Newly married couples can receive up to 600,000 yen to cover their rent and other costs to start a new life from next April if they live in a municipality adopting Japan's newlywed support program, government sources said Sunday.

As the nation's extremely low birth rate is mainly due to the tendency that people marry late or stay unmarried, the government will try to encourage marriages by enhancing（增强）the program to provide a larger sum and cover more couples, said the sources at the Cabinet Office.

To get the allowance, both husband and wife will have to be under age 40 at the registered date of marriage and have a combined income of less than 5.4 million yen, up from age 35 and 4.8 million yen under the current conditions for aid of up to 300,000 yen. Only 281 municipalities, or 15 percent of all cities, towns and villages in Japan, had adopted the program since July as they must shoulder half the expenses, but in a bid to increase the number, the central government will bear two-thirds from 2021, the sources said.

The program is part of government efforts to deal with the low birth rate as married couples tend to have two children，even though the average number of children a woman will bear in her lifetime was 1.6 last year with a record-low 865,000 babies born.

An economic incentive（刺激）is considered effective to encourage people to marry since 29.1 percent of single men aged 25 to 34 and 17.8 percent of single women said that lack of marriage funds was a reason they stayed unmarried in a 2015 survey by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

Technology has changed almost everything. With the Internet and mobile phones, everyone is now connected. Mobile phones are no longer just a luxury (奢侈品). They have played an important part in people's lives. And today, there is a very long-standing debate about the use of mobile phones in the classroom.

First of all, mobile phones can keep students connected. With mobile phones, parents might be less worried since they can easily check on their children, and students can easily call their parents. Secondly, they encourage shared learning. Students can share notes and reminders faster and easier with mobile phones. Moreover, mobile phones can be used as memory support. Students can record their lessons by taking pictures and / or videos for future use. With smart phones, learning can also be more fun. Additionally, students can use their phones for taking down notes and creating reminders. Last but not least, smart phones are an excellent source of information. Students can search for information on the Internet, or use the dictionary and translation tools on their phones.

However, allowing students to use their mobile phones in the classroom has some big disadvantages. For example, students' attention can easily be drawn away when their phones ring, and the learning process comes to a complete stop when students start to send and read messages or make and receive calls. Moreover, with the appearance of smart phones, it is now easy for students to play on the Internet or shop online. Smart phones can also be used for cheating (作弊). Text messaging is the new note passing. Students can exchange test answers through text messages without the teacher knowing. Finally, mobile phones can cause health problems. Playing with phones for long periods of time can harm students' eyesight, and the radiation (辐射) emitted from mobile phones may be bad for students' health.

A pretty face is never forgotten. Do you believe so? But maybe it is untrue! Psychologists believe beautiful people are less likely to be recognized. A new study suggests that attractiveness can actually prevent the recognition of faces, unless a pretty face has particularly distinctive (与众不同的) features, such as Angelina Jolie’s.

German psychologists think the recognition of pretty faces is distorted (扭曲) by emotions. Researchers Holger Wiese, Carolin Altmann and Stefan Schweinberger at the University of Jena, Germany, discovered in a study that photos of unattractive people were more easily remembered than pretty ones when they showed them to a group of people.

For the study, which was published in science magazine Neuropsychologia, the psychologists showed photos of faces to test subjects. Half of the faces were considered to be more attractive and the other half as less attractive, but all of them were being thought of as similarly distinctive looking. The test subjects were shown the faces for just a few seconds to memorize them and were shown them again during the test so that they could decide if they recognized them or not.

The researchers were surprised by the result. “Until now we assumed that it was generally easier to memorize faces which are being considered as attractive, just because we prefer looking at beautiful faces,” Dr. Wiese said. But the study showed that such a connection cannot be easily proven. He assumes that remembering pretty faces is distorted by emotional influences, which increase the sense of recognition at a later time. The researchers’ idea is backed up by evidence from EEG-recordings (脑电图记录) they used during their experiment which show the brains’ electric activity.

The study also revealed that in the case of attractive faces, considerably more false positive results were detected. In other words, people thought they recognized a face without having seen it before. “We obviously tend to believe that we recognize a face just because we find it attractive.” Dr. Wiese said.