说明文 知识点题库

From: Lee Haojie

Subject: Handheld Scanners

    Ms. Hu, I received the parcel from Scan Technology 1 piece. The scanner model they sent is correct, and the quantity is right. However, I've discovered the cables and connectors are all wrong. They are not suitable for the model 8021101.

    Can you do me a small favor and go through the product information website and see if the cables and connectors are still compatible (兼容的）with the 8021101 scanners? I have no wish to unpack the cables and connectors and try connecting them to the scanners. I believe we will have problem asking for an exchange if the cables and connectors are not compatible. If the website suggests an incompatibility, please contact Dan Richman and request an exchange for the collect model. (Refer to the invoice for his e-mail address.)

    I will only use the scanners for our project once we have resolved the exchange issue. We should not proceed unless we get confirmation (证实）on their compatibility. I am looking to resolve this in the shortest possible time as it would be disastrous to wait for this exchange without making progress on the project.

Haojie

    Why do Americans struggle with watching their weight, while the French, who eat rich food, continue to stay thin? Now a research by Cornell University suggests how life style and decisions about eating may affect weight. Researchers concluded that the French tend to stop eating when they feel full. However, Americans tend to stop when their plate is empty or their favorite TV show is over.

    According to Dr. Joseph Mercola, a health expert, the French see eating as an important part of their life style. They enjoy food and therefore spend a fairly long time at the table, while Americans see eating as something to be squeezed (挤进) between the other daily activities. Mercola believes Americans lose the ability to sense when they are actually full. So they keep eating long after the French would have stopped. In addition, he points out that Americans drive to huge supermarkets to buy canned and frozen foods for the week. The French, instead, tend to shop daily, walking to small shops and farmers' markets where they have a choice of fresh fruits, vegetables, and eggs as well as high-quality meats for each meal.

    After a visit to the United States, Mireille Guiliano, author of French Women Don't Get Fat, decided to write about the importance of knowing when to stop rather than suggesting how to avoid food. Today she continues to stay slim and rarely goes to the gym.

    In spite of (尽管) all these differences, evidence shows that recent life style changes may be affecting French eating habits. Today the rate of obesity (肥胖)—or extreme overweight — among adults is only 6%. However, as American fast food gains acceptance and the young refuse older traditions, the obesity rate among French children has reached 17% — and is growing.

    We all know that the cost of heating our homes will continue to be a significant burden on the family budget. Now millions of people are saving on their heating bills with the EP portable heater. With over one million satisfied customers around the world, the new EP heats better and faster, saves more on heating bills, and runs almost silent.

    The EP has no exposed heating parts that can cause a fire. The outside of the EP only gets warm to the touch so that it will not burn children or pets.

    The EP will not reduce oxygen in the room. With other heaters, you'll notice that you get sleepy when the heat comes on because they are burning up oxygen.

    The advanced EP also heats the room evenly, wall to wall and floor to ceiling. It comfortably covers an area up to 350 square feet. Other heaters heat rooms unevenly with most of the heat concentrated to the center of the room. And they only heat an area a few feet around the heater. With the EP, the temperature will not vary in any part of the room.

    The EP comes with a 3-year warranty (保修) and a 60-day, no questions asked, satisfaction guarantee. If you are not totally satisfied, return it at our expense and your money will be given back to you.

    Now we have a special offer for 10 days, during which you can enjoy a half price discount and a free delivery. If you order after that, we reserve the right to either accept or reject order requests at the discounted price.

    Take action right now!

    Whether in your life or work, the following things are not the reasons for you to feel embarrassed. It's OK and just move on.

⒈Mistakes while learning

    There will be times when you have people above you(a boss) or even next to you(a coworker) that will get really annoyed with you for“ruining"  something "important". Even if you make mistakes and get a punishment, persevere and push on. You do not need to be embarrassed for learning from your mistakes.

⒉Food choices

    People are different and have different taste buds（味蕾）.Whether it is healthy or not, food is a choice and it is part of life.  You do not need to be embarrassed for food you do or do not like. Tell them, "It is a personal choice I have made, and I am committed to it.”

⒊Your past

    Allowing positive experiences to define, limit, improve, and outshine（凸显）you may cause you to be caught up in the past and unable to truly live in the present. Whether your history is positive, negative, or somewhere in between, don't hold on to the negative experiences and let it reflect your current behavior，

⒋The clean lines of your car／home／workspace

    When everyone gets in the car, you realize your Starbuck bags are still on the floor. So what? Think about it this way: everyone has a "messy" aspect of their life. Maybe their home is completely clean, but the relationship with their spouse（配偶）is messy. Someone's car gets washed once a week, but his/her work life could use some help. We don't apologize to others about our personal limitations. By being outwardly embarrassed, it only brings more attention to the fact!

⒌Putting yourself first

    If you find yourself saying no to something or making up lies to get out of it,tell them the truth,  and don't apologize. You will feel much better in the long run if you are honest with them and yourself. If you're not up to a voluntary duty, you don't have to be. You can politely refuse the person's request.

     Put yourself first.

A. It is simply a personal choice that people make for their own reasons.

B. It is okay to be selfish from time to time.

C. Errors are bound to happen when you have on your training wheels.

D. Each of them waits for your immediate help.

E. Let bygones(过去的事)  be bygones.

F. Forgetting history means betrayal.

G. No one on Earth lives a perfectly "clean" life in every aspect.

    Increasingly, over the past ten years, people-especially young people have become aware of the need to change their eating habits, because much of the food they eat, particularly processed food, is not good for the health. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in natural foods: foods which do not contain chemical additives and which have not been affected by chemical fertilizers（化肥）widely used in farming today.

    Natural foods, for example, are vegetables, fruit and grain which have been grown in soil that is rich in organic matter. In simple terms, this means that the soil has been nourished by unused vegetable matter, which provides it with essential vitamins and minerals. This in itself is a natural process compared with the use of chemicals and fertilizers, the main purpose of which is to increase the amount but not the quality of foods grown in commercial farming areas.

    Natural foods also include animals which have been allowed to feed and move freely in healthy pastures（生活状况）. Compare this with what happens in the mass production of poultry（家禽）: there are battery farms, for example, where thousands of chickens live crowded together in one building and are fed on food which is little than rubbish. Chickens kept in this way are not only tasteless as food; they also produce eggs which lack important vitamins.

    There are other aspects of healthy eating which are now receiving increasing attention from experts in diet. Take, for example, the question of sugar. This is actually a nonessential food! It is not that sugar is harmful in itself. But it does seem to be additive: the quantity we use has grown steadily and in Britain today each person consumes an average of 200 pounds a year! Yet all it does is provide us with energy, in the form of calories. There are no vitamins in it, no minerals and no fibre.

    Frank Woolworth was born in Rodman, New York, in 1852. His family were very poor farmers, and there was never enough to eat. Frank decided he did not want to be a farmer. So he took a short business course, and went to work as a salesman in a large city.

    Woolworth realized he had a natural skill for showing goods to attract people's interest, but he soon learned something more important. One day his boss told him to sell some odds and ends (小商品) for as much as he could get. Frank put all these things on one table with a sign which said FIVE CENTS EACH. People fought and pushed to buy the things and the table was soon cleared.

    Soon afterwards, Woolworth opened his own store, selling goods at five and ten cents. But he had another lesson to learn before he became successful. That is, if you want to make money by selling low-price goods, you have to buy them in large quantities(大量) directly from the factories. Once, for example, Woolworth went to Germany and placed an order for knives. The order was so large that the factory had to keep running 24 hours a day for a whole year. In this way, the price of the knives was cut down by half.

    By 1919, Woolworth had over 1000 stores in the US and Canada, and opened his first store in London. He made a lot of money and his name became famous throughout the world. He always ran his business according to strict rules, of which the most important was: “ THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.”

    Have you ever looked out of the window of a passenger plane from 30,000 feet at the vast expanses of empty ocean and uninhabited land, and wondered how people can have any major effect on the Earth? I have. It is now becoming pretty clear that we are causing a great deal of damage to the natural environment. And the planes which rush us in comfort to destinations around the globe, contribute to one of the biggest environmental problems that we face today— global warming.

    As usual, people in the developing world are having to deal with problems created mainly by those of us in developed countries. Beatrice Schell, a spokeswoman for the European Federation for Transport and Environment says that, "One person flying in an airplane for one hour is responsible for the same greenhouse gas emissions（排放）as a typical Bangladeshi in a whole year." And every year jet aircraft produce almost as much carbon dioxide as the entire African continent does.

    There is a way of offsetting(抵消) the carbon dioxide we produce when we travel by plane. A company called Future Forests offers a service which can relieve the guilty consciences of air travelers. The Future Forest website calculates the amount of CO₂ you are responsible for producing on your flight, and for a small fee will plant a number of trees which will absorb this CO₂.

    Yesterday I returned to Japan from England, and was happy to pay Future Forests 25 pounds to plant the 3 trees which balance my share of the CO₂ produced by my return flight. Now the only thing making me lose sleep is jet lag.

    In every British town, large and small, you will find shops that sell second-hand goods. Sometimes such shops deal mostly in furniture, sometimes in books, sometimes in ornaments（装饰） and household goods, sometimes even in clothes.

    The furniture may often be "antique", and it may well have changed hands many times. It may also be very valuable, although the most valuable piece will usually go to the London salerooms, where one piece might well be sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds. As you look around these shops and see the polished wood of chests and tables, you cannot help thinking of those long-dead hands which polished that wood, of those now-closed eyes which once looked at these pieces with love.

    The books, too, may be antique and very precious; some may be rare first printings. Often when someone dies or has to move house, his books may all be sold, so that sometimes you may find whole libraries in one shop. On the border between England and Wales, there is a town which has become a huge bookshop as well. Even the cinema and castle have been taken over, and now books have replaced sheep as the town's main trade.

    There are also much more humble shops, sometimes simply called "junk shops", where you can buy small household pieces very cheaply. Sometimes the profits（利润）from these shops go to charity. Even these pieces, though, can make you feel sad; you think of those people who once treasured them, but who have moved on to another country or to death.

    Although the British do not worship（崇拜）their ancestors, they do treasure the past and the things of the past. This is true of houses as well. These days no one knocks them down; they are rebuilt until they are often better than new. In Britain, people do not buy something just because it is new. Old things are treasured for their proven worth; new things have to prove themselves before they are accepted.

    Your mobile phone vibrates in your pocket. 'Need to see you,' reads the screen. Nothing new, considering that texting is currently the most common form of long-distance communication. But how were messages conveyed in the past?

    One of the first methods was the smoke signal. This practice was used by Chinese soldiers guarding the Great Wall to warn of the enemy's approach. The Greeks invented a whole alphabet of smoke signals for sending messages. But it was Native Americans who made the system mobile by carrying small bunches of dried grasses around with them. These could be lit quickly from any place at any time.

    Moving on to messages transmitted by sound, an early technique was the drum. Drums are still used today in the rainforests of Africa, Papua New Guinea and Central and South America for broadcasting news. The instrument is made from a piece of wood, which is empty inside, and this is hit with a stick. On receiving the message, each village passes it on to the next, which means that news can travel at up to 150 km an hour.

    In some parts of the world, humans are able to convey messages over long distances without using instruments. On La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, people use Silbo, or the 'whistling language' to communicate across the valleys. The language involves the use of the tongue, lips and hands to make sounds, which can travel up to 5 km. To ensure its continuation, Silbo is currently a compulsory subject in primary and secondary schools on the island.

    A look at long-distance communication would not be complete without mentioning the art of yodelling. This is a form of singing, in which the voice changes sound levels very quickly, making it easily heard over long distances. It is believed that the technique was developed in the Swiss Alps, but it is also found in other places such as Central Africa. At one time, yodelling was popular in theatres and music halls, but this is no longer so.

    As data and identity theft becomes more and more common, the market is growing for biometric(生物测量)technologies—like fingerprint scans—to keep others out of private e-spaces. At present, these technologies are still expensive, though.

    Researchers from Georgia Tech say that they have come up with a low-cost device(装置)that gets around this problem: a smart keyboard. This smart keyboard precisely measures the cadence(节奏)with which one types and the pressure fingers apply to each key. The keyboard could offer a strong layer of security by analyzing things like the force of a user's typing and the time between key presses. These patterns are unique to each person. Thus, the keyboard can determine people's identities, and by extension, whether they should be given access to the computer it's connected to—regardless of whether someone gets the password right.

    It also doesn't require a new type of technology that people aren't already familiar with. Everybody uses a keyboard and everybody types differently.

    In a study describing the technology, the researchers had 100 volunteers type the word "touch" four times using the smart keyboard. Data collected from the device could be used to recognize different participants based on how they typed, with very low error rates. The researchers say that the keyboard should be pretty straightforward to commercialize and is mostly made of inexpensive, plastic-like parts. The team hopes to make it to market in the near future.

    A company has just launched(发起) what it calls "the world's first free standardized English test" recently. Anyone can take the test for free. The new exam is called the EFSET, which is short for Education First Standardized English Test. The company, Education First, is known by the letters EF.

    It is reported that there are two billion English language learners worldwide. Many of them are interested in attending an American college or university. To do so, foreign students need to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language—better known as TOEFL. However, many foreigners are not rich enough to take the TOEFL. In addition, test-takers often have to travel overnight to reach an official testing site. The World Bank says an average Cambodian worker earns only about $1,000 per year. The cost of taking the TOEFL is about 17.5 percent of the average worker's yearly wage.

    It is not just individuals who find the test pricey. Some governments also find it too expensive. What's more, not everyone needs official results from the TOEFL or IELTS—the International English Language Testing System. In the future, it's likely that the government may use the EFSET to test millions of employees and students.

    Experts believe that the EFSET meets the highest value in language testing. It uses special computer software that makes the questions easier or harder, depending on one's performance. The EFSET measures all the English learners' levels while the IELTS and TOEFL only measure learners' levels from intermediate(中等的) to advanced. The EFSET is unique in the sense that it gives free online access to anyone interested in measuring their English level.

    There is a 50-minute and a two-hour version of the test, which its developers are calling the EFSET Plus. Both versions test only reading and listening skills. It's hopeful that speaking and writing skills will be tested in the future. The IELTS and the TOEFL still use humans to rate the speaking and writing sections. It's a huge deal for students who are in areas where they can't get to the TOEFL or the IELTS. However, it is too early to know whether the EFSET results are acceptable for colleges and universities in America.

    Scientists Diego Kersting and Cristina Linares have found that some coral species are able to recover from harmful warming events through a unique survival strategy (策略)—known as "rejuvenescence" (新生)—among corals in the Mediterranean Sea. The findings represent some rare good news for corals around the world, which are facing numerous severe threats—most notably, climate change.

    "The main threats are climate change, overfishing, pollution and coastal urbanization," Kersting said. "But currently, climate change is probably the one causing the most coral cover declines. Warming stresses corals up to a point that may cause death. Some corals bleach (白化) before dying. Other corals do not bleach but die directly." He went on, "Our findings are significant because this survival strategy was only known from fossil corals that existed hundreds of millions of years ago. It is the first time that it has been found in a living coral. Thanks to our findings, we know now that some corals are able to recover, but unfortunately this is not enough in the current climate change context."

    For their research, Kersting and Linares monitored 243 colonies of the endangered reef-building coral Cladocoracaespitosa in Spain's Columbretes Islands Marine Reserve over 16 years, starting in 2002. The monitoring revealed that Cladocoracaespitosa in the Mediterranean uses rejuvenescence to cope with warming events. This process involves the polyps — or the individual coral animals in a colony—shrinking inward and abandoning their skeletons (骨骼) during warm periods, before rejuvenating at a later point. "What happens is that some polyps in a coral colony—sometimes just one— reduces completely its dimensions and partially retreats from its skeleton," Kersting said. "Once the stressful event is over, the shrunken or rejuvenated polyp recovers its size and builds up a new skeleton. Eventually, it begins to reproduce itself through budding and begins to cover the dead colony surfaces."

    He continued, "The results were very surprising because I started to observe colonies that were dead years ago, that were showing living parts many years after their death."

    Sports can help you keep fit and get in touch with nature. However, whether you are on the mountains, in the waves, or on the grassland, you should be aware that your choice of sport might have great influence on the environment.

    Some sports are resource-hungry. Golf, as you may know, eats up not only large areas of countryside, but also tons of water. Besides, all sorts of chemicals and huge amounts of energy are used to keep its courses(高尔夫球场) in good condition. This causes major environmental effects. For example, in the dry regions of Portugal and Spain, golf is often held responsible for serious water shortages in some local areas.

    In fact, there are many environment friendly sports. Power walking is one of them that you could take up today. You don't need any special equipment except a pair of good shoes; and you don't have to worry about resources and your purse. Simple and free, power walking can also keep you fit. If you can walk regularly, it will be good for your heart and bones. Experts say that 20 minutes of power walking daily can make you feel less anxious, sleep well and control your weight better.

    Whatever sport you take up, you can make it greener by using environment friendly equipment and buying products made from recycled materials. But the final goal should be "green gyms". They are better replacements(代替物) for traditional health clubs and modern sports centers. Members of green gyms play sports outdoors, in the countryside or other open spaces. There is no special requirement for you to start your membership. And best of all, it's free.

Earlier this year a series of papers in The Lancet reported that 85 percent of the $265 billion spent each year on medical research is wasted because too often absolutely nothing happens after initial results of a study are published. No follow-up investigations to replicate(复制) or expand on a discovery. No one uses the findings to build new technologies.

The problem is not just what happens after publication — scientists often have trouble choosing the right questions and properly designing studies to answer them. Too many studies test too few subjects to arrive at firm conclusions. Researchers publish reports on hundreds of treatments for diseases that work in animal models but not in humans. Drug companies find themselves unable to reproduce promising drug targets published by the best academic institutions. The growing recognition that something has gone wrong in the laboratory has led to calls for, as one might guess, more research on research — attempts to find rules to ensure that peer-reviewed studies are, in fact, valid.

It will take a concerted effort by scientists and other stakeholders to fix this problem. We can do so by exploring ways to make scientific investigation more reliable and efficient. These may include collaborative team science, study registration, stronger study designs and statistical tools, and better peer review, along with making scientific data widely available so that others can replicate experiments, therefore building trust in the conclusions of those studies.

Reproducing other scientists' analyses or replicating their results has too often in the past been looked down on with a kind of "me-too" derision(嘲笑) that would waste resources — but often they may help avoid false leads that would have been even more wasteful. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to replication is the inaccessibility of data and results necessary to rerun the analyses that went into the original experiments. Searching for such information can be extremely difficult. Investigators die, move and change jobs; computers crash; online links malfunction. Data are sometimes lost — even, as one researcher claimed when confronted about spurious(伪造的) results, eaten by termites(白蚁).

There has definitely been some recent progress. An increasing number of journals, including Nature and Science, have adopted measures such as checklists for study design and reporting while improving statistical review and encouraging access to data. Several funding agencies, meanwhile, have asked that researchers outline their plans for sharing data before they can receive a government grant.

But it will take much more to achieve a lasting culture change. Investigators should be rewarded for performing good science rather than just getting statistically significant ("positive") but nonreplicable results. Revising the present incentive(激励) structure may require changes on the part of journals, funders, universities and other research institutions.

What is language for? Some people seem to think it's for practicing grammar rules and earning lists of words—the longer the list, the better. That's wrong. Language is for the exchange (交流) of ideas and information. It's meaningless knowing all about a language if you can't use it freely. Many students I have met know hundreds of grammar rules, but they can't speak correctly or fluently (流利地). They are afraid of making mistakes. One shouldn't be afraid of making mistakes when speaking a foreign language. Native speakers make mistakes and break rules, too. Bernard saw once wrote, "Foreigners often speak English too correctly. "But the mistakes that native speakers make are different from those that Chinese students make. They're English mistakes in the English language. And if enough native speakers break a rule, it is no longer a rule. What used to be wrong becomes right. People not only make history, they make language. But a people can only make its own language. It can't make another people's language. So Chinese students of English should pay attention to grammar, but they shouldn't overdo (做过头) it. They should put communication first.

For 30 years, Alaska's northern fur seal population has not increased. But the ocean mammals are appearing in growing numbers in one unlikely place-a small island that forms the tip of an active undersea volcano. Bogoslof Island is distant and unpopulated. It sits in the eastern Bering Sea. Openings on the ground there release mud, steam and sulfurous gases, but northern fur seals find the island to be a good place for giving birth and raising their young.

It is unclear why the seals have chosen to live on an active volcanic island instead of other unpopulated islands in the area. "The surface is covered with these big blocks, some as big as 10 meters in length, which were exploded out of the vent,” said Chris Waythomas, a U.S. Geological Survey research scientist.

Northern fur seals get their name from their extremely thick fur; they have about 60,000 hairs per square centimeter. When Russian Emperor Alexander II needed money and decided to sell Alaska to the United States in 1867, fur was one of the future state's known valuables.

Most of the world's northern fur seals live in the eastern Bering Sea area. They live in the ocean from November to June and return to land in summer, when they breed and nurse pups. Between 1950 and 1988, the northern fur seal population dropped from 2.1 million to 1.1 million. Scientists do not know why they have not made a comeback. Northern fur seals were first seen on Bogoslof in 1980. NOAA researchers have since carried out periodic studies of the population.

Volcanic activity on Bogoslof has remained mostly stable. But Gelatt's crew chose not to camp there during their week-long visit in August. They feared an explosion could shoot up huge rocks. Instead, they made day trips from a secured boat. The crew counted the number of seals and examined whether images taken from above by an unpiloted aircraft could be used in future counts.

A new review article, from an international team of material scientists, is suggesting a leather-like material made from mushroom has the potential to be cheaper and more environmentally sustainable than animal leather of its plastic derivations (衍生物) .

Non-animal derived forms of leather have traditionally been willingly accepted by sustainability advocates. While these types of "vegan textiles" sidestep many issues found when producing traditional leather, these synthetic (合成的) materials have their own host of dilemmas. As well as relying on harmful chemicals for production, synthetic leathers come up against the same non-biodegradable problems faced by most plastic products.

Leather made from fungi (菌类) is a relatively new innovation. The little mushrooms that we see pop out of the ground are only a small part of any given fungus. Under the ground is an often sprawling web of branching, threaded growths known collectively as the mycelium. It is from this mycelium structure that leather can be produced.

Bismarck and colleagues suggest advances in making processes have resulted in fungi-derived leather being able to now meet the "functional and aesthetic (审美的) expectations of consumers". They think fungi-derived leather overcomes the ethical (伦理的) issues facing animal leather and the environmental issues facing synthetic leathers.

In addition to being more environmentally sustainable to produce than leather and its synthetic alternatives, pure fungi — biomass — based leather substitutes are also biodegradable at the end of their service life and cheap to make.

Scaling the production of fungi leather up to industrial levels is perhaps one of the remaining hurdles facing this nascent industry. But this may not be a problem for too much longer. Just last year a team from Finland revealed the development of what they claimed was a novel industrial process that can scale up production of fungi leather.

"Substantial advances in fungi-based leathers and the growing number of companies that are producing them suggests that this new material will play a major role in the future of ethically and environmentally responsible fabrics," says Bismarck.

According to a recent study, a new kind of genetically modified(转基因的)rice can prevent infections of HIV, the virus responsible for the disease AIDS.

The study reports the newly-developed rice produces proteins(蛋白质)that attach directly to the HIV virus. This process keeps the virus from mixing with human cells. The scientists say it can remove the effect of the virus and block its spreading.

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS reports that worldwide, nearly 37 million people were living with HIV in 2017.The organization says the largest number of those is in developing countries. Nearly two-thirds of HIV cases are in Africa. Now there is no cure for HIV/AIDS though there have been developments in oral drug treatments to slow the progression of the disease.

The new study predicts the rice-based method will lead to long-term use of the anti-HIV treatment across the developing world. Researchers say the “groundbreaking” discovery is “realistically the only way” that anti-HIV combination treatments can be produced at a cost low enough for the developing world.

They say the easiest and most cost-effective way to use the rice will be to make it into a cream to be put on the skin. The HIV-fighting proteins can then enter the body through the skin. People all over the world could grow the rice and make the cream themselves. This would prevent the cost and travel required for many patients to receive treatments and medicine.

The process of changing the genetic structure of food crops has been debated for some time. Critics of genetically engineered crops believe they can harm people. The scientific team says further testing is needed to ensure that the genetic engineering process does not produce any additional chemicals that could be dangerous to human bodies.

You can actually catch a good mood or a bad mood(情绪) from your friends, according to a new study in the journal Royal Society Open Science. But that shouldn't stop you from hanging out with friends who are down in the dumps, say the new study authors. Thankfully, the effect isn't large enough to push you into depression.

The new research involved groups of junior high and high school students. They took part in depression medical tests and answered questions about their best friends, many of whom were also involved in the study. In total, 2,194 students were included in the analysis, which used a mathematical model to look for connections among friend networks.

Overall, students whose friends suffered from bad moods were more likely to report bad moods themselves. And they were less likely to have improved when they were tested again six months to a year later. When people had more happy friends, on the other hand, their moods were more likely to improve over time.

Some symptoms related to depression—like helplessness, tiredness, and loss of interest—also seemed to follow this pattern, which scientists cal "social contagion(传染)". But this isn't something so harmful that people need to worry about, says lead author Robert Eyre at the University of Warwick's Center for Complexity Science. Rather, it's likely just a "normal empathetic(移情的) response that we're all familiar with, and something we recognize by common sense", he says.

"In other words, when a friend is going through a rough patch, it makes sense that you'll feel some of their pain, and it's certainly not a reason to stay away," says Eyre. The study also found that having friends who were depressed did not increase participants' risk of becoming depressed themselves. "The good news from our work is that following the evidence-based advice on improving moods—like exercise, sleeping well, and managing stress—can help your friends too," Eyre says.

Smart Highway is a creative idea for smart roads of tomorrow: Smart Highway is the result of the teamwork between builder and developer Heijmans and designer Daan Roosegaarde.

Among them, Glowing Lines, the world's first light-emitting(发光的) highway, is a safe and environment-friendly road. The site of the pilot project is a part of the N329 Highway in Oss, located in the province of Noord-Brabant, the Netherlands.

The road was built by Heijmans and was designed by Daan Roosegaarde, using light- emitting paints. The paints absorb ultraviolet light(紫外线) during the day and give it off for up to 10 hours at night. Solar energy panels(太阳能板) or other sources of power can provide energy to make sure that the road continues to provide light as required, despite weather or daylight hours.

The Van Gogh-Roosegaarde bicycle path is a creative path, inspired by Van Gogh's Starry Night and designed by Daan Roosegaarde. There are thousands of light-emitting stones, giving visitors an experience of poetry and design. The path gets energy at daytime and emits light during the night. It is supported by LED light to make sure of safety, quality and light during the whole night. Art and technology merge in this new, public view. The bicycle path is 600 metres long and is part of the Van Gogh cycling path.

The Van Gogh-Roosegaarde bicycle path is set up as a cultural and enjoyable road, based on the light-emitting technologies developed for the Smart Highway. Riding a bicycle at this site is a wonderful experience. Furthermore, the path is lit up in such an environment-friendly way without destroying the ecology. As a tourist attraction, the bicycle path also offers economic added value to the Eindhoven region: Visitors can experience the pathway in the evening and will likely stay in the region longer.