Moving to a new place may be an exciting adventure.{#blank#}1{#/blank#} If you have a friend experiencing this anxiety, there are some steps you can take to make him feel more at home. Talk to your friend about his homesickness.{#blank#}2{#/blank#} This also gives you the option to share with him any strategies you have personally discovered to help overcome these feelings.

    Join your friend in discovering and adapting to the new environment. It is human nature to fear the unknown. By learning to deal with the new environment, your friend will find it easier to overcome the desire for what is familiar.

    Introduce him to new friends by including him in your social circle. These new relationships help relieve the feelings of homesickness and keep his mind off those friends he left behind.{#blank#}3{#/blank#} For example, if he likes sports and being outdoors invite him to go hiking or camping with you and your friends.

{#blank#}4{#/blank#} Developing a new schedule will help him change things to where he does not need his old routine. Perhaps get him involved in an athletic club where he can boost endorphins(内啡肽) by keeping physically fit.

    Keep a positive outlook. Encourage him to see the glass half full so he can embrace this new experience instead of longing for what once was. Being positive helps your friends become more positive, so make the most of your influence{#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. However, there are many ways to overcome it.

B. Burying it will only make his homesickness worse.

C. Invite him to clubs that you know he will enjoy.

D. Help him develop a new routine to replace the old one.

E. You will help him keep an active attitude to life if you are positive.

F. He could be homesick due to missing family dinners every night

G. However, following that is the anxiety that comes from a change in routine.

    For grown-ups, an afternoon snooze(打盹) is often easier said than done. But many of us have probably experienced just how simple it can be to catch some sleep in a gently rocking hammock(吊床). By examining brain waves in sleeping adults, researchers reported in the June 21 issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, that they now have evidence to explain why that is.

    “It is a common belief that rocking causes sleep: we fall asleep in a rocking chair soon and, since ancient times, we cradle our babies to sleep,” said Sophie Schwartz of the University of Geneva. “Yet, how this works had remained a mystery. The goal of our study was made up of two parts: to test whether rocking does indeed improve sleep, and to understand how this might work at the brain level.”

    Schwartz, Michel Mühlethaler, and their colleagues Laurence Bayer and Irina Constantinescu asked twelve adult volunteers to nap on a custom-made bed or “experimental hammock” that could either remain still or rock gently. All participants were good sleepers who didn't typically nap and did not suffer from excessive sleepiness during the day. Each participant took two 45-minute afternoon naps, one with the bed still and one with the bed in motion, while their brain activity was monitored.

    “We observed a faster transition to sleep in each and every subject in the swinging condition,” Mühlethaler said. “Surprisingly, we also observed a dramatic boosting of certain types of sleep-related brain waves.”

    More specifically, rocking increased the length of stage N2 sleep, a form of non-rapid eye movement sleep that normally occupies about half of a good night's sleep. The rocking bed also had a lasting effect on brain activity, increasing slow brain waves and bursts of activity known as sleep spindles(纺锤体).

    Schwartz and Mühlethaler say the next step is to find out whether rocking can improve longer periods of sleep and to find out whether it may be useful for the treatment of sleep disorders, such as insomnia(失眠).

    Idioms are one of the hardest parts of learning a language. For those of you who don't know, an idiom is a phrase which has a meaning, but if you translate it word for word, it sometimes makes no sense at all. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    Get your act together

    This might be something your teacher says to you if you score badly in an exam or if you misbehave in class. It means you need to improve your behavior or work.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Yes, it's longer and more difficult to say than “I'm sick.” But if your English teacher asks you why you haven't done your homework, he or she is more likely to forgive you if you say that you were feeling under the weather.

    It's a piece of cake

    I don't know why this means what it does, but sometimes you just have to accept that English people use the phrase. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Break a leg

    This is perhaps one of the most confusing yet well-known English idioms. If someone says this to you, do not take offence or think they are threatening you. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} It is most often used for people wishing success to actors and actresses before they perform on the stage, but it can be said in other situations, too.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} It's definitely not a piece of cake, especially when there are so many confusing idioms. However, with enough hard work and interest, you will succeed in no time. Break a leg!

A. It shows it's so easy.

B. Pull yourself together.

C. I'm feeling under the weather.

D. They are just wishing you luck.

E. Try your best to use them in various situations.

F. All in all, learning a new language can be challenging.

G. Here are four common English idioms that you can use in a variety of situations.

Most people, when they travel to space, would like to stay in orbit for a few days of more. And this stands to reason, if you're paying $20,000 for your trip to orbit! Strain order for tourism to reach its full potential there's going to be a need for orbital accommodation—or space hotels. What would a space hotel actually be like to visit? Hotels in orbit will offer the services you expect from a hotel—private rooms, meals, bars. But they'll also offer two unique experiences: impressive views—of Earth and space—and the endless entertainment of living in zero gravity—including sports and other activities that make use of this.

The hotels themselves will vary greatly—from being quite simple in the early days to huge luxury structure at a later date. It's actually surprising that as later as 1997; very few designs for space hotels were published. This is mainly because those who might be expected to design them haven't expected launch costs to come down far enough to make them possible.

    Lots of people who've been to space have described vividly what it's like to live in zero gravity. There are obviously all sort of possibilities for dancing, gymnastics, and zero-G sports. Luckily, you don't need to sleep much living in zero gravity, so you'll have plenty of time for relaxing by hanging out in a bar with a window looking down at the turning Earth below.

Of course all good things have come to an end. Unfortunately, and so after a few days you'll find yourself heading back enough you'll be much more expert at exercising in zero gravity than you were when you arrived. You'll be thinking how soon you can save up enough to get back up again—or maybe you should change jobs to get to work in an orbiting hotel.

    Steven Spielberg's 2002 science-fiction thriller Minority Report produced a world where computers could read minds and predict the future. It seemed fanciful at the time, but fantasy is edging closer to fact.

    On Jan 31, a team of scientists at UC Berkeley, led by Robert Knight programmed computers to decode (破译) brain waves and replay them as words. Five months earlier, another group of Berkeley scientists showed their colleagues short movies and used computers to play back in color what people saw.

    These experiments are a big advance from 2006, when a French scientist first replayed images from a human mind, a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. The possibilities are great: a disabled person could" speak"; doctors could access the mind of a patient who fainted; you could rewatch your dreams on an iPad. There are, of course, equally dark side, such as the involuntary take out of information from the brain.

    In spite of these breakthroughs, Jack Gallant, the neuroscientist who led the first Berkeley team, says current technology for decoding brain activity is still "relatively primitive". The field is held back by its poor machinery, in particular the FMRI.

    "Eventually," says Gallant, "someone will invent a decoding machine you can wear as a hat." Such an advance into the human mind, he says, might take 30 years.

    Still, the recent advances at Berkeley offer small answers, which scientists can use to begin unlocking the secrets of memory and consciousness.

    In this Pennsylvania city, Pittsburgh is shrinking but getting wealthier. Since 2000, its population has declined by 95,000 while its income per capita (人均) has shot up 24 percent. The trend is taking hold in many other cities, like Buffalo in New York, Providence in Rhode Island and New Orleans.

    Some of these areas have created more high-paying jobs in energy, health care or education. Others have managed to reshape their manufacturing (制造业) for a new economy. Higher-paying jobs have a greater effect because they create demand for additional services. “The story in Pittsburgh is very positive, and other areas are looking at it as an example of the transformation that might be possible,” said Guhan Venkatu, who wrote an economic history of the area called “Rust and Renewal” for the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

    Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have helped bring tech jobs and innovation (革新) to the area by sponsoring tech centers that help graduates start companies without moving to Silicon Valley or San Francisco. This has helped keep Pittsburgh's educated young population growing even as the entire population in the city has dropped.

    Pittsburgh has more STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs than other shrinking cities, about 80,000 or 7% of all jobs. STEM jobs add productivity and income growth to the area. Manufacturers of high-tech medical equipment in the Pittsburgh area also have doubled employment in the last 10 years.

    However, some experts question whether growing income per capita can really make up for a declining population. According to Patrick Adler, a researcher at the University of Toronto, population loss does matter if it means lower-skilled workers have fled because of a lack of opportunity. What's more, high-paying jobs in education and health care can disappear if the population declines too greatly. So it'd be wise to find ways to increase the population.