【推荐2】Is breakfast really that important?

With almost 20% of people reporting skipping the first meal of the day, people are wondering whether breakfast is really that important. Well, the overwhelming majority of research supports that breakfast is more than something your Mom nagged you about.     1    .

The National Weight Control Registry is tracking over 10,000 Americans who have lost significant amounts of weight and kept it off for long periods of time.     2    .Other large studies have linked eating breakfast to decreased waistlines. Skipping breakfast may turn out to be one of the worst barriers to your weight loss efforts, for certain individuals. It is because not eating breakfast may lead to their increased amounts of late-night snacking.

    3    . Academic performance is associated with eating breakfast in children and teens, including improvements in reading, math and science. Nutrition can improve cognitive function, and deficiencies of key vitamins and minerals are linked to decreased concentration and cognition.

Moreover, skipping breakfast leads to malnutrition and lack of specific nutrients, which is linked to aggression and problem behaviors.     4    .

【推荐3】Many of us in China enjoy adding chilies（辣椒）to our food, but did you know that this spicy vegetable could also be dangerous?A 34-year-old US man recently ended up in hospital after eating a Carolina Reaper. the spiciest chili in the world. After taking just a single bite of one, the man suffered from serious headaches in the following few days, reported BBC News.

In fact, reports of stomachache and headache caused by eating spicy food are not something unusual. But if chilies are harmful, why is it that human beings are the only animals to eat this vegetable? According to the website Huanqiu, about 600 million Chinese people-almost half of the national population-are chili eaters. So what makes people love chilies so much?The human body reacts to the burning feeling that comes from eating chilies by releasing natural chemicals that “produce a sense of happiness”, noted BBC News.

And the benefits go even further than just personal enjoyment. A survey conducted by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences found that the death rate of those who eat spicy food once or twice a week is 10 percent lower than those who eat it less than, once a week. The number decreased to 14 percent for those who eat spicy food six to seven times a week. And another study done by the University of Vermont came to a similar conclusion. “The data encourages people to eat more spicy food to improve health and reduce death risk at an early age,” Liu Qi, a nutritionist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, told BBC News.

Chilies have anti-cancer quality and the ability to increase our metabolism（新陈代谢）. So, don’t worry if you love spicy food. It seems that chilies are actually good for us-except for the Carolina Reaper, perhaps.

【推荐3】Social media use has been linked to depression, especially in teenage girls. But a new study argues that the issue may be more complex than experts think.

The research involved interviews with 10,000 teenagers in England. “Our results suggest social media itself doesn’t cause harm, but that frequent use may disrupt activities that positively impact mental health such as sleeping and exercising, while increasing exposure of young people to harmful content, particularly cyberbullying (网络欺凌),” study co-author Russell Viner said in a statement.

Bob Patton, a lecturer of the University of Surrey, said this means strategies focusing only on reducing social media use to improve mental health might not help. He said, “Building strategies to increase resilience (适应力) to cyberbullying and promote better sleep and exercise is needed to reduce psychological (心理的) harm.”

The research was conducted by interviewing teenagers once a year. They would report the frequency of their using social media. More than three times daily was considered “very frequent”. The researchers noted that they did not capture how much time the participants spent on these websites, which was a limitation of the study. “For boys, the impact on their mental health may result from other reasons,” the authors said.

The researchers found that, in both sexes, very frequent social media use was associated with greater psychological harm. The effect was especially clear among girls: The more often they checked social media, the greater their psychological harm was.

But most impact on psychological harm in girls could be accounted for by lower sleep quality and greater exposure to cyberbullying, with decreased physical activities playing a lesser role. But for boys, those factors explained only 12% of the effects of very frequent social media use on psychological harm.

“It’s an important distinction,” said Ann DeSmet, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium. “If healthy lifestyles can be replaced, the positive effects of social media use, such as encouraging social interactions, can be more supported.”

【推荐1】Laboratory animals are vital in scientific research, enabling breakthroughs in medicine and biology and many other fields.

The World Day for Laboratory Animals, observed on April 24 each year, serves as an important reminder of our ethical obligations toward these animals. Established in 1979 by the UK’s National Anti-Vivisection Society, it advocates the“3R”principle: replacement, reduction, and refinement. Replacement involves using lower-level animals or alternative research methods. Reduction aims to minimize the number of animals used , while refinement focuses on human e practices.

However, ethical questions related to lab animals still raise concerns. For example, in September 2023, Neuralink, the company established by US billionaire Elon Musk, was said to mistreating monkeys during its experiments. After brain-computer chips were implanted in their brains, many of their monkeys suffered from multiple painful symptoms including diarrhea and paralysis, according to the US Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. In the end, there was no choice but to euthanize (使安乐死) the animals due to their suffering. This highlights the ongoing need for human e alternatives to animal experiments.

Thankfully, advancements in science and technology are opening new pathways that could further minimize or even wipe out the need for animal testing. For example, the organs-on-chips technology allows scientists to grow special human cells that act like real organs, on a tiny chip. Scientists use these organ chips to study how medicines or other things might affect the organs, without having to use animals for testing, according to Live Science Intelligence.

Li Yanqing at the Institute of Zoology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences wrote in an article: “How people treat animals not only reflects people’s understanding of the world, but also shows people’s attitude toward life.”

【推荐2】Were you to join a marathon, you might think you’d wander into a nightmare. Mouths kept shut, runners cover miles breathing just through their noses — sometimes holding their breath for quite a while.

Beyond adopting a new technique, marathon runners can expect to see an improvement by reviewing on the breathing basics. Studies suggest that 10 percent to 14 percent of women are shallow breathers, over-breathers or mouth-breathers, all of which could restrict movement of the ribcage and create a build-up of tension in the upper body and tightness in the chest. And while this may not bother you when you’re sitting at your desk, it’s a different story when you begin a workout. The biggest mistake that Professor Dickinson sees is when athletes want to maintain-or pick up- speed. “When you’re working harder, you don’t tell your heart to beat faster. It just knows that it needs to,” he says, adding that the same is true of your breathing. He explains that your body is built with neurons called chemoreceptors, which tell your muscles when they need to breathe more.

So how should you be breathing during an intense workout? Professor Dickinson recommends athletes take basic breath pattern mastery, before moving on to respiratory muscle   training.

“Some people accept that the breathlessness they experience when exercising is just their norms and that they’ve reached the limit they can push themselves to in their workouts,” says Professor Dickinson. But committing to these techniques, he explains, could be impactful on your performance. However, those who have high blood pressure, should check their conditions before getting to work on their breath. “In some cases, it could be that you’re only breathing at 80 percent of your capacity, so increasing that percentage by practicing breathing exercises can have a huge impact on your fitness performance,” Professor Dickinson adds. The results just might be breathtaking.