US private rocket company SpaceX has announced that two private citizens have paid to be sent around the Moon. The mission (任务) is planned for late 2018. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said, "This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years."

The two unnamed people will fly aboard a spaceship which is set for its first unmanned test flight later this year. The co-operation of America's NASA space agency had made the plan possible. Mr. Musk said, "The two passengers will travel faster and further into the solar system than any before them." Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration.

"We expect to conduct health and fitness tests, as well as begin initial training later this year. The first mission would be unmanned, and the next one―with crew―was expected in the second quarter of 2018," the rich businessman and inventor said, "The first passengers are entering this with their eyes open, knowing that there is some risk here. They're certainly not childish, and we'll do everything we can to reduce that risk, but it's not zero."

The space tourists would make a circle around the Moon, scanning the lunar surface and then going well beyond. However, the mission will not involve a lunar landing. "If NASA decided to take part in a lunar fly-by mission, then the agency would have privilege," Mr. Musk said. The US has not sent astronauts to the Moon since the early 1970s.

Next time you raise an eyebrow at the views of your friend, brother, sister or colleague, remember they could be helping to make you smarter. New research shows that intelligence is not fixed but can be improved throughout adulthood by family members, bright mates and intellectually challenging careers. The study challenges the commonly held belief that intelligence is fixed by the age of about 18.

    Scientific consensus (共识) suggests intelligence is controlled by genes, with environmental factors such as schooling and nutrition playing a part up to this age. After this point, IQ scores become steady. But James Flynn, professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, argues that people can "upgrade" their intelligence throughout their lives. He believes intellectual stimulation (刺激) from other people is important as the "brain seems to be rather like a muscle—the more you use it, the stronger it gets". However, the opposite is also true—so people who share a home or workplace with the intellectually challenged risk seeing their IQ levels nosedive as a result.

    Professor Flynn analyzed US intelligence tests from the last 65 years and created new IQ "age tables". He found a bright ten-year-old with brothers and sisters of average intelligence will suffer a five to ten point IQ disadvantage compared to a similar child with equally bright brothers and sisters. However, children with a low IQ could gain six to eight points by having brighter brothers and sisters and special educational treatment to help pull them up.

    Professor Flynn concluded that although genetics and early life experiences determine about 80% of intelligence, the remaining 20% is linked to lifestyle. This means people can raise their IQ, or allow it to fall, by ten points or more. He suggests the best way to improve IQ levels is to socialize with bright friends, and find an intellectually challenging job.

A technology company is developing a lie detector app for smart phones that could be used by parents, teachers—and even Internet daters.   The app measures blood flow in the face to assess whether or not you are telling the truth. Its developers say that it could be used for daters wanting to see if somebody really is interested in them. Parents could use it on their children to see if they are lying and teachers could work out which of their pupils are honest.   The app is being developed by Toronto startup NuraLogix and the software is called Transdermal Optical Imaging. The idea is that different human emotions create different facial blood flow patterns that we have no control over. These patterns change if we are telling the truth or telling a lie.

     Using the footage(拍摄的片段)from the smart phone camera, the software will see the changes in skin colors and compare them to standardized results. A study from last year found that anger was associated with more blood flow and redness while sadness was associated with less of both.

     Developmental neuroscientist (神经病学家) Kang Lee, who has been researching the field for 20 years, said. "It could be very useful, for example, for teachers. A lot of our students have math anxiety but they do not want to tell us. because thatˈs embarrassing." Lee remarked that the technology would not replace lie detectors used in a court of law. He said, "They want the accuracy to be extremely high, like genetic tests, so a one-in-a-million error rate. Our technique wonˈt be able to achieve an extremely high accuracy level, so because of that I donˈt think itˈs useful for the courts." He added that it would be a few years before the app is available to consumers.

Everyone has got two personalities—the one that is shown to the world and the other that is secret and real. You don’t show your secret personality when you are awake because you can control your behavior, but when you are asleep, your sleeping position shows the real you. In a normal night, of course, people frequently change their positions. The important position is the one that you go to sleep in.

If you go to sleep on your back, you’re a very open person. You normally trust people and you are easily influenced by fashion or new ideas. You don’t like to displease people. So you never express your real feelings. You’re quite shy and you aren’t quite sure of yourself.

If you sleep on your stomach, you are a rather secretive person. You worry a lot and you’re always easily upset. You always stick to your own opinions or judgment, but you don’t raise your hope too much. You usually live for today not tomorrow. This means that you enjoy having a good time.

If you sleep curled up, you are probably a very nervous person. You have a low opinion of yourself and so you’re often defensive. You’re shy and you don’t normally like meeting people. You prefer to on your own. You’re easily hurt.

If you sleep on your side, you have usually got a well—balanced personality. You know your strengths and weakness. You’re usually careful. You believe in yourself. You sometimes feel anxious, but you don’t often get sad. You always say what you think even if it makes people rather angry.

Walk through the Amazon rainforest today and you will find it is steamy, warm, damp and thick. But if you had been around 15 000 years ago,during the last ice age,would it have been the same? For more than 30 years, scientists have been arguing about how rainforests like the Amazon might have reacted to the cold, dry climates of the ice ages, but until now, no one has reached a satisfying answer.

 Rainforests like the Amazon are important for mopping up CO₂ from the atmosphere and helping to slow global warming. Currently the trees in the Amazon take in around 500 million tones of CO₂ each year, equal to the total amount of CO₂ giving off in the UK each year. But how will the Amazon react to future climate change? If it gets drier, will it still survive and continue to draw down CO₂? Scientists hope that they will be able to learn in advance how the rainforest will manage in the future by understanding how rainforests reacted to climate change in the past.  

Unfortunately, getting into the Amazon rainforest and collecting information are very difficult.To study past climate, scientists need to look at fossilized pollen, kept in lake mud.Going back to the last ice age means drilling deep down into lake sediments(沉淀物), which requires specialized equipment and heavy machinery.There are very few roads and paths, or places to land helicopters and airplanes. Rivers tend to be the easiest way to enter the forest, but this still leaves vast areas between the rivers completely unsampled(未取样)．So far, only a handful of cores have been drilled that go back to the last ice age and none of them provide enough information to prove how the Amazon rainforest reacts to climate change.

Walk through the Amazon rainforest today and you will find it is steamy, warm, damp and thick. But if you had been around 15 000 years ago,during the last ice age,would it have been the same? For more than 30 years, scientists have been arguing about how rainforests like the Amazon might have reacted to the cold, dry climates of the ice ages, but until now, no one has reached a satisfying answer.

 Rainforests like the Amazon are important for mopping up CO₂ from the atmosphere and helping to slow global warming. Currently the trees in the Amazon take in around 500 million tones of CO₂ each year, equal to the total amount of CO₂ giving off in the UK each year. But how will the Amazon react to future climate change? If it gets drier, will it still survive and continue to draw down CO₂? Scientists hope that they will be able to learn in advance how the rainforest will manage in the future by understanding how rainforests reacted to climate change in the past.  

Unfortunately, getting into the Amazon rainforest and collecting information are very difficult.To study past climate, scientists need to look at fossilized pollen, kept in lake mud.Going back to the last ice age means drilling deep down into lake sediments(沉淀物), which requires specialized equipment and heavy machinery.There are very few roads and paths, or places to land helicopters and airplanes. Rivers tend to be the easiest way to enter the forest, but this still leaves vast areas between the rivers completely unsampled(未取样)．So far, only a handful of cores have been drilled that go back to the last ice age and none of them provide enough information to prove how the Amazon rainforest reacts to climate change.

Here are a few tips we’ve put together to help you learn English well.

Speak, speak, speak

Practise speaking as often as you can—even speaking to yourself is good practice.

Try recording yourself whenever you can. Compare your pronunciation with the master version, see how you can do better and have another go. If you do this several times, you will find that each version is better than the last.

Why not learn with someone else?

It helps if you can learn with someone else. If you can persuade a friend or a family member to study with you, it will make you keep working.

Don’t get stuck by a word you don’t know.

Practise improvising (即兴的) ways of getting your meaning across when speaking spontaneously (本能地) , even if you don’t know the exact words or phrases. Think of things you might want to say whenever you have spare time. Use facial expressions, hand movements, anything to get your meaning across.

Language learning is also about intuition.

Guesswork is an important way to learn a new language. When listening to recorded material, you aren’t expected to understand everything first round. If you play the same piece several times, you will most probably understand something new each time.

Build up your vocabulary.

A wide vocabulary is the key to successful language learning but don’t try to learn too much at once. It’s best to study frequently, for short periods of time. Take at most six or seven items of vocabulary and learn them. Put them into sentences to fix them in your mind, then come back to them later.

And above all, have fun!   

More than a decade ago, cognitive（认知的）scientists John Bransfgord and Daniel Schwartz, both then at Vanderbilt University, found that knowledge was not the ability to retain facts or apply previous knowledge to a new situation but a quality they called “preparation for future learning.” The researches asked fifth graders and college students to create a recovery plan to protect bald eagles from extinction. Shockingly, the two groups came up with plans of similar quality (though the college students had better spelling skills). From the standpoint of a traditional educator, this outcome indicated that schooling had failed to help students think about ecosystems and extinction, major scientific ideas.

　　The researches decided to go deeper, however. They asked both groups to generate questions about important issues needed to create recovery plans. On this task, they found large differences. College students focused on critical issues. The college students had cultivated the ability to ask questions, the foundation of critical thinking. They had learned how to learn.

Museums and other institutions of informal learning may be more suitable to teach this skill than elementary and secondly schools. At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, we recently studied how learning to ask good questions can affect the quality of people’s scientific inquiry. We found that when we taught participants to ask “What if?” and “How can?” questions that nobody present would know the answer to and that would spark exploration, they engaged in better inquiry at the next exhibit-asking more questions, performing more experiments and making better interpretations of their results. Specially, their questions became more comprehensive at the new exhibit.

This type of learning is not limited to museums of institutional settings. Informal learning environment tolerate failure better than schools. Perhaps many teachers have too little time to allow students to form and pursue their own questions and too much ground to cover in the curriculum. But people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depend on them being able to make critical decisions about their own medical treatment, says, or what we must do about global energy needs and demands. For that, we have a robust（健全的）informal system that gives no grades, takes all comers, and is available even on holidays and weekends.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was not leaning（倾斜） when it was built in 1173 and it was straight like a pole. It started to shift（变换） direction soon after construction because of poor foundation in addition to the loose layer of subsoil(底土). At the beginning, it leaned to the southeast before the shaky foundation started to shift leaning towards the southwest. After the period of structural strengthening in the beginning of 21st century, now the Leaning Tower of Pisa leans at an angle of 3.97 degrees.

In 1178, the shift in direction was observed for the first time when the construction had progressed further to the third floor. The tower was very heavy for the three-meter foundation that was built on a weak area of land.

For compensating(补偿) the leaning position, the builders started to construct the upper floors with one side higher than the other one. This caused the tower to lean in the other direction. This unusual structure led to the tower being actually curved. In spite of these efforts, the tower kept on leaning.

The government of Italy started to plan a prevention of the complete collapse of the tower in 1964. However, a request was put forward by the authorities to keep the leaning position because of the tourism industry of the region.

After nearly two decades of careful planning by engineers, historians and mathematicians, the stabilization efforts for the Leaning Tower of Pisa started in 1990. The tower was closed for the general public and the people living nearby moved away. For reducing the total weight of the tower, its seven bells which represented the seven musical notes were removed. The tower was reopened for the general public on December 15, 2001.

In May 2008, after removing another 70 metric tons of earth, the engineers announced that the tower had been finally stabilized and it would remain stable for at least 200 years.

a. People noticed the tower began to shift its direction.

b. The repair work was carried out last time.

c. The Leaning Tower of Pisa was repaired for the first time.

d. The Leaning Tower of Pisa was built.

e. The tower was opened to the visitors again.

f. The government started to make a plan for the tower.

Music for Humans and Humpback Whales

As researches conclude in Science, the love of music is not only a universal feature of the human species, but is also deeply fixed in complex structures of the human brain, and is far more ancient than previously suspected.

In the articles that discuss the field of bio-musicology, the study of the biological basis for the creation and appreciation of music, researchers present various evidence to show that music-making is at once an original human“business”, and an art form with skillful performers throughout the animal kingdom.

The new reports stress that humans hold no copyright on sound wisdom, and that a number of nonhuman animals produce what can rightly be called music, rather than random sound. Recent in-depth analyses of thesongs sung by humpback whales show that, even when their organ would allow them to do otherwise, the animals converge on the same choices relating to sounds and beauty, and accept the same laws of song composition as those preferred by human musicians, and human ears, everywhere.

For example, male humpback whales, who spend six months of each year doing little else but singing, use rhythms similar to those found in human music and musical phrases of similar length-- a few seconds. Whales are able to make sounds over a range of at least seven octaves(八度音阶), yet they tend to move on through a song in beautiful musical intervals, rather than moving forwards madly. They mix the sounds like drums and pure tones in a ratio(比例)which agrees with that heard in much western music. They also use a favorite technique of human singers, the so-called A-B-A form, in which a theme is stated, then developed, and then returned to in slightly revised form.

Perhaps most impressive, humpback songs contain tunes that rhyme.“This suggests that whales use rhyme in the same way we do: as a technique in poem to help them remember complex material,”the researchers write.