Keeping plants at home is a healthy and comfortable way of life. The following houseplants can create a most beautiful piece of green for your home.

Bird's Nest Fern (蕨)

The bird's nest fern is a good choice for anyone with a house that wouldn't support sun-loving species. It's a hardy fern variety adapting to living on forest floors, where the air tends to be cool and damp. It likes to be misted as well, but this doesn't always mean you need a misting bottle—spraying (喷洒) it in the sink or hanging it near a shower often works as well.

Chinese Money Plant

This is a flowering species that might be most appropriate for experienced plant gardeners looking for a new challenge. It prefers a moderate amount of indirect light, and tends to dry out slightly between watering sessions. It produces new plants easily without any input, directly from its root system. These can coexist in the same pot for a time.

Resurrection Plant

This native of the Mexican desert has adapted to surviving in extreme drought by curling (蜷缩) into a ball and remaining in seemingly lifeless state for years, if necessary. In this form, it can be transported by the wind across the dry landscape to areas with water. It will revive within hours in a shallow bowl of water, unfolding and transforming into a fresh and green moss (苔藓).

Snake Plant

This is a striking houseplant that can be an especially good option for new plant owners who you might not trust to keep a plant alive. It grows happily in almost any condition. While it prefers bright light, it doesn't mind shade or even artificial light. Plus, thanks to its thick, fleshy leaves, it stores water with remarkable efficiency, which makes it survive without water in the earth.

Desperate to help his 96-year-old mother to speak her mother tongue again, Keith McDermott made an appeal on social media and was met with a flood of kind responses. The old lady, Ray, was moved to tears after talking on the phone with one of the enthusiastic respondents in Welsh.

Ray moved to America after meeting her husband when she was only 18, hence waving goodbye to her life in Wales. She continued to speak Welsh with her mum- keeping a little bit of home. But she lost her beloved mum four decades ago and hadn't spoken Welsh since.

Despite suffering from short-term memory loss and sometimes not remembering what she has done recently, Ray's childhood memories in Wales remain crystal clear. "She wants to return but I know, given her age, such long-distance travel is out of the question." said Keith, "Once she mentioned ‘I wish I could speak Welsh again but l suppose I never will' It was then that I thought I should make her-wish happen."

So Keith, 70, posted on social media in the New York Welsh area asking for any Welsh speakers that could speak Welsh with his mum. And he was touched, as-well as-a little shocked, to receive over 30 responses within half an hour. Keith thanked everyone and eventually asked Melisa to give his mum a phone call. Speaking with Melisa, her (Ray's) Welsh was a little rusty. A few more Welsh conversations and I think she'd be fluent again," added Keith.

"When you have a parent in their nineties, you-will find you two have something in common: you're both old, So I am very sympathetic to my mother? feelings of loneliness and isolation (孤立). I'm feeling it myself." Keith hopes to set up more Welsh phone conversations for his-mum and Melisa has promised to send Ray some short stories in Welsh to remind her of her life in Wales.

It is a phenomenon known as the "first-night" effect that people often experience trouble sleeping in a different bed in unfamiliar surroundings. If a person stays in the same room the following night they tend to sleep more soundly. Yuka Sasaki and her colleagues at Brown University set out to investigate the origins of this effect.

Dr. Sasaki knew the first-night effect probably has something to do with how humans evolved(进化). The puzzle was what benefit would be gained from it when performance might be affected the following day. She also knew from previous work conducted on birds and dolphins that these animals put half of their brains to sleep at a time so that they can rest while remaining watchful enough to avoid predators (捕食者). This led her to wonder if people might be doing the same thing.

To take a closer look, her team studied 35 healthy people as they slept in the unfamiliar environment of the university's Department of Psychological Sciences. The participants each slept in the department for two nights and were carefully monitored with techniques that looked at the activity of their brains. Dr. Sasaki found, as expected, the participants slept less well on their first night than they did on their second, taking more than twice as long to fall asleep and sleeping less overall. During deep sleep, the participants' brains behaved in a similar manner seen in birds and dolphins. On the first night only, the left hemispheres (半球) of their brains did not sleep nearly as deeply as their right hemispheres did.

Curious if the left hemispheres were indeed remaining awake to process information detected in the surrounding environment, Dr. Sasaki re-ran the experiment while presenting the sleeping participants with a mix of regularly timed beeps (蜂鸣声) of the same tone and irregular beeps of a different tone during the night. She worked out that, if the left hemisphere was staying watchful to keep guard in a strange environment, then it would react to the irregular beeps by stirring people from sleep and would ignore the regularly timed ones. This is precisely what she found.