Six volunteers are about to find out what it would be like to live on Mars without ever leaving the Earth. Three men and three women will spend eight months living in a special place on the side of a volcano in Hawaii. They are part of an experiment that is designed to mimic（模仿）life on Mars. Their mission began on October 15, 2014. NASA says it could send astronauts to Mars as early as the 2030s. The mission would take more than two years, so NASA needs to know how people would react to living in a small group, isolated from the rest of the world, for such a long time. Some people may become depressed or bored living under those conditions. By studying people living in similar conditions here on Eares NASA hopes to learn how to choose the most suitable people for a space mission, and how to help them get along.

    They will live in a two-story building. The ground floor is about 86 square meters, roughly the size of a small two-bedroom apartment. It includes shared areas like kitchen, dining room, bathroom, laboratory and an exercise room. The upstairs is less than half the size of the downstairs. It contains another bathroom and six small bedrooms. The building is located in an abandoned quarry（采石场）about 2,400 meters up the side of Mauna Loa, the second biggest volcano in the world. It is constantly monitored for signs of volcanic activity. NASA chose the location because the appearance looks very similar to Mars.

    To make it more like being on Mars in the future, they are only able to communicate by email during the experiment. Meanwhile, there will be a 20-minute delay between the time when a message is sent and that when it is received. When they go outside, they will have to suit up in full spacesuits, just as if they were on Mars.

    The commander is Martha Lenio, a 34-year-old Canadian. During the mission, she will run experiments on growing food. The other members have backgrounds in physics and so on. None of them are astronauts.

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    A survey has shown that what you do on a plane can be determined by which nationality is listed on your passport.

    According to the results of an international passenger survey. Australians are the biggest drinkers on board with 36 percent choosing to down the hatch（干杯）, compared to 35 percent of Americans and 33 percent of Brits.

    The Airline Passenger Experience Association (APEX) spoke to around 1,500 people, aged 18 and older, who have travelled by plane at least once during the last three months and were living in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, China, Singapore, Australia and Brazil.

    The results found Chinese travelers are most likely to nod off once the seat-belt sign switches off. They are also the first to take out their credit card for some in flight shopping and the biggest fans of gaming. Americans on the other hand like to use their time in the air more productively when not drinking, choosing to work while flying at 35,000 feet.

    Meanwhile, Brits and Germans are the best at making chat with random strangers spending 50 percent more time than any other nationality. Comparatively, Brazilians conduct their conversations online via email, messaging apps or social media.

    Despite plane food having a bad reputation, seven out of ten interviewees said they were happy to eat upon the selection of in-flight snacks and meals. In flight magazines were also popular with four out of five passengers.

    The international flyers did, however, express their desire for better in flight entertainment. “The industry has greatly improved the comfort, entertainment and onboard service, and passengers are accepting those improvements” said Russell Lemieux, the APEX executive director “At the same time, passengers are demanding more from their air travel experiences which will drive more improvements touching all aspects of the journey.” he added.

    Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children, who are able from a young age to gather their own food.

In the laboratory, chimps don't naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random —he just doesn't care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.

    Human children, on the other hand are extremely cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate in achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.

    There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught .but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive (认知的) skills, at least when compared with chimps. In tests conducted by Tomasello, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.

    The core of what children's minds have and chimps' don't is what Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But beyond that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.

    All across the nation, in Americans' backyards and garages and living rooms, wild animals kept as pets live side by side with their human owners. It's believed that more exotic animals live in American homes than are cared for in American zoos. The exotic-pet business has drawn criticism from animal welfare advocates and wildlife conservationists alike, who say it's not only dangerous to bring wildlife into households but it's cruel and criminal. Yet the issue is far from black or white.

    The term exotic pet has no firm definition. It can refer to any wildlife kept in human households or simply to a pet that's more unusual than the common dog or cat. Privately owning exotic animals is currently permitted in a handful of states with no restrictions in America. Adam Roberts of Born Free USA keeps a running database of deaths and injuries caused by exotic-pet ownership：In Connecticut a 55-year-old woman's face was permanently disfigured by her friend's lifelong pet monkey；in Ohio an 80-year-old man was attacked by a 200-pound kangaroo；in Nebraska a 34-year-old man was strangled(勒)to death by his pet snake. And that list does not include the number of people who become sick from coming into contact with zoonotic(动物传染的) diseases.

    Some people see wild animals as pets as a way to connect with the natural world. Other exotic-pet owners say they are motivated by a desire to preserve threatened species. They believe climate change and human population growth could wipe out a species in record time, so having a backup population is a good idea.   

    But some groups like Born Free USA and the World Wildlife Fund gay that captive breeding(圈养)of endangered species by private owners—whether for commercial, conservation, or educational reasons—serves only to continue a booming market for exotic animals. That, in turn, results in a greater risk to animals still living in their natural habitat.

    Next month, I'm traveling to a remote area of Central Africa and my aim is to know enough Lingala — one of the local languages — to have a conversation. I wasn't sure how I was going to manage this — until I discovered a way to learn all the vocabulary I'm going to need. Thanks to Memrise, the app I'm using, it feels just like a game.

    "People often stop learning things because they feel they're not making progress or because it all feels like too much hard work," says Ed Cooke, one of the people who created Memrise. "We're trying to create a form of learning experience that is fun and is something you'd want to do instead of watching TV."

    Memrise gives you a few new words to learn and these are "seeds" which you plant in your "greenhouse". When you practice the words, you "water your plants". When the app believes that you have really remembered a word, it moves the word to your "garden". And if you forget to log on (登录), the app sends you emails that remind you to "water your plants".

    The app uses two principles about learning. The first is that people remember things better when they link them to a picture in their mind. Memrise translates words into your own language, but it also encourages you to use "mems". For example, I memorized "motele", the Lingala word for "engine", using a mem I created — I imagined an old engine in a motel (汽车旅馆) room.

    The second principle is that we need to stop after studying words and then repeat them again later, leaving time between study sessions. Memrise helps you with this, because it's the kind of app you only use for five or ten minutes a day.

    I've learnt hundreds of Lingala words with Memrise. I know this won't make me a fluent speaker, but I hope I'll be able to do more than just smile when I meet people in Congo. Now, I need to go and water my Vocabulary!

    What is eBay? The simple answer is that it is a global trading platform where nearly anyone can trade practically anything. People can sell and buy all kinds of products and goods, including cars, movies and DVDs. sporting goods, travel tickets, musical instrument clothes and shoes- the list goes on and on.

    The idea came from Peter Omidyar, who was born in Paris and move to Washington when he was still a child. At high school, he became very interested in computer monogramming and after graduating from Tuft University in 1988, he worked for the next few years as a computer engineer. In his free time he started eBay as a kind of hobby, at first offering the service free by word of mouth.By1996 there was so much traffic on the website that he had to upgrade (升级) and he began charging a fee to members Joined by a friend, Peter Skoll, and in 1998 by his capable CEO, Meg Whitman, he has never looked back. Even in the crashes of the late 1990s, eBay has gone from strength to strength. It is now one of the ten most visited online shopping websites on the internet.

    eBay sells connections, not goods, putting buyer and seller into contact with each other. All you have to do is take an e-photo, write a description fill out a sales form and you are in business; the world is your market place. Of course for each item (商品) sold eBay gets a percentage and that is a great deal of money. Every day there are more than sixteen million items listed on eBay and eighty percent of the items are sold……