It was in October. I was aimlessly wandering down the street, heading into a most gloriously beautiful sunset. I had an urge to speak to someone on the street to share that beauty, but it seemed everyone was in a hurry.

    I took the next-best action. Quickly I ducked into a department store and asked the lady behind the counter if she could come outside for just a minute. She looked at me as though I were from some other planet. She hesitated, and then seemingly against her better judgment, she moved toward the door.

    When she got outside I said to her, “Just look at that sunset! Nobody out here was looking at it and I just had to share it with someone.”

    For a few seconds we just looked. Then I said, “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.” I thanked her for coming out to see it; she went back inside and I left. It felt good to share the beauty.

    Four years later my situation changed greatly. I came to the end of a twenty-year marriage. I was alone and on my own for the first time in my life. I lived in a trailer park which, at the time, I considered a real come-down, and I had to do my wash in the community laundry room.

    One day, while my clothes were going around, I picked up a magazine and read an article about a woman who had been in similar circumstances. She had come to the end of a marriage, moved to a strange community, and the only job she could find was one she disliked: clothing sales in a department store.

    Then something that happened to her changed everything. She said a woman came into her department store and asked her to step outside to look at a sunset. The stranger had said, “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world,” and she had realized the truth in that statement. From that moment on, she turned her life around.

    Have you ever found yourself in his situation: You hear a song you used to sing when you were a child-a bit of nostalgia(怀旧) or “blast from the past,” as we say. But it is not a distant childhood memory. The words come back to you as clearly as when you sang them all those years ago.

    Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied the relationship between music and remembering a foreign language. They found that remembering words in a song was the best way to remember even one of the most difficult languages.

    Here is what they did. Researchers took 60 adults and randomly divided them into three groups of 20. Then they gave the groups three different types of “listen-and-repeat” learning conditions. Researchers had one group simply speak the words. They had the second group speak the words to a rhythm, or beat. And they asked the third group to sing the words.

    All three groups studied words from the Hungarian language for 15 minutes. Then they took part in a series of language tests to see what they remembered.

    Why Hungarian, you ask? Researchers said they chose Hungarian because not many people know the language. It does not share any roots with Germanic or Romance languages, such as Italian or Spanish. After the tests were over, the singers came out on top. The people who learned these new Hungarian words by singing them showed a higher overall performance. They did the best in four out of five of the tests. They also performed two times better than those who simply learned the words by speaking them.

    Dr. Katie Overy says singing could lead to new ways to learn a foreign language. The brain likes to remember things when they are contained in a catchy 3, or memorable 4, tune 5.

    Dr. Ludke said the findings could help those who struggle to learn foreign languages. On the University of Edinburgh's website Dr. Ludke writes, “This study provides the first experimental evidence that a listen-and-repeat singing method can support foreign language learning, and opens the door for future research in this area.”

    Lennon Flowers' mom was diagnosed with lung cancer when she was a senior in high school. This young woman gave up her big dreams to go to New York University and become an actor and instead entered the University of North Carolina so she could be close to home. Though she was surrounded by a community of friends, she rarely brought up her mom. “I became good at not talking about what was happening to me,” she explains. “I got really, really good at being really, really busy.”

    When her mother died during her senior year in college, many of Lennon's friends hadn't even known she was sick. In part, she said she kept silent about it due to her belief that it protected other people.

    Three years after her mother died, Lennon moved to Los Angeles for a job and, met Carla Fernandez. They had an immediate connection. Later, while apartment hunting side-by-side, Carla admitted that her father had died just six months earlier. Lennon shared her own story. A seed was planted.

    A couple of months later Carla organized a dinner party for five women, Lennon among them. All of them had lost a parent already though they were only in their 20s; all of them had felt alone in that loss.

    An emotional movement was born: The Dinner Party. Today, there are 31 “tables” across the country and the initial organization plans to create even more.

    Lennon says, “As people gather month after month, they branch out from talking about their lost loved ones and start exploring what those losses have taught them about the meaning of life.”

    We can video chat with astronauts aboard the International Space Station and watch live footage from the frozen heights of Everest. But communicating with a submarine (潜艇）or a diver is not so easy. The lack of practical methods for sharing data between underwater and airborne devices has long been a frustration for scientists. The difficulty stems from the fact that radio signals work perfectly in air travel but poorly in water. Sonar (声呐）signals used by underwater sensors reflect off the surface of the water rather than reaching the air.

    Now, researchers at MIT have developed a method with the potential to revolutionize underwater communication. "What we've shown is that it's actually feasible to communicate from underwater to the air," says Fadel Adib, a professor at MJT's Media Lab, who led the research.

    The MIT researchers designed a system that uses an underwater machine to send sonar signals to the surface, making vibrations (震动)corresponding to the ls and Os of the data. A surface receiver then reads and decodes these tiny vibrations. The researchers call the system TARF. It has any number of potential real-world uses, Adib says. It could be used to find downed planes underwater by reading signals from sonar devices in a plane's black box and it could allow submarines to communicate with the surface.

    Right now the technology is low-resolution. The initial study was conducted in the MIT swimming pool at maximum depths of around 11 or 12 feet. The next steps for the researchers are to see if TARF is workable at much greater depths and under varying conditions—high waves, storms, schools of fish. They also want to see if they can make the technology work in the other direction— air to water.

    If the technology proves successful in real-world conditions, expect "texting while diving" to be the latest underwater fashion.

    I have never been a fan of the phrase, "No pains, no gains." I prefer the alternative version, "No pains, no pains!" When it comes to exercise, for example, I learned years ago that pushing through pain was more likely to lay me up with an aching back than to leave me feeling strong and healthy.

    But there are times when stressful situations actually do lead to greater happiness. A new study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies found that people who pursue (追求) goals that are tough to achieve feel more stress in the moment, but greater happiness in the aftermath particularly if they feel connected to others along the way.

    The researchers concluded that happiness increases when people develop greater competence in something and greater competence only comes when people keep on working through the stress-inducing phase of trying, fighting, and trying again to learn and grow. If the psychological needs to be autonomous or self-directed, and to be connected to others are met, the momentary stresses will be less acute, and the resulting happiness will be more lasting.

    This idea reminds me of another often quoted phrase, which I have heard in reference to challenging tasks, such as exercise —"Fill-in-the-blank-stressful-task is the worst thing to do, but the greatest thing to have done." In other words, suffering from the stress of an exercise class that leaves us feeling sweat-drenched shouldn't lead us to walk away from exercising. And if we can pass those stressful moments with a friend, colleague or family member who is trustworthy and supportive, all will be better.

    As I travel my positive path, I'm certainly not seeking out stress. But life will offer me plenty of it, whether I ask for it or not. My task is to choose wisely when and how to face it head-on, knowing that happiness awaits on the other side.

    When young, I loved going on trail(小路) runs. It was my favorite way to escape stress. So, when I was back in my hometown after a tough first year of my Ph. D. program, I thought a trail run was just what I needed. But instead of helping me relax, the run did just the opposite.

    After I moved to the city for college, where my runs were on flat concrete paths instead of winding dirt trails, I used a GPS watch. When I went on trail runs again in the country, it constantly reminded me of the fact that I wasn't keeping up with my usual pace. I turned my watch off, thinking that would allow me to enjoy my surroundings and find the peace I expected, but I worried I was underperforming. "Why can't I let go and just enjoy myself?" I wondered. But after some introspection(反省), I realized why I was struggling­both on trail runs and in graduate school.

    Going into my Ph. D. , I had thought that my solid undergraduate track record would set me up for instant success. To my surprise, I was wrong. I lacked confidence in my research abilities which I thought stopped me performing well and I constantly felt my progress was too slow. Other students'self-confidence and their excellent results made me feel insecure. Finally, one day I broke down in tears in my adviser's office.

    Then came my visit home: I was having trouble because I hadn't properly adjusted my expectations to the differences between an urban run and a trail run.

    A Ph. D. is like a trail run: Sometimes you can run fast. Sometimes you might find yourself climbing up a steep, winding trail at a snail's pace. And that's OK. Barriers are unavoidable, and success looks and feels different on a challenging trail than it does on a smooth, flat path. Sometimes it's best to take a deep breath and do your best to meet the challenge.