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Five Ways to Reduce Your Living Costs While You Study in New Zealand

The  2016 Mercer Cost of Living survey  rated Auckland at 98th and Wellington at 123rd out of a list of 209 cities. That makes them much cheaper than cities like Shanghai (7), New York (11), London (17) and Sydney (42).  Within New Zealand, the cost of living varies according to where you live. Some cities have higher accommodation and transport costs than others. Check out these tips on how to keep your costs down while you are studying in New Zealand. 1. Save money on food It’s much cheaper to buy fresh fruit and vegetables at local markets rather than the supermarket. Most towns have at least one weekend market and larger cities have several. You’ll also save money by buying New Zealand-grown produce when it’s in season rather than splashing out on expensive imported produce. That means no strawberries in the middle of winter!  Sharing food costs and cooking meals with your flatmates is another way of cutting costs – and it’s a nice way to get of gett...
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I Am Convinced That Humans Need to Leave Earth : Stephen Hawking

Back in May, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking made yet another doomsday prediction. He said that humanity has 100 years left on Earth, which knocked 900 years off the prediction he made in November 2016, which had given humanity 1,000 years left. With his new estimate, Hawking suggested the only way to prolong humanity’s existence is for us to find a new home, on another planet. Speaking at the Starmus  Festival   in Trondheim, Norway on Tuesday, Hawking reiterated his point: “If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before,” he explained, according to the BBC . Specifically, Hawking said that we should aim for another Moon landing by 2020, and work to build a lunar base in the next 30 years — projects that could help prepare us to send human beings to Mars by 2025. “We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore...

Sleep

Sleep is an important part of your daily routine—you spend about one-third of your time doing it.  Quality sleep – and getting enough of it at the right times -- is as essential to survival as food and water.  Without sleep you can’t form or maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn and create new memories, and it’s harder to concentrate and respond quickly. Sleep is important to a number of brain functions, including how nerve cells communicate with each other.  In fact, your brain and body stay remarkably active while you sleep.  Recent findings suggest that sleep plays a housekeeping role that removes toxins in your brain that build up while you are awake.  Everyone needs sleep, but its biological purpose remains a mystery.  Sleep affects almost every type of tissue and system in the body – from the brain, heart, and lungs to metabolism, immune function, mood, and disease resistance.  Research shows that a chronic lack of sleep, o...

Communism or Socialism

If asked, most people would likely declare that they know fairly well what the terms in the title mean. In the heat of the election period  political debates, these terms are often used without much thought about their meaning. It happened to me that my opinion was perceived by different people as me advocating for both political concepts. It appears that some people see all the evils in one of these two political concepts, and every time when they disagree with some political view, they label it as  socialistic or communist - depending on their bias.  So to make a clear understanding here is comparison between communism and socialism;          Communism     Socialism Definition International theory or system  of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, with actual ownership ascribed to the community or state. Rejection ...

What Would Happen If The Sun Disappeared ???

If the sun suddenly blinked out of existence, you'd have nothing to worry about.—for the first eight minutes, anyway. After that, all hell would likely break loose. Still, it wouldn't be the instantaneous end to life on Earth that you might think. When The Lights Go Down Light takes roughly eight minutes to reach Earth from the sun. For that reason, if the sun disappeared, we'd still see it in the sky for another eight minutes. But what about gravity? The sun is the anchor point of the solar system—at 333,000 times the mass of  Earth, it exerts a hefty pull that keeps the planets locked in their orbits. If all that gravitational force disappeared, it would still take us eight minutes to feel it. That's because, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, gravity travels at the same speed as light.   Chaos Creeps In Slowly After that, though, Earth still    wouldn't be snuffed out. Electricity would still w...

A Happy Life May Not Be a Meaningful Life

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “ Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” For most people, feeling happy and finding life meaningful are both important and related goals. But do happiness and meaning always go together? It seems unlikely, given that many of the things that we regularly choose to do – from running marathons to raising children – are unlikely to increase our day-to-day happiness. Recent research suggests that while happiness and a sense of meaning often overlap, they also diverge in important and surprising ways. Roy Baumeister and his colleagues recently published a study in the  Journal of Positive Psychology  that helps explain some of the key differences between a happy life and a meaningful one. They asked almost 400 American adults to fill out three surveys over a period of weeks. The surveys asked people to answer a series of questions their happiness levels, the d...