World's Wonderful Libraries

    How cool can libraries be in an era of iPads and Kindles Morethan you think. Only if you know where to go.

                                                                                         Central Library

    The Central Library in Seattle,United States is modern and sophisticated. The building is an impressive work of art, which has tourists from around the world paying visits and taking tours. The library offers free self-guided cell phone tours, along with group tours.

    The library holds various art exhibitions, book signings andother events throughout the year.

    Open: Monday-Thursday 10 a.m-8 p.m, Friday-Saturday 10 a.m-6p.m, Sunday noon-6 p.m

                                                                                      Trinity College Library

    The Trinity College Library in Dublin is the oldest library in Ireland, founded in 1592 by Queen Elizabeth I.

    Not only is the exterior impressive, it boasts the largest single chamber library in the world, also known as the Long Room, which contains more than 200,000 of the library's oldest books.

    Various exhibitions and tour are available; admission 9(US 12)

    Open: Monday-Wednesday 9:30 a.m -5 p.m, Tuesday 9:30 a.m -9 p.m,Saturday 9:30 a.m -1 p.m, Sunday closed.

                                                                                    Bibliotheca Alexamdrina

    The Bibliotheca Alexamdrina is the revival(复兴) of theancient Royal Library of Alexandria, which was the largest and most influential library in the Greek world. It was built by Alexander the Great some 2, 300years ago.

    The new library was reborn in 2002 on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea after 10 years of designing, planning and construction.

Along with the standard libraries, there are four museumscovering science, Arabic Calligraphy, the history of printing and the Greekart.

    Open: Saturday-Thursday 9 a.m- 4 p.m.

                                                                                       Stuttgart City Library

    The Stuttgart City Library is controversial. Some say it's innovative, while others say it doesn't match its environment.

     Nevertheless, the library is one of the most interesting buildings in Germany. The design of the cubic facility was influenced by the ancient Pantheon in Rome. It serves as a multi-story meeting space that draws natural sunlight through the roof.

    Open: Monday-Saturday 9 a.m--9 p.m

    While engineers have made out fantastic products for sitting still—Munchery instead of walking to lunch, Uber instead of walking to the bus stop—services to make you move have been less appealing for consumers.

    Fitbit's stock price fell 18% after they announced their latest Apple Watch-like product named Fitbit Force. And new data suggests that, for the first time, death rates for large parts of the American population are rising, with signs pointing to inactivity and weight gain as the reasons. Our digital lifestyles and desk-based workplaces are contributing to serious health problems and could be shortening our lives, wellness firms want us to believe.

    Northrup, president and co-founder of the connected exercise device TAO-Wellness, was in Las Vegas to promote TAO's small device that encourages exercises. He lifts the device, about the size of an apple, and says workplaces should start encouraging on-site exercise.

    Nick Mokey, the managing editor of Digital Trends, agrees. “I hate to break it to you, a room full of people sitting down, but sitting is killing you,” he says to the audience. They shift in their seats.

    In the health section of the Sands Exposition Hall, people are selling devices made by LifeSpan Fitness. They say they're the largest seller of treadmill（跑步机） desks in the US. At the center of their exhibition area is a Bike Desk, which looks like three gym bikes attached to a table. That's for people who just want to sit and enjoy conversation.

    Treadmill desk-related shame is their biggest obstacle, they say when LifeSpan installs two in opposite ends of the same building, neither tends to get used. If the company installs two next to each other, people will use them. “You don't want to be so noticeable, especially at work,” company spokesman James Lowe says. What's more, what if we get sweaty using a treadmill in the office?

    In choosing a friend, one should be very careful. A good friend can help you study. You can have fun together and make each other happy. Sometimes you will meet fair­weather friends. They will be with you as long as you have money or luck，but when you are down, they will run away. How do I know when I have found a good friend? I look for certain qualities of character，especially understanding, honesty and reliability(信任)．

    Above all else, I look for understanding in a friend. A good friend tries to understand how another person is feeling. He is not quick to judge. Instead, he tries to learn from others. He puts himself in the other person's place, and he tries to think of ways to be helpful. He is also a good listener.

    At the same time, however, a good friend is honest. He does not look for faults in others. He notices their good points. In short, a friend will try to understand me and accept me.

    Another quality of a friend is reliability. I can always depend on a good friend. If he tells me he will meet me somewhere at a certain time, I can be sure that he will be there. If I need a favor，he will do his best to help me. If I am in trouble, he will not run away from me.

    There is a fourth quality that makes a friend special. A special friend is someone with whom we can have fun. We should enjoy our lives, and we would enjoy our friendship. That is why I especially like friends who are fun to be with. A good friend likes the same things I like. We share experience and learn from each other. A good friend has a good sense of humor too. He likes to laugh with me. That is how we share in the joy of being friends. And I know that he is looking for the same quality in me.

    When I meet someone who is reliable, honest, and understanding，I know I've found a friend!

C

    Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter-gatherers, small, tightly knit(联系) groups developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them.   

    Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialisation, the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalisation and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.

    At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot, wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number （中位数）of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

   Already well over 400 of the total of 6,800 languages are close to extinction (消亡), with only a few elderly speakers left. Pick, at random, Busuu in Cameroon (eight remaining speakers), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a question-mark): none of these seems to have much chance of survival.

    If your dog looks pleased to see you—it is probably because it loves the particular way you smell.

    The scent (气味)of a familiar human apparently lingers like perfumein the animal's brain—where it causes an instinctive emotional response, research reveals.

    Our scent acts on a part of the canine (犬科的) brain associated with reward and the strongest reactions are produced by humans that pets know best, say scientists in America.

    Gregory Bern, of Emory University in Atlanta, said, “While we might expect that dogs should be highly tuned to the smell of other dogs, it seems that the 'reward response' is reserved for their humans. When humans smell the perfume of someone they love, they may have an immediate, emotional reaction that's not necessarily cognitive (认识的). So is it in dogs. But since dogs have a more sensitive smell than humans, their responses would likely be even more powerful than the ones we might have. In our experiment, however, the owners of the dog were not physically present. The canine brain responses were being caused by something distant in space and time. It shows that dogs' brains have these mental representations of us that persist when we're not there.”

    The experiment involved 12 dogs of various kinds by brain scans while five different scents were placed in front of them. The scent samples (样本)came from the subject (接受试险者) itself, a dog the subject had never met, a dog living in the subject's household. The familiar human scent samples were taken from someone else from the house other than the handlers during the experiment, so that none of the scent donors were physically present.

    The results showed all five scents gained a similar response in parts of the dogs brains involved in detecting smells. Responses were significantly stronger for the scent of familiar humans, followed by that of familiar dogs. The findings showed dogs reacted strongest to the scent of familiar humans even when they were not there. Pets trained as help or therapy dogs showed greater brain activity than the other dogs in the test.

    Researchers say the findings could improve the way to select animals helping wounded old soldiers or disabled people.

    What happens inside the head of a soccer player who repeatedly heads a soccer ball. That question motivated a study of the brains of experienced players.

    Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York selected 34 adults, men and women. All of the volunteers had played soccer since childhood and  now competed year﹣round in adult soccer leagues. Each filled out a detailed questionnaire developed especially for this study to determine how many times they had headed a soccer ball in the previous year, as well as whether they had experienced any known concussions in the past.

    Then the players completed computerized tests of their memory and other learning skills and had their brains scanned. using a complex new M.R.I. technique which can find structural changes in the brain that can't be seen during most scans.

    According to the data they presented, the researchers found that the  players who had headed the ball more than about 1, 100 times in the previous 12 months showed significant loss of white matter in parts of their brains involved with memory, attention and the processing of visual information, compared with players who had headed the ball less.

    This pattern of white matter loss is "similar to those seen in traumatic brain injury", like that after a serious concussion, the researchers reported, even though only one of these players was reported to have ever experienced a concussion.

    The players who had headed the ball about 1, 100 times or more in the past year were also generally worse at remembering lists of words read to them, forgetting the words far more often than players who had headed the ball less.