【推荐2】“How do they walk in these things?” complains Jack Lemmon, walking with difficulty in his heels, newly dressed as his another identity Josephine, in the film “Some Like It Hot”.

High heels were, in fact, originally designed for men — and had an extremely practical purpose. Soldiers on horseback wore them in 10th-century Persia, according to Elizabeth Semmel hack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. The heel helped keep them stable as they stood up in their stirrups ( 马镫) and took aim at enemies with bows and arrows (cowboy boots still use heels in this way). Over time, heels appeared on the shoes of male nobles across Europe. Yet from the mid-17th century, heels became associated with supposedly “feminine” qualities, and so became women’s wear. Until the mid-20th century heels were heavy, heavy things. After the Second World War, techniques and materials used in aircraft engineering were applied to shoes, creating the stiletto ( 细高跟). The high, narrow heel requires a thin metal pole, strong enough to bear the wearer’s weight yet flexible enough to allow the shoe to move.

Shoemakers have searched actively for a right heel. They aim to reduce the angle created by a high heel, which forces the few square centimeteres of the ball of your foot to bear the entire weight of your body. Joan Oloff, a podiatrist-turned-shoe-designer, makes footwear lined with memory foam ( 泡沫) to absorb the shock of each painful step. The bottom part of the shoe is crafted to support the arch of the foot and distribute the wearer’s weight more equally. Antonia Saint Dunbar, an entrepreneur, makes shoes with a heel cup and strips inside to stop the foot slipping around and getting blisters ( 水泡). And growing numbers of companies make shoes with adjustable heels: two inches for the boardroom, four for the nightclub, none for home.

However, the wisest are stepping down altogether: in 2016, for the first time, more British women bought trainers than heels.

【推荐3】In some parts of the world, COVID-19 is not the only plague that 2020 has brought. In parts of Asia and east Africa, swarms (成群) of locusts have ruined fields. The UN figures the swarms in India and Pakistan are the largest for a quarter of a century, and that the numbers in Kenya are the highest for 70 years. One swarm in northern Kenya was estimated to be 25 miles long and 37 miles wide.

Locusts are usually inoffensive, solitary creatures that live alone and do not stay far from the place that they were born. But under the right circumstances—namely heavy rain, and plant harvests—they can become “gregarious”. When that happens, the insects gather in hungry swarms which can fly more than 100km in a day.

In a paper published in Nature, Xiaojiao Guo, of the Institute of Zoology in Beijing, and a group of other researchers, shed light on the factor that drives that transformation. They think they have identified the specific pheromone (信息素) that attracts the insects to each other, and thus causes them to swarm.

Dr Guo and her colleagues collected35 chemicals collected from the bodies and faeces (排泄物) of the most widespread locust. When tested, gregarious locusts were strongly attracted to just one, a chemical called 4-vinylanisole (4VA). That attraction was strong for immature and mature locusts alike, and for both males and females.

Dr Guo’s results could be of more than academic interest. Humans have tried everything from insecticides to flame-throwers to deal with locust swarms. If a chemical could be developed that blocks the receptor (接收器), the insects might be made deaf to its call. If 4VA turns out to be a language that all locusts understand, then it may help humans persuade them to abandon their gregarious ways, and return to a solitary life.

【推荐3】Art is a powerful tool for telling a scientific story. Many scientific fields deal with the strangest of the animal kingdom — like creatures with a handful of eyes and bodies so different from our own. Art can help us experience these hard-to-imagine parts of the natural world and shed light on new scientific discoveries.

Alia Payne, an interactive arts professor came to the National Museum of Natural History to work with the live jellyfish collections. She always got the same question from visitors, “How do jellyfish stings work?” She had the scientific answer for them but found it difficult to explain without a clear visual. That’s when a lightbulb went off in Payne’s mind. She built a 3D model of one of the stinging cells that visitors could touch and interact with. “I’ve always loved art for education,” said Payne. “We learn more easily when we have something to play and interact with.”

While art helps society experience, it also helps scientists understand the natural world. Dr. Karen Osborn, a zoologist at the museum, specializes in the striking creatures of the ocean’s largest habitat—the midwater. Midwater creatures are equipped with all sorts of unique features to get them through life in their extreme habitat, and Osborn’s research helps us understand how these animals came to be. “So I started learning photography,” Osborn explained. “It was really important because these animals don’t look so great when they’re preserved in a jar in the museum’s collections.”

Artistic creativity provides an opportunity to show off the bright colors, attractive body plans and cool adaptations of these creatures to the museum’s scientists, visitors and the world. In turn, art connects scientists to their own creativity and aids in their scientific process and the communication of their discoveries. By weaving together science with imagination and storytelling, art helps highlight the beauty of the ocean’s creatures even those fit for horror movies — and connects people to their innate curiosity for the strangeness of the animal kingdom.