Sometimes the simple act of being outside every day can be good to you. We often forget about what nature has to offer by staying inside too much. Going outside, you’ll probably be exposed to numerous sensations. You might hear the crinkle of leaves under your feet, concentrate on how the breeze cools your skin, and feel the sun offering its natural warmth.

Time outside also reminds you how you share your time on Earth with countless creatures and that you must live in harmony with them. The more often you encounter animals in their natural habitats, the easier it will be to recall why it’s so important to treat the outdoors with respect. After coming in contact with a squirrel, for example, you may be especially careful to throw your trash away in the nearest garbage can in case of some harmful leftover food. That’s because you’ve just been reminded that you’re not the only living thing to come in contact with what’s now rubbish.

Spending too much time indoors may cause us to become too isolated from others, especially if we use up much time in front of computer screens. It seems that a computer connected to the Internet allows you to share parts of your world with other people, but actually it can also make us feel more disconnected from others for lack of face-to-face communication. The time outside with a loved one allows you to take part in a shared experience. For instance, you can call attention to a type of flower that’s just started blooming and allow your companions to marvel at its beauty. That’s a similar shared experience.

Anyhow, it is not as hard as you might imagine. You may just decide to start an outdoor practice that takes you outside for a certain amount of time, preferably every day. The last 15 minutes of your lunch break strolling outside with a friend and some after-dinner family time discussing your days can be good options. Get off the computer and head outside! You’ll feel how your choice pays off.

During the period from 1660 through 1800, Great Britain became the world’s leader. Language itself became submitted to rules during this period. This need to fix the English language is best illustrated in the making of The Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson. Guides to the English language had been in existence before Johnson began his project in 1746. These, however, were often little more than lists of hard words. When definitions of common words were supplied, they were often unhelpful. For example, a “horse” was defined in an early dictionary as “a beast well known”.

Johnson changed all that, but the task was not an easy one. Renting a house at 17 Gough Square, Johnson began working in the worst of conditions. Supported only by his publisher, Johnson worked on the Dictionary with five assistants. Compared to the French Academy’s dictionary, which took forty workers fifty-five years to complete (1639 — 1694), Johnson’s dictionary was completed by very few people very quickly.

Balanced on a chair with only three legs, Johnson sat against a wall in a room filled with books. Johnson would read widely from these books, mark passages illustrating the use of a particular word, and give the books to his assistants so that they could copy the passages on slips of paper. These slips were then stuck to eighty large notebooks under the key words that Johnson had selected. Fixing the word by this method, Johnson could record a word’s usage and its definition.

How many passages were used? According to Johnson’s modern biographer Walter Jackson Bate, the original total number could have been over 240, 000. How many words were defined by the lexicographer? Over 40, 000 words appeared in two large books in April of 1755. Did Johnson fully understand the huge task he was undertaking when he began? As he told his contemporary biographer James Boswell, “I knew very well what I was undertaking and very well how to do it — and have done it very well.

Vitamin C for a cold? A good dose of Vitamin D on a sunny day? We all know that vitamins are critical for our health, but how did they get their names and when were they discovered in the first place?

American nutrition scientist Elmer McCullum conducted a variety of feed experiments with different animal populations and discovered that an “accessory” substance contained in some fats was essential to growth. That fat-soluble (脂溶的) substance became known as Vitamin “A” for “accessory.”

McCollum and others also conducted further experiments with rice-bran-derived nutrient, naming it Vitamin “B” after beriberi, which can cause heart failure and a loss of sensation in the legs and feet. Eventually, it turned out that the substance known as Vitamin B was a complex of eight water-soluble vitamins, which were each given individual names and numbered in order of discovery.

The custom of naming vitamins alphabetically in order of discovery continued. Today, four fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) and nine water-soluble vitamins (Vitamin C and the eight B vitamins) are considered essential to human growth and health. Only one vitamin bucked the oh-so-logical naming system: Vitamin K, discovered by Danish researcher Carl Peter Henrik Dam in 1929. The substance should have been in line to be called Vitamin F given its discovery date. But Dam’s research revealed that the vitamin is essential for blood coagulation (凝固) — known as Koagulation in the German journal that published his research — and his abbreviation for the vitamin somehow stuck.

It’s been decades since the last essential vitamin — Vitamin B12 — was discovered in 1948. It now appears unlikely that scientists will ever discover a new essential vitamin. But even if there’s no Vitamin F or G in our future, that doesn’t mean nutritional discovery has stopped completely. If the golden age of vitamin discovery was an appetizer (开胃菜) of sorts, scientists are devoted to the main course — a rapidly evolving understanding of the ways food shapes our lives, one microscopic substance at a time.