Most buildings are built to stand up straight, but these look as if they might fall over!

The church tower of Suurhusen

    Built in 1450, the 27-meter-high church tower lies in Suurhusen, Germany. It was built in wet land on foundations of oak tree trunks (树干). When the land was drained (排水) later, the wood broke down, causing one side of the tower to be a little lower than the other. In 1975, the tower became a real hazard and people were not allowed to enter until the foundations were made strong again. The lean (倾斜) of the tower is now about five degrees.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

    The work of building the tower began in 1173, and was finally completed in 1372. In fact, it began to lean after just a couple of floors were built. And this condition continued in the centuries after its completion. The tower was finally closed to the public in 1990 after people failed to stabilize (使稳固) its foundations. In 2001, it was reopened after engineers removed soil from underneath its raised side. Now it leans just an angle of 3.97 degrees.

Capital Gate of Abu Dhabi

    Completed in 2011, the Capital Gate tower in Abu Dhabi was designed to lean eighteen degrees. The building stands next to the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre and contains, among other things, a fine hotel with wonderful views of the harbour. Also known as the leaning tower of Abu Dhabi, the tower is one of the tallest buildings in the city.

Big Ben of London

    The building leans 0.26 degrees to the northwest. This is mainly caused by the engineering projects that have been carried out in the ground below it since the late 1800s. The tower, which has been continuously open since it was completed in 1858, has nowhere near the lean of the Tower of Pisa and is still completely safe to enter.

    In 1975, George Carlin appeared on a popular TV show, Saturday Night Live, with his famous words about blue food. “Why is there no blue food? I can't find blue food—I can't find the flavor of blue! I mean yellow is lemon; orange is orange and red is cherry. Where is the blue food?”

    Well, Carlin pretty much has it right—there is not no blue food, but there's certainly not a lot of it. Fresh-picked blueberries are blue, though they become purple when they are turned into jam. The blue in blueberries—like the purple in grapes and red in tomatoes—is found in nature. But it isn't a hot color for food. People don't seem to prefer blue food. Some diet programs even suggest that those determined to lose weight should make their food blue.

    Eating, in part, begins with our eyes. Chares Spence—an experimental psychologist from Oxford University—points out that color can change our taste experience. Commonly, we consider red-colored foods up to 20% sweeter than they actually are; and green foods as being more sour. Spence suggests: human expectations may be influenced by our long history of watching—green fruits can become sweet as they grow up and turn red.

    But what about blue? Except blueberries, much of the blue food we see these days is dyed blue artificially. Food producers argue that artificial color doesn't do much damage to health. A lot of research shows that some physical problems of kids are related to food dyes—while other studies show no effects at all. Blue birthday cake or even blue-dyed chicken can be served on the dinner table. So what?

    Obama, Lady Gaga and Steve Jobs—what do they have in common? They are, of course, all Americans. And according to a survey by social networking site baidu. com, they all best illustrate(举例说明) the word “cool”.

    But just what does it mean to say someone is “cool”? Most would answer that it is something to do with being independent-minded and not following the crowd.

    Yale University art professor Robert Farris Thompson says that the term “cool” goes back to 15th century West African philosophy. “Cool” relates to ideas of grace under pressure.

    “In Africa,” he writes, “coolness is a positive quality which combines calmness, silence, and life.”

    The modern idea of “cool” developed largely in the US in the period after World War II. “Post-war 'cool' was in part an expression of war-weariness (厌战情绪), . . . it went against the strict social rules of the time,” write sociologists Dick Pountain and David Robins in Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude.

    But it was the American actor James Dean who became the symbol for “cool” in the hugely successful 1955 movie Rebel without a Cause. Dean plays a tough guy who disobeys his parents and the authorities. He always gets the girl, smokes cigarettes, wears a leather jacket and beats up bullies. In the movie, Dean showed what “cool” would mean to American young people for the next 60 years.

    Today the focus of “cool” has changed to athletics (体育运动) stars. Often in movies about schools, students gain popularity on the athletics field more than in the classroom. This can be seen quite clearly in movies like Varsity Blues and John Tucker Must Die.

    But many teenagers also think being smart is cool. Chess and other thinking games have been becoming more popular in schools.

    “Call it the Harry Potterization of America—a time when being smart is the new cool,” writes journalist Joe Sunnen.

    Life is full of funny moments, and not just for humans.

    Over the years, studies by various groups have suggested that monkeys, dogs and even rats love a good laugh. People, meanwhile, have been laughing since before they could talk.

    Jaak Panksepp, a professor at Bowling Green State University, US, said he would not be surprised if positive feelings could be produced in some animals. Dolphins, for example, have long attracted animal researchers because of the complex (复杂的) ways in which they communicate: a rich variety of sounds of different rhythms. A decade ago, researchers studying dolphins at the Kolmarden Wildlife Park in Sweden noticed a set of sounds the dolphins made during play-fighting. They concluded that the purpose of the sound was to suggest that the situation was pleasant and to prevent it from a real fight.

    Panksepp has even seen evidence of joy in crayfish (小龙虾). When given small amounts of drugs such as cocaine (可卡因) in a certain place, they appear to connect that location with pleasure. “Given the chance, they will always return to that place, perhaps in the hope of getting more,” he says. Panksepp wasn't sure it equals the same happiness that humans get from cocaine, but said it “could be in the same evolutionary category”.

    More studies are needed to really understand animals' laughter. Strangely enough, the answers may help with our own desires for cures for mental illnesses. Panksepp's experiments may soon lead to a new antidepressant (抗抑郁) drug that works by using the pathways in the brain behind positive feelings and joy. Perhaps pleasure and laughter in the animal world will help solve the depression in our own species one day.

    On a recent spring morning. Susan Alexander, a retired government intelligence analyst, left her Maryland home, climbed into her Volkswagen Passat and drove about three miles to pick up two strangers. She battled rush-hour traffic on the Capital Beltway and George Washington Memorial Parkway before dropping them off at Reagan National Airport. She didn't earn a cent for her trouble, and that was the point.

    Alexander is a member of the Silver Spring Time Bank— one of more than 100 such exchanges around the world trying to build community by exchanging time credits for services instead of dollars and cents. "I have time," she said. "I like giving the gift of time to other people."

    In Alexander's case, passengers Mary and Al Liepold were grateful for the ride, but it wasn't charity. Mary, a retired writer and editor for nonprofit organizations, used time credits she banked for editing work and baking. Senior citizens who don't drive, the Liepolds cashed in their credits to catch a flight to Montreal for a five-day vacation.

    Without money changing hands or shifting between virtual accounts, the airport drop-off was more like a coffee party than a taxi ride. Driver and passengers chatted about projects they've completed for the time bank, and no one raised an eyebrow when Mary said she likes "to avoid the conventional economy."

    "The beauty of this is that you make friends," Mary Liepold said. "You don't just get services."

    The Silver Spring Time Bank formed in 2015 and has about 300 members, said co-founder Mary Murphy. Last year, she said, l,000 hours were exchanged for basic home repairs, dog walking, cooking and tailoring, among other services, without the exchange of money." You get to save that money that you would have spent," she said. "You get to meet somebody else in your community and get to know that person. That's a bonus that's part of an exchange."

    A deal performed partly to make friends would seem to go against classical economics and one of Benjamin Franklin's most memorable sayings: "Time is money." To those at the forefront of modern time-banking, that is the appeal.

In recent years American society has become increasingly dependent on its universities to find solutions to its major problems. It is the universities that have been to blame for developing the expertise to place men on the moon; for dealing with our urban problems and with our worsening environment; for developing the means to feed the world's rapidly increasing population. The effort involved in meeting these demands presents its own problems. In addition, however, this concentration on the creation of new knowledge significantly impinges on the universities' efforts to perform their other principal functions, the transmission and interpretation of knowledge-the imparting of the heritage of the past and the preparing of the next generation to carry it forward.

With regard to this, perhaps their most traditionally acknowledged task, college and universities today find themselves in a serious situation. On one hand, there is the American commitment, especially since World War Ⅱ, to provide higher education for all young people who can profit from it. The result of the commitment has been a dramatic rise in enrollments(登记入学) in our universities, coupled with a striking shift from the private to the public sector of higher education. 

On the other hand, there are serious and continuing limitations on the resources available for higher education. While higher education has become a great "growth industry", it is also at the same time a tremendous drain(耗竭) on the resources of the nation. With the vast increase in enrollment and the shift in priorities away from education in state and federal(联邦的) budgets, there is in most of our public institutions a significant decrease in expenses for their students. One crucial aspect of this drain on resources lies in the persistent shortage of trained faculty(全体教师), which has led, in turn, to a declining standard of competence in instruction.

Intensifying these difficulties is, as indicated above, the concern with research, with its increasing claims on resources and the attention of the faculty. In addition, there is a strong tendency for the institutions' organization and functioning to fulfill the demands of research rather than those of teaching.