【推荐2】Do women talk more than men?     1     According to the latest research from the United States of America, men and women talk such different languages that it is like people from two different cultures trying to communicate. Professor Deborah Tannen, of Georgetown University, has noticed differences in the style of boys’ and girls’ conversations from an early age. According to her study, little girls’ conversation is less clear than boys’ and expresses more doubts.     2    

These differences will continue into adult life, she says. In public conversations, men talk most and interrupt other speakers more than women do. In private conversations, men and women speak in almost equal amounts.     3     Professor Tannen believes that, for women, private talking is a way to establish and test intimacy. For men, private talking is a way to explore the power structure of a relationship.

    4     “When a woman teaches another woman,” says Professor Tannen, “she is more likely to take a sharing approach and to encourage her student to join in. When a man teaches a woman, however, he wants to show that he has more knowledge and power in conversation.     5    ”

Some scientists who are studying speech think that the brain is preprogrammed for language. As we are usually taught to speak by women, it seems likely that the brain must have a sexual bias in its programming; otherwise, male speech patterns would not arise at all.

【推荐3】Psychologists who study creative accomplishments throughout the life cycle generally find that creativity peaks between the ages of mid to late 30s or early 40s.They tend to view creativity from the perspective of creative and innovative disciplines, rather than individual accomplishment. And they find little variation across different professions and disciplines of creativity and innovation, such as the arts and sciences.

At What Age Does Creativity Peak? A new study shows that it counts on whether you are a conceptual or an experimental thinker.

But according to two economics professors at Ohio State University, that’s only part of the story. Their research, which looked at 31 Nobel Prize Winners in the field of economics and when they made their most significant contributions to the field, uncovered evidence of two peak cycles of individual creativity in the sciences, one that surfaces very early in some people’s careers, and another that, for others, rises up later in their lives. The difference between those who experience a peak in creativity during their mid twenties and those who are more likely to peak in their mid 50s, the researchers say, is in the type of creativity involved.

People who are conceptual innovators — those who think out of the box and challenge conventional wisdom — tend to come up with new ideas and innovations automatically and peak at an earlier age. Those creators who are more experimental — who build on their knowledge and accepted theories throughout their careers and ultimately find new and innovative ways to analyze that knowledge — tend to peak later in life.

Past research has shown that conceptual artists — poets, painters and novelists — who have clear and more immediate goals for their work, such as to communicate very specific and timely ideas or emotions, work in a different time frame than experimental artists, whose goals are less clear and less precise and who work through trial and error at a more gradual pace. Examples of conceptual innovators include Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Herman Melville, and Albert Einstein, all of whom contributed their most innovative work while they were young. Examples of experimental innovators include Paul Cezanne, Robert Frost, Virginia Woolf, and Charles Darwin.

The researchers believe that their findings on this view of creativity — that your most creative period is more a product of the type of creator you are and the nature of your work than of the particular field you are in — extend to other academic and scholarly disciplines as well. If you are a conceptual thinker, you are likely to be more creative when you are younger; if you are an experimental thinker, you are likely to do your most creative work when you are older, perhaps even past middle age. In theory, then, there are no limitations to creativity. You could end up doing your best work in your forties, fifties, sixties or even later.

【推荐2】When Kim Zachman was making popular American foods for her two daughters, she also tried to learn the fun facts and stories behind their favorite foods in order to inspire them to read and learn. To their surprise, they found that many “American foods” are actually not American at all.

For example, hamburgers came from Germany but the food became popular when someone in America put them on a round piece of bread. And the famous New York-style pizza was a food eaten by the poor in Italy for hundreds of years. In 1905, an Italian immigrant (移民) named Gennaro Lombardi, who could not find a job in the US, started selling the first pizza from a food truck in the city.

“My little girls and I were very excited about our discoveries,” Zachman wrote in the preface (前言) of her new book, There’s No Ham in Hamburgers, which was published on April 6, 2021. “Then we thought it would be fun to share our discoveries with other kids.”

Speaking of the new book, San Francisco Book Review concludes, “Told in a conversational style and explained with amazing cartoon characters, the book combines history with our favorite foods from pizza to peanut butter. It can be great reading material in the history classes for the kids.”

Of course, not every story in the book is true. Some were passed down for generations and are still unproven. But the most interesting stories are the true ones. For example, Zachman has learned that pepperoni (意大利辣肠) is not a traditional pizza addition in Italy. It is an American creation started by German immigrants who wanted a spicy sausage.

And anyone who watches American television probably knows that children love peanut butter spread between two pieces of bread-known as a sandwich. But it did not start with kids. It got its start with American soldiers in World War I and stayed popular among soldiers through the 1940s. When soldiers returned home after World War II, they started making peanut butter sandwich for their children.

【推荐3】For riders of the Lopifit, getting from A to B is as easy as putting one foot in front of the other, with its unusual design helping users to ride around by walking.

Designed by Dutchman Bruin Bergmeester, the electric walking bike called Lopifit is a mixture between a scooter (踏板车), an electric bike and a treadmill (跑步机).

According to Lopifit’s website, bike lover Bergmeester came up with the idea while training in the gym, wondering: “How can I use the treadmill outdoors? What about a treadmill on wheels?”

Four years ago the first Lopifit was created in the Netherlands, now the Lopifit firm is selling the bikes to several countries, including the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean.

The bikes use a motor to support the treadmill, so using the bikes takes “no more effort…than a walk in the park”. As the rider walks, sensors (传感器) record the turning treadmill and kick the motor into gear (齿轮) to support the movement and set the wheels in action.

Lopifit’s bikes come with a heavy pricetag (价格标签), at $2,495 (£1,980) per bike. But bikers can choose their walking bike with a series of colours.

At present, the company is struggling to keep up with the orders from all over the world. Bruin Bergmeester, CEo of the company, says smiling : “Our goal is to make the electric walking bike available for as many people as possible. We want to change the way people move. We wish that everyone can benefit from a greener and cleaner way of transportation that naturally improves your health.”