【推荐1】Lack of sleep can be compensated for by exercise

Staying active and fit could help to ward off some of the negative health impacts that would normally result from low-quality sleep, according to a large study of 380,055 middle-aged people involved in the UK Biobank research project.While the health benefits of exercise and sleep are nothing new,     1    .It could even give doctors another option to suggest for patients dealing with sleep problems.

"We found those who had both the poorest sleep quality and who exercised the least were most at risk of death from heart disease, stroke (中风), and cancer," says epidemiologist Bo-Huei Huang, from the University of Sydney in Australia.     2    .

Participants were grouped into three levels of physical activity (high, medium or low) and were also given a sleep quality score from 0-5 based on the amount of shut-eye they got, how late they stayed up, insomnia (失眠), snoring and daytime sleepiness.Those with the highest risk of dying from cancer or heart disease during the study period were those with the worst quality sleep and who didn't meet the WHO recommended guidelines for exercise.     3    .

    4    , for example, those at the unhealthiest end of the sleep and exercise scale had a 45 percent higher risk of dying from cancer than those with good sleep scores who kept physically active.     5    .

【推荐3】Examinations are vital for any student. To prepare for the examinations, it is not just one resource you are expected to cover but several.     1     To take care of so many subjects, you must maintain a healthy lifestyle. Here are some tips that you can use to stay healthy during examinations.

    2     You must sleep for 7 to 8 hours daily, which must range between 10 PM to 7 AM. Sleeping for less than 7 hours will affect your day negatively. While maintaining a sleep routine, make sure that you do not oversleep.

Sitting at one place at school, your body tends to become stiff (僵硬).     3    You can suffer various types of body aches that may go unnoticed. One healthy habit is that you must exercise. Exercises have various positive effects on health.

You must eat healthily. Eat mostly home-cooked meals. It is difficult and unrealistic for students our age to remove junk from our diet. Have three proper meals.     4    . Eat a well-balanced diet. It should contain the right amount of everything you need.

The pressure of examination can bring with it several emotions. Therefore, you must have your beloved ones around you instead of being buried in the books the entire day. This can significantly strengthen your mood and you’ll be able to concentrate on your studies better.

【推荐2】In the 1770s, an English doctor called Edward Jenner gave his gardener’s son cowpox (牛痘) and then deliberately infected him with smallpox (天花) to test his assumption that people who were frequently exposed to cowpox, a similar but less severe virus, would avoid catching smallpox. It worked and cowpox as the vaccine (疫苗) was highly effective. “Vaccination”, from the Latin word for cow, soon became commonplace.

Challenge trials are forms of research where, rather than relying on data from natural infections, we intentionally expose someone to a disease in order to test the effectiveness of a vaccine or treatment. Things have changed a lot since Jenner’s time, of course, when it was not uncommon for doctors to conduct this kind of research. Even so, there’s the continuous sense that there’s something immoral about making someone ill on purpose.

But this shouldn’t blind us to the extraordinary power of challenge trials. They could become increasingly important weapons in the medical research, in a situation where vaccine technology is advancing and the threat of diseases jumping from animals into human beings is increasing.

Much has been done to reduce the risks of challenge trials. Like respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), researchers have involved adults who are at a low risk of severe illness. These acts have already cut down a massive range of vaccine candidates. With their help, the world will soon have the first vaccines against RSV, which kills tens of thousands of newborn babies each year. But not all diseases are like these ones. We don’t always know the dangers volunteers might face; we don’t always have treatments ready. What then?

We could, of course, just avoid these questions entirely, and rely on other types of research.But that doesn’t always work: sometimes, animal testing is tricky and uninformative, because the disease doesn‘t develop in the same way as it would in humans. In contrast, challenge trials can be deeply informative within weeks, with far fewer volunteers. And the benefits can be surprisingly high. Take the latest pandemic. At the end of last year, as the number of deaths is estimated to have reached about 17.8 million, it’s also estimated that 20 million had been saved by vaccines.In the years to come, they will hopefully save millions more.

In order to make sure we are as protected as possible from current and future threats, we should try to get rid of the misbelief in challenge trials, making them a more familiar part of our tool kits. Perhaps the greatest reward of all would be to make sure participants’ efforts are worthwhile: by designing trials to be fair and effective and applying them when and where they might make a real difference. In short, by helping them to save thousands, if not millions of lives.

【推荐2】When faced with a problem, people tend to select solutions that involve adding new elements rather than taking existing components away.

Adams, a social psychologist at the university of Virginia and her colleagues wanted to figure out why this was the case. They wanted to investigate whether, and to what degree, people actually overlook subtraction(减法)when they are tasked with changing things.

The researchers looked through a profile of ideas for improvement submitted to a university president, and found that only 11 percent of 651 proposals involved removing an existing rule or program. Similar results appeared across tasks about adjusting essays and plans. The vast majority of people chose to add rather than remove.

The team dug deeper by conducting eight experiments with more than 1,500 participants. In one experiment, people were asked to stabilize(固定)the roof of a Lego structure held up by a single block that rested on top of a cube-shaped base. The reward for completing the task was $ 1, and participants could add new blocks for 10 cents a piece or get rid of blocks for free. One group was reminded, “Each piece that you add costs ten cents but removing pieces is free, ” while another group was just told, “Each piece that you add costs ten cents. ”Almost two thirds of people who had been reminded chose to get rid of the single block rather than adding new ones, compared with 41 percent of those who had not been reminded.

These findings were published in Nature, suggesting that “additive solutions tend to come to mind quickly and easily. Subtractive solutions are not necessarily harder to consider, but they take more effort to find. While the tendency for businesses and organizations to choose for complexity rather than simplification was previously known, the novelty(新颖)of this paper is that it shows that people tend toward adding new features even when subtracting would clearly be better.

The team hopes that these findings will encourage more people to think about subtractive options that might often be overlooked.

【推荐3】In the paper Diversity, Constance Woodman, a doctoral graduate student of Texas A & M University, and Professor Donald Brightsmith shared their findings from a project with Chris Biro, a globally recognized free-fight trainer, which included documenting Biro’s training process step by step so that conservationists can apply his methods when releasing birds into the wild.

Biro has trained 400 students on how to free-fly their birds, but his process was only captured by video previously.

“We have colleagues raising and releasing birds, but their main objective is conservation and they have no chance to write up a lot of the science,” Brightsmith said. “A & M’s role in this project is to ensure this information gets put into a format so others can read, criticize, use and improve it. If information hasn’t made it into scientific literature, it’s not improving future parrot (鹦鹉) conservation.”

Woodman and Biro spent years training three flocks (群) of multiple parrot species using Biro’s techniques, thoroughly documenting every step. These 37 birds, which collectively spent 500 months in free-flight, were hand-raised from chicks to build a strong bond with the trainer before being gradually taught new commands and introduced to increasingly complex environments to learn the skills necessary to safely fly in open, uncontrolled areas. They learned to recognize and even frighten natural enemies, and avoid unsafe situations.

Traditionally, attempting to release hand-raised parrots has resulted in birds that show little fear of humans, increasing their chances of being trapped by hunters. Biro used a “kernel flock”, human-socialized birds trained in free-light, to teach survival behaviors to other parrots. This technique being applied to establishing new bird flocks in the wild allows conservationists to release wild birds without having to train them themselves, cutting the difference when human socialization is not desirable in wild birds.

After the “kernel flock” trains the non-socialized birds, it could be recalled and moved to another location, leaving behind a well-established settlement of wild parrots.

“The work we’ve done—spending years working with a group to learn how they do what they do and then translating that into something useful for scientists—is critical to moving conservation forward,” Woodman said.