【推荐2】In an effort to stop poaching and protect endangered species, people are using technology previously created to discover stars. Claire Burke, who led the project, says the application of the star-hunting tech has so far paid off big for conservation. “Since animals and humans in thermal imagery (热成像) ‘glow’ in the same way as stars in space, we have been able to combine the technical expertise of astronomers with the conservation knowledge of ecologists to develop a system to find the animals or poachers automatically,” she said in a statement.

In addition to species identification, the software can also provide an overview of health. Burke said that diseased or injured animals give off a different thermal imagery than the healthy ones. “The real advantage this gives you is that if you know how many animals you have and where they are and what kind of health they are in, then you can work out a good conservation strategy for looking after them,” she said.

The following is a post written by Burke on Twitter: More animals for the thermal imagery library. Thanks to Chester Zoo Science @ScienceatCZ for letting us observe their fantastic creatures. Images are giraffes, Indian elephants, and fruit bats.—Claire Burke (@CBurkeSci) October 27.

To train the software on a wide variety of heat signatures from different species, the team of researchers spent time collecting thermal imagery of animals. Their first field trial to detect Riverine rabbits, one of the most endangered mammals in the world (with only 500 living adults left in the wild), was a complete success. “The rabbits are very small, so we flew the drone (无人机) quite low to the ground at a height of 20 meters (65 feet). Although this limited the area we could cover with the drone, we managed to see the rabbit five times,” said Burke. “Given that there have only been about 1,000 times people have seen Riverine rabbits, it was a real success.”

【推荐3】The endangered pandas in the Qinling Mountains might face a new threat: the loss of their food — bamboo, which makes up 99% of their meals.

Adult pandas spend most of the day eating bamboo and have to take in at least 40 pounds a day to stay healthy. However, a new study published in Nature Climate Change warned that they may soon find their food gone because most of the bamboo in the Qinling Mountains might disappear by the end of the century as a result of the rising temperature worldwide.

A team made up of researchers from Michigan State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has studied the effects of climate change on the bamboo in the Qinling Mountains. They have found that bamboo is very sensitive to climate change. “80% to 100% of the bamboo would be gone if the average temperature increases 3.5 degrees worldwide by the end of the century,” said Liu Jianguo, one of the report's authors.

He added, “This is how much the temperature would rise by 2100 even if all countries will keep their promises in The Paris Agreement. But you know what is happening around the world.”

In recent years, China has been trying its best to protect the endangered pandas by setting up more and bigger nature reserves.

“But it is far from being enough and the endangered pandas need cooperation from the rest of the world, because their future is not just in the hands of the Chinese,”said Shirley Martin from the WWF but not a member of the team.

There are 345 wild pandas in the Qinling Mountains. That is about 18.5% of the population of China's wild pandas. In addition, about 375 pandas are living in research centers and zoos in China.

【推荐1】What are two things that make humans different from animals? One is language and the other is music. It’s true that some animals can sing. However, the songs of animals like birds are very limited. It’s also true that humans, not animals, have developed musical instruments.

Music is a strange thing. It’s clearly distinct from language. However, people can use music to communicate things — especially their emotions. When music is combined (组合) with speech in a song, it’s a very powerful form of communication.

If music is truly different from speech, then we should process music and language in different parts of the brain. The scientific evidence suggests that this is true. For example, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, had a stroke (中风) in 1953. It injured the left side of his brain. He could no longer speak or understand speech. He could, however, still compose music until his death ten years later. On the other hand, sometimes strokes cause people to lose their musical ability, but they can still speak and understand speech.

By studying the physical effects of music on the body, scientists have also learnt a lot about how music influences the emotions. But why does music have such a strong effect on us? That is a harder question to answer.

Geoffrey Miller, a researcher at University College, London, thinks that music and love have a strong connection. Music requires special talent, practice and physical ability. That’s why it may be a way of showing your fitness to be someone’s mate. For example, playing a musical instrument requires fine muscular control. You also need a good memory to remember the notes. And playing those notes correctly suggests that your hearing is in excellent condition. Finally, when a man sings to the woman he loves, it may be a way of showing off.

However, Miller’s theory still doesn’t explain why certain combinations of sounds influence our emotions so deeply. For scientists, this is clearly an area that needs further research.

【推荐3】It may help you to know that there is no such thing as a perfect speech. At some point in every speech, every speaker says something that is not understood exactly as he has planned. Fortunately, such moments are usually not obvious to the listeners, why? Because the listeners do not know what the speaker plans to say, they hear only what the speaker does say. If you lose your place for a moment, wrongly change the order of a couple of sentences, or forget to pause at a certain point, no one will be any the wiser. When such moments occur, don’t worry about them. Just continue as if nothing happened.

Even if you do make an obvious mistake during a speech, that doesn’t really matter. If you have ever listened to Martin Luther King’s famous speech — “I have a dream”, you may notice that he stumbles over his words twice during the speech. Most likely, however, you don’t remember. Why? Because you were fixing your attention on his message rather than on his way of speech-making. People care a lot about making mistakes in a speech because they regard speech-making as a kind of performance rather than as an act of communication. They feel the listeners are like judges in an ice-skating competition. But, in fact, the listeners are not looking for a perfect performance. They are looking for a well-thought-out speech that expresses the speaker’s ideas clearly and directly. Sometimes a mistake or two can actually increase a speaker’s attractiveness by making him more human.

As you work on your speech, don’t worry about being perfect. Once you free your mind of this, you will find it much easier to give your speech freely.