【推荐2】As doctors performed surgery on Dagmar Turner’s brain, the sound of a violin filled the operating room. The music came from the patient on the operating table. In a video from the surgery, the violinist was moving her bow (琴弓) up and down as surgeons worked to remove her brain tumor (肿瘤). The King’s College hospital surgeons woke her up in the middle of the operation in order to ensure they did not damage parts of the brain necessary for playing the violin and keep her hand’s functions intact.

Turner, 53, learned that she had a slow-growing tumor. Later doctors found that it had become more aggressive and the violinist decided to have surgery to remove it. “We knew how important the violin is to Turner, so it was vital that we preserved function in the delicate areas of her brain that allowed her to play,” Keyoumars Ashkan, a doctor at King’s College Hospital, said in a press release.

Before Turner’s operation, Ashkan and his colleagues spent two hours carefully mapping her brain to identify areas that were active when she played the violin and those controlling language and movement. Waking her up during surgery then allowed doctors to monitor whether those parts were suffering damage.

Brad Mahon, expert at Carnegie Mellon University, said the basic features of an “awake craniotomy” — the type of brain surgery where patients are awake in order to avoid damage to critical brain areas — have remained largely unchanged for decades. But he said that doctors are now able to map the patient’s brain activity in great detail before the surgery, using an imaging technique called functional MRI. That means surgeons are coming into the operating room with far more information about a specific patient’s brain. That kind of information helps doctors tailor tests to a patient’s particular needs.

【推荐3】Head injuries typically come from trauma (创伤) caused by hard or sharp objects. The skull does not have to be broken, but can be. If the skull is soft when touched, or missing, the victim is likely to have an open or depressed skull fracture (骨折). If a skull fracture is suspected, call 911 immediately.

A closed head injury is an injury to the brain inside an undamaged skull. Injury to the brain causes swelling, which quickly increases the pressure within the skull. The increased pressure causes more damage to the brain, which causes more swelling, and so on.

Some types of closed head injury stop the cycle automatically, while others will continue to get worse until the victim dies. The only way to tell the difference is through a CT scan, which looks at the brain and the skull using X-rays.

In all cases of injury to the head and neck, it’s vital not to move the victim at will. Support his or her head in the position you found it. Backbones can be injured from movement of the head during trauma. Broken or displaced backbones can cut or put pressure on the nerves of the spinal cord, causing temporary or permanent inability to move and loss of feeling.

Vomiting (呕吐) can lead to problems with the victim's airway. If the victim begins vomiting and is unconscious, place the victim in the recovery position to let the vomit flow from the victim’s mouth.

It is a misunderstanding that head injury victims should be kept awake. If a victim of trauma to the head does not have any of the signs or symptoms (症状) of a closed head injury or skull fracture，there is no reason to keep him or her awake. Once asleep, wake the victim up about 30 minutes later to make sure he or she can be aroused. If you are unable to wake him or her up. Call 911 immediately.

【推荐1】Gitanjali Rao, Colorado teenager who invented mobile device to test for lead (铅) in drinking water, was Time’s Kid of the Year for 2020. The magazine announced the award on Thursday, citing Rao’s ability to apply scientific ideas to real-world problems and her desire to motivate other kids to take up their own causes.

It was just the latest recognition for Rao, 15, who was named last year to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. She won praise in 2017 after she responded to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, by creating a device named Tehys, using carbon nanotube sensors to detect (探测) lead in water. The Lone Tree, Colo., native was named America’s Top Young Scientist when she was in the seventh grade. She went on to cooperate with scientists in the water industry to try to get the device on the market.

More recently, Rao has developed a phone and Web tool named Kindly, which uses artificial intelligence technology to detect possible early signs of cyberbullying (网络欺凌).

“You type in a word or phrase, and it’s able to pick it up if it’s bullying, and it gives you the choice to edit it or send it the way it is,” Rao told Time. “The goal is not to punish people. As a teenager I know teenagers tend to become very angry sometimes. Instead, it gives you the chance to rethink what you’re saying so that you know what to do next time around.”

Rao was chosen in part because of the way she has followed up her technical work with efforts to get other young people to work on solving the problems they see.

“I don’t look like your typical scientist. Everything I see on TV is that it’s an older, usually white man as a scientist,” she told Time. “My goal has really shifted, not only from creating my own devices to solve the world’s problems, but inspiring others to do the same as well. So I really want to put out that message: If I can do it, you can do it, and anyone can do it.”

【推荐2】Vinegar (醋) is great. It makes salad, fries and dumplings taste better, and you can even clean your windows with it. And now, according to scientists, it may even help the planet’s population survive climate change.

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan have found that growing plants in vinegar makes them more resistant to droughts. This could mean that in the future, worries about climate change affecting the world’s supply of food will be much lower. The discovery was made after the researchers studied the Arabidops, a plant known for its ability to survive in dry weather. It was found that when the plant was placed in drought-like conditions, it produced a chemical called acetate (醋酸盐) — the main element of vinegar.

After discovering this, the scientists experimented further by adding acetate to the soil of other plants, and they stopped giving them water completely. After leaving the plants for 14 days, they found that the ones treated with acetate had survived, while the untreated plants had dried up and died. It’s hoped that this simple method of survival could soon be used to help farmers in dry countries keep their crops alive.

Jong Myong Kim, the co-author of the study, tells Popular Science that he’s already been in touch with people all over the world who are interested in trying this simple and cost-effective method out for themselves from flower growing companies to amateur gardeners. Although at this point keeping thirsty plants alive isn’t as easy as just pouring vinegar over them, Kim says he and his team are working on making the process as simple as possible.” Now we are trying to cooperate with some farmers, and also some companies, to make a method of applying this system, “he says.

And for those of us who always forget to ask our neighbors to water our plants when we go away, hopefully this means the end of returning home from a trip to find our favorite flowers have died.

【推荐1】A 12-­year-­old girl who had a feeling that she might be quite clever has taken a test and proved she was absolutely right.

After raising the idea with her parents and pestering (纠缠) them for the best part of a year, Lydia took the test in her summer holidays. It turns out the test wasn’t that hard after all.

“I was really nervous before the test and I thought it was going to be really hard. But as I started the test, I thought it was a bit easier than I thought it was going to be,” she said.

Lydia Sebastian achieved the top score of 162 on Mensa’s Cattell Ⅲ B paper, showing she has a higher IQ than well­known geniuses Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The comparison doesn’t sit well with the British student, who’s currently in Year 8 at a selective girl’s grammar school in Essex, England.

“I don’t think I can be compared to such great intellectuals as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. They’ve achieved so much. I don’t think it’s right,” Lydia told CNN.

To explain Lydia’s mark’s level, the top adult score in the Cattell Ⅲ B test, which mainly tests verbal (语言) reasoning, is 161. A top 2% score—which allows entry to Mensa, the club for those with high IQs—would be 148 or over. Lydia scored 162, placing her in the top 1% of the population.

Lydia’s not quite sure what she wants to do when she leaves school, although she’s leaning toward something “based around Maths, because it’s one of my favorite subjects.” “All I’m going to do is work as hard as I can, and see where that gets me,” she said.

【推荐3】Marcelo Toledo usually creates works of art out of metal. Now the Argentine artist is working with a new material: waste masks from the COVID-19 pandemic (流行病) to create an exhibition exploring the painful impact of the virus.

Toledo, who has made decorations for the musical “Evita” on Broadway, was among the first in Argentina to be infected by COVID-19, which left him hospitalized for eight days. The experience led to a series of artworks, including a 14-meter mask with the Argentine flag that he placed on the famous Obelisk in Buenos Aires to raise awareness about organ donation during the pandemic.

For his new exhibition, the “Museum of the After,” Toledo is collecting recycled coronavirus waste sent by hospitals, laboratories and random people, including old medical parts and newspapers about the pandemic.

“I am excited to be able to transform pain into beauty and this. exhibition is just recording everything that is happening to us as a society,” Toledo said. The artworks, which will go on show from September in a public space in downtown Buenos Aires, will all be made from waste materials or garbage that people send him. “It is the first time that I have done an exhibition in which I do not have to buy any of the elements,” he said.

In the exhibition there will be a real ship that will symbolically cross a “storm” and recycling islands to raise awareness about the importance of caring for the environment. “The exhibition will tell the story of this ship that went on sailing after the storm, which is a great metaphor (隐喻) for what is happening to us. This pandemic is a great global storm,” Toledo said.

As with the huge mask, which was replicated (复制) in countries such as the United States and Japan, the artist dreams of replicating the new exhibition in other cities around the world.