As we all know, sleep is very important and necessary. I would love everyone to develop the following four habits to have better sleep without needing the alarm（闹钟）wake-up call.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#}If you eat much food an hour before you go to bed, your body will hate you, because your body needs time to digest while you are still awake.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}When I hear on TV that people just need 30-minute exercise a week, I think that's wrong. Every person should get 30-minute exercise every day. When you exercise, your body uses energy and feels tired. You have to recover from the tiredness. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} The harder you exercise your body, the faster it falls to sleep and the better it sleeps.

    Turn the TV off. There are a few shows I still watch, but they will never get in my way of (妨碍) sleep. The bedroom is only for sleeping and rest. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}A question to ask yourself: If I didn't have an alarm, what time would I get up? If that time is the time you need to get up, you should probably throw away the alarm. If the time you actually get up is much later than the time you need to get up, make great changes to your way of life and the time you go to sleep. No one should need an alarm.

A. Exercise for at least 30 minutes every day.

B. Don't eat any food 4 hours before you sleep.

C. Throw away the alarm.

D. Sleep is one of the most important things in our lives.

E. Your body recovers when you are sleeping.

F. Try to get up as early as you can.

G. Take the TV out of your bedroom.

Plastic-Eating Worms

    Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills(垃圾填埋场), and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.

    Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the worms of the greater wax moth can break down polyethylene, which accounts for 40% of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms' chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste(糊状物) and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass — apparently broken down by enzymes (酶) from the worms' stomachs. Their findings were published in Current Biology in 2017.

    Federica Bertocchini, co-author of the study, says the worms' ability to break down their everyday food — beeswax — also allows them to break down plastic. “Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well,” she explains, “The wax worm evolved a method or system to break this bond. ”

    Jennifer DeBruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes(肠道微生物)?

    Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team's findings might one day help employ the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process — not simply “millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic.”

    Shopping for and choosing clothes is challenging enough. But imagine if you were unable to use your arms to do anything, or used a wheelchair.

    The conditions are reality for four people who became the "customers" of 15 students at Parsons School of Design at the New School this year. The students spent their spring term creating clothing to fit their customers' unique requirements as part of a class run by Open Style Lab, a nonprofit organization whose aim is to design functional and fashionable clothing for people with disabilities.

    "Disability overlaps (关联、一致) with aging and universal design," said Grace Jun, the director of the program. "We need to see it as part of our life cycle. It's something that we need to not only see from a human rights standpoint but also for its economic value."

    "I'm always looking at me being the problem and the clothing as being OK," said Kieran Kern, who gets around in a wheelchair. When Ms. Kern approached Open Style Lab, she was looking for a coat that would be easy to put on with the limitations of a weaker body. Her team came up with a design with a circular rod (杆) that runs through the collar and allows Ms. Kern to swing the coat across her back with one hand.

    "The idea of having a coat that sees the parts that make me as just parts and not as a problem that I need to solve was really liberating in an identity sense," Ms. Kern said. "Because generally, when you have a different body, you don't really see yourself."

    "I think the challenges the students faced throughout the course had a lot to do with the exchange of ideas," Ms. Jun said. "They were able to understand that no two people with a disability are alike. Being able to design uniquely means you have to have a collaborative (合作) process. We're designing with each other, not for."

    Children's books are everywhere. New ones, old ones, made-into-movie ones. It seems as if the children's publishing industry is developing rapidly. Here are some books every young child should have in their book diet.

    The Peter Rabbit books by Beatrix Potter

    It's best to have a copy of the original stories, with the original drawings done by Beatrix Potter herself. In The Tale of Peter Rabbit are the delightful tales of Peter Rabbit. Included in the series are also cute little stories about mice. These books have sweet stories that teach lessons.

The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss

    Dr. Seuss is, of course, the master of children's literature. Dr. Seuss teaches children to play with language and have a good time reading. The pictures are wonderful and inspire lots of fun questions. Big kids will like re-reading Dr. Seuss along with their younger sisters and brothers.

Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey

    The story of Mr. and Mrs. Mallard is shown by simple pencil drawings that help children use their imaginations. The story explores the city of Boston as the Mallards look for a place to get their ducklings safely across the city. Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack are good examples of obedience(顺从) as they follow Mrs. Mallard through the city.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar(毛虫) and other books by Eric Carle

    The Eric Carle books have delightful pictures, full of bright colors and interesting detail. In The Very Hungry Caterpillar, children see the life cycle of a butterfly through the eyes of a caterpillar that is hungry. The children will laugh at all the food the caterpillar eats and be overjoyed by the beautiful butterfly at the end. All the Eric Carle books are fun for kids and parents, with simple ideas and beautiful art.

    There are many children's books available, and this list is only the beginning. However, these are all essential to a good children's library.

    Kaitlin Woolley and Ayelet Fishbach report in Psychological Science that a meal taken "family-style" from a central plate can greatly improve the outcome of later negotiations.

    Having conducted previous research in 2017 revealing that eating similar foods led to people feeling emotionally closer to one another, Dr Woolley and Dr Fishbach wondered whether the way in which food was served also had a psychological effect. They theorized that, on the one hand, sharing food with other people might indicate food scarcity（短缺）and increase a feeling of competition. However, they also reasoned that it could instead lead people to become more aware of others' needs and drive cooperative behavior as a result. Curious to find out, they did a series of experiments.

    For the first test they recruited 100 pairs of participants from a local cafe, none of whom knew each other. The participants were seated at a table and fed tortilla chips with salsa. Half the pairs were given their own basket of 20 grams of chips and a bowl of 25 grams of salsa, and half were given 40 grams of chips and 50 grams of salsa to share. As a cover for the experiment, all participants were told this snack was to be consumed before the game began.

    The game asked the participants to negotiate an hourly wage rate during a fictional strike. Each person was randomly assigned to represent the union or management and follow a set of rules.

    The researchers measured cooperation by noting the number of rounds it took to reach an agreement, and found that those who shared food resolved the strike significantly faster（in 8. 7rounds）than those who did not（13.2 rounds）. A similar experiment was conducted with 104

participants and Goldfish crackers（饼干）, this time negotiating an airline's route prices. The results were much the same, with the food-sharers negotiating successfully 63. 3%of the time and those who did not share doing so 42. 9%of the time.

The coast of the State of Maine is one of the most irregular in the world. A straight line running from the southernmost coastal city to the northernmost coastal city would measure about 225 miles. If you followed the coastline between these points, you would travel more than ten times as far. This irregularity is the result of what is called a drowned coastline. The term comes from the glacial (冰川的) activity of the Ice Age. At that time, the whole area that is now Maine was part of a mountain range that towered above the sea. As the glacier declined, however, it applied enormous force on those mountains, and they sank into the sea.

As the mountains sank, ocean water charged over the lowest parts of the remaining land. And the highest parts of the former mountain range, nearest the shore, remained as islands. Marine fossils found here are 225 feet above sea level indicating the level of the shoreline prior to the glacier.

The 2,500-mile-long rocky and jagged (锯齿状的) coastline of Maine keeps watching over nearly 2,000 islands. Many of these islands are tiny and uninhabited, but many are home to blooming communities. Mt. Desert Island is one of the largest, most beautiful of the Maine coast islands left behind by the glacier. Measuring 16 miles by 12 miles, Mt. Desert was very nearly formed as two distinct islands. It is split almost in half by Somes Sound, a very deep and very narrow stretch of water seven miles long.

For years, Mt. Desert Island, particularly its major settlement, Bar Harbor, has afforded summer homes for the wealthy. Recently, though, Bar Harbor has become a new arts community as well. But the best part of the island is the unspoiled forest land known as Acadia National Park. Since the island sits on the border between two different geographical zones, the park supports the plants and animals of both zones. It also lies in a major bird migration lane and is a resting spot for many birds.