in 1987. A total global ban on production came into force in 2010.

    Now, the newly discovered four new gases can destroy ozone and are getting into the atmosphere from as yet unidentified sources. Three of the gases are CFCs and one is a hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC), which can also damage ozone.

    The research has shown that four gases were not around in the atmosphere at all until the 1960s, which suggests they are man-made. The scientists discovered the gases by analyzing polar snow pack. Air from this snow is a natural archive of what was in the atmosphere up to 100 years ago. There searchers also looked at modern air samples, collected at remote Cape Grim in Tasmania.

    They estimate that about 74,000 tonnes of these gases have been released into the atmosphere. Two of the gases are accumulating at significant rates. However, they don't know where the new gases are being released from and this should be investigated. Possible sources include chemicals for insecticide (杀虫剂)production and solvents (溶液) for cleaning electronic components. The three CFCs are being destroyed very slowly in :the atmosphere—so even if emissions (散发)were to stop immediately, they will still be around for many decades to come.

    Of the four species identified, CFC-113a seems the most worrying as there is a very small but growing emission source somewhere, maybe from agricultural insecticides. We should find it and take it out of production.

B

    Many of us love July because it's the month when nature's berries and stone fruits are in abundance. These colourful and sweet jewels from British Columbia's fields are little powerhouses of nutritional protection.

    Of the common berries, strawberries are highest in vitamin C, although, because of their seeds, raspberries contain a little more protein (蛋白质), iron and zinc (not that fruits have much protein). Blueberries are particularly high in antioxidants (抗氧化物质). The yellow and orange stone fruits such as peaches are high in the carotenoids we turn into vitamin A and which are antioxidants. As for cherries (樱桃), they are so delicious who cares? However, they are rich in vitamin C.

    When combined with berries or slices of other fruits, frozen bananas make an excellent base for thick, cooling fruit shakes and low fat "ice cream". For this purpose, select ripe bananas for freezing as they are much sweeter. Remove the skin and place them in plastic bags or containers and freeze. If you like, a squeeze of fresh lemon juice on the bananas will prevent them turning brown. Frozen bananas will last several weeks, depending on their ripeness and the temperature of the freezer.

    If you have a juicer, you can simply feed in frozen bananas and some berries or sliced fruit. Out comes a "soft-serve" creamy dessert, to be eaten right away. This makes a fun activity for a children's party; they love feeding the fruit and frozen bananas into the top of the machine and watching the ice cream come out below.

    The plan: turn Mars into a blue world with streams and green fields, and then fill it with creatures (生物) from the earth. This idea may sound like something from a science fiction (科幻小说), but it is actually being taken seriously by many researchers.

    This suggested future for the "red planet" will be the main topic for discussion at an international conference hosted by NASA (美国宇航局) this week. Leading researchers as well as science fiction writers will attend the event. It comes as NASA is preparing a multi billion dollar Mars research programme. "Turning Mars into a little earth has long been a topic in science fiction," said Dr Michael Meyer, NASA's senior scientist for astrobiology (太空生物学). "Now, with scientists exploring the reality, we can ask what are the real possibilities of changing Mars."

    Most scientists agree that Mars could be turned into a little earth, although much time and money would be needed to achieve this goal.

    But many experts are shocked by the idea. "We are destroying our own world at an unbelievable speed and now we are talking about ruining another planet," said Paul Murdin, of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK. Over the past months, scientists have become increasingly confident they will find Martian life forms. Europe and America's robot explorers have found proof that water, mixed with soil, exists in large amounts on the planet.

    In addition, two different groups of scientists announced on March 28 that they had found signs of methane (甲烷) in the Martian atmosphere (大气). The gas is a waste product of living creatures and could be produced by microbes (微生物) living in the red planet's soil.

    But scientists such as Dr Lisa Pratt, a biologist at Indiana University, say that these microbes will be put in danger by the little earth project. "Before we have even discovered if there is life on Mars, we are talking about carrying out projects that would destroy all these native life forms, all the strange microbes that we hope to find buried in the soil," said Dr Pratt. This view is shared by Monica Grady, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum, London. "We cannot risk starting a global experiment that would wipe out the precious information we are looking for." she said, "This is just wrong."

    Moving flight times from night to day could reduce air travel's contributions to global warming, a new study suggests. Scheduling more (lay time flights may reduce the influence of contrails ——the visible lines of white steam that many planes leave behind them in the sky.

    The role of contrails in climate change is still being studied, but some scientists believe they contribute to the greenhouse effect by trapping heat in the atmosphere.

    Nicola Stuber, first author of the study, suggests that contrails' overall impact on climate change is almost as big as that of aircraft^? s carbon dioxide emissions (排放)over a hundred-year period. Aircraft are believed to be responsible for 2-3% of human carbon dioxide emissions. Like other high, thin clouds, contrails reflect sunlight back into space and cool the planet. However, they also trap energy in the atmosphere and increase the warming effect.

    Stuber and other scientists believe that the effect of the contrails is big. "On average, the green-house effect controls the effects of contrails, said Stuber, a meteorologist at England's University of Reading." The warming effect is far greater for contrails left by night flights," Stuber added. "The cooling effect only happens (luring the day when the sun is up. During the night the greenhouse warming is no longer balanced and that is why the contribution of night-flight is so large."

    Most commercial airline traffic occurs during daylight hours. For example, only one in four United Kingdom flights is a night flight, but those flights create some 60% of the warming created by contrails, the study reports.

Every profession or trade, every art, and every science has its technical vocabulary, the function of which is partly to name things, or processes which have no names in ordinary English, and partly to secure greater exactness in terminology (术语). Such special dialects are necessary in technical discussion of any kind. Being universally understood by those engaged or interested in the particular science or art, they have the accurateness of a mathematical formula (公式）. Besides，they save time in these kinds of discussions, for it is much more economical to name a process than to describe it. Thousands of these technical terms are very properly included in every large dictionary, yet, as a whole, they are rather in the suburbs of the English language.

Different occupations, however, differ widely in the character of their special vocabularies. In trades and handicrafts, and other professions, like farming and fishery, which have occupied great numbers of men from remote times, the technical vocabulary is very old. It consists largely of native words, or of borrowed words that have worked themselves into the very central part of our language. Thus, though highly technical in many particulars, these vocabularies are more familiar in sound, and more generally understood, than most other technical terms. In law, medicine, and philosophy, the special dialects have also become pretty familiar to cultivated persons and have contributed much to the popular vocabulary. Yet among these professions, each one still possesses a large body of technical terms that remain essentially foreign, even to educated speech. And the proportion has increased in the last fifty years, particularly in the various departments of natural and political science and in the mechanic arts. Here new terms are coined with the greatest freedom, and abandoned when they have served their turn. Most of the newly-invented terms are restricted to special discussions, and seldom get into general literature or conversation.

Yet no profession is nowadays, as all professions once were, a close combination. Lawyers, doctors and men of science all communicate freely with others, not in a merely professional way. Furthermore, what is called "popular science" makes everybody familiar with modem views and recent discoveries. Any important experiment, though made in a remote or provincial laboratory, is at once reported online, and everybody is soon talking about it-as in the case of AI.