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.”

    After a terrible electrical accident, which caused him to become both blind and deaf, the whole world became completely dark and quiet for Robert Edwards for almost ten years. The loss of sight and hearing threw him into such sorrow(悲伤) that he tried a few times to put an end to his life. His family, especially his wife, did their best to tend and comfort him and finally he regained the will to live.

    One hot summer afternoon, he was taking a walk with a stick near his house when a thunderstorm started all at once. He stood under a large tree to avoid getting wet, but he was struck by the lightning. Witnesses thought he was dead but he woke up some 20 minutes later lying face down in muddy water at the base of the tree. He was trembling badly, but when he opened his eyes, he could hardly believe what he saw —— a plough and a wall. When Mrs. Edwards came running up to him, shouting to their neighbors to call for help, he could see her and hear her voice for the first time in nearly ten years.

    The news of Robert regaining his sight and hearing quickly spread, and many doctors came to examine him. Most of them said that he regained his sight and hearing from the shock he got from the lightning. However, none of them could give a convincing answer as to why this should have happened. The only reasonable explanation given by one doctor was that, since Robert lost his sight and hearing as a result of sudden shock, perhaps, the only way for him to regain them was by another sudden shock.

    US inventor Thomas Alva Edison once said: "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." He was not exaggerating. Perspiration, indeed, plays a very important role in Chinese scientist Tu Youyou's success.

    Tu was given the Nobel Prize in Physio logy or Medicine in 2015 for discovering a new drug for malaria, a deadly disease caused by the bite of some types of mosquito. She is the first Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize in science. "It is the pride of the whole Chinese science community, which will inspire more Chinese scientists," China Daily noted.

    Malaria is a disease that infects around 200 million people and k ills about half a million people each year, according to the Economist. Tu's discovery has saved millions of lives, especially in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, by 2013 malaria deaths had fallen by 47 percent compared with 2000.

    But the road to this achievement was a tough one to travel. In the late 1960s, during the "cultural revolution" (1966-1976), Tu joined a government project on which she began research on a new malaria drug.

    In the beginning, Tu read a lot of old folk remedies(药方), searched texts that w ere hundreds or thousands of years old and traveled to remote places.

    Over several months, Tu and her team collected over 600 plants and created a list of almost 380 possible remedies.

    "This w as the most challenging stage of the project," Tu told The Beijing News. "It was a very labor-demanding and dull job, in particular when you faced one failure after another."

    But the hard work and the dullness failed to break the team's spirit. In the following months, she and her team tested the remedies on malaria- infected mice and they found that an extract(提取物)from the plant qinghao seemed to work w ell.

    Not that the work was easier after that. The fact that the extract didn't always work against malaria discouraged some of her teammates. But Tu was ambitious to make a contribution to the world and so she encouraged her teammates to keep going. They decided to start again from the beginning.

    In 1971, they were rewarded for their efforts. After nearly 200 failures, Tu finally made an extract that was 100 percent effective  against malaria parasites.The extract was called "Artemisin in"(青蒿素).

    Thanks to decades of hard work, Tu and her team had "provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people every year," said the Nobel Prize Committee. "It has greatly improved human health and reduced suffering."

    We have encountered a crisis around the corner. You mean global warming? The world economy? No, the decline of reading. People are just not doing it anymore, especially the young. Who's responsible?

Actually, it's more like, what is responsible? The Internet, of course, and everything that comes with it – Facebook, Twitter. You can write your own list.

    There's been a warning about the imminent death of literate civilization for a long time. In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio, then television that seemed to spell doom for the written world. None did. Reading survived; in fact it not only survived, it has flourished. The world is more literate than ever before – there are more and more readers, and more and more books.

    The fact that we often get our reading material online today is not something we should worry over. The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades has arguably shown the way forward for reading and for writing. Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example.

    Devices like Kindle make reading more convenient and are a lot more environmentally friendly than the traditional paper book.

    As technology makes new ways of writing possible, new ways of reading are possible. Interconnectivity allows for the possibility of a reading experience that was barely imaginable before. Where traditional books had to make do with photographs and illustrations, an e-book can provide readers with an unlimited number of links: to texts, pictures, and videos. In the future, the way people write novels, history, and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.

    On the other hand, there is the danger of trivialization. One Twitter group is offering its followers single-sentence-long "digests" of the great novels. War and Peace in a sentence? You must be joking. We should fear the fragmentation of reading. There is the danger that the high-speed connectivity of the Internet will reduce our attention span—that we will be incapable of reading anything of length or which requires deep concentration.

    In such a fast-changing world, in which reality seems to be remade each day, we need the ability to focus and understand what is happening to us. This has always been the function of literature and we should be careful not to let it disappear. Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility of someone utterly in tune with modern technology but able to make sense of a dynamic, confusing world.

    In the 15th century, Johannes Guttenberg's invention of the printing press in Europe had a huge impact on civilization. Once upon a time the physical book was a challenging thing. We should remember this before we assume that technology is out to destroy traditional culture.

    About three decades ago, China was known as the "Bicycle Kingdom".But the two­wheeled transport's popularity began to fade, with many bikes soon replaced by their fuel­powered competitors.

    But recent months have seen a renaissance of the bike across China, with an increasing number of people choosing cycling instead of driving to schools, to workplaces or to do sightseeing. The introduction of bike­sharing schemes, first developed by new companies like Ofo and Mobike, has brought the trend to a new level. According to data from iResearch Consulting Group, the first week of this year saw 5.85 million active users of Mobike while Ofo had 1.4 million active users.

    People can unlock the shared bikes by simply using their smartphones. The bikes are equipped with GPS and can be left anywhere in public places for the next user. They're popular among many Chinese people as they provide an effective answer to the "last mile" problem, which refers to a person's final journey. "In places where the subway doesn't reach and where it's difficult to change from one kind of transport to another, it's so easy to get where you want to go with Mobike," Hu Hong, 29, said. She rides a bike to work.

    However, the schemes have also led to problems such as illegal parking, vandalism (故意破坏) and theft. "Bike­sharing is a greener method of transportation and provides a user­friendly experience," said Liu Xiaoming, Vice­Minister of Transport. "But it's a combination of online and offline business. Operators are usually strong in online services, but lack offline business experience."

    In fact, these problems are also shared by bike­sharing schemes abroad. Set up in 2007, Vélib is a large­scale public bike sharing system in Paris. By October, 2009, a large number of Vélib's initial bikes had to be replaced due to vandalism or theft. Bikes were found hanging from lampposts (街灯柱) or thrown into the Seine River.

So far this winter, a theater in the Alps has staged more than 60 unique concerts. Winter temperatures in the remote mountain village can drop high below zero. Performers wear down jackets and play ice instruments. In fact, almost everything from drums and guitars to horns and harps at the music festival is carved from ice even the stage the musicians play on. The audience sits on ice chairs and benches and claps their hands to listen, both to praise the performers and to keep themselves warm when the air flows through.

The musical instruments used were almost entirely made by an American ice artist, Tim Linhart. Since he created his first musical instrument out of ice more than a decade ago, he has already carved various ice instruments, including violins, violas, timber drum sets, xylophone, double bass, mandolin and cello. He also created his own large wind instrument, which uses the vibration of an ice tube to produce sound when the air flows through.

Linhart makes the different parts of the ice instrument and then uses a liquid mixed with snow to glue them together, with a metal support placed where the strings need to be. A violin can usually be made in two or three weeks, while larger instruments can take more time and efforts, sometimes taking months to make.

An ice instrument has a clearer sound than a wooden instrument. However, ice instruments are more easily broken or damaged than ordinary instruments. The temperature in the ice theater changes depending on the number of people in the audience. This also changes the temperature of the ice instruments, which in turn affects the 1 sound they produce. Musicians need to tune their instruments frequently during performances.

Although playing an ice instrument is not easy, Linhart believes that ice and snow are good materials for making instruments. The only downside is melting when the temperature is above freezing.