【推荐2】Have you ever found yourself starting to yawn just because you saw someone else do it? It’s not your imagination: Yawns really are contagious (传染的)!

Scientists have been trying for a while to figure out why yawns are so easy to “catch”. But for now, they’re not even sure why the yawns you let out when you’re sleepy or bored happen. It’s possible that a yawn serves to cool down your brain or other parts of your body. It might serve to keep your body alert (警惕的) when you’re tired.

That’s one theory about why yawns are contagious. If they’re meant to perk (振作) us up when we might be in danger, it’s useful for them to spread quickly through a group. It’s common for social animals such as humans to copy one another’s behaviors to fit in, especially when that behavior is something that might be useful to their survival. That’s why some research focuses on whether contagious yawning is related to empathy (同理心).

“Empathy can be defined by the ability to understand, share and be affected by the states or emotions of others. So, if seeing someone yawn makes you yawn in response, this action could be placed within a category (范畴) of empathy,” says Andrew C. Gallup, a professor of psychology. Some studies have tried to see whether people and animals with more empathy are more likely to catch yawns. But Gallup says more study is needed to know for sure.

While yawns and their catchiness remain unclear, we do know we’re not alone in spreading them around. Scientists have seen evidence of monkeys and dogs catching yawns. Dogs actually catch yawns from humans, not other dogs. If we can figure out why these animals share yawns with their friends, it might help us understand why we do it, too.” There are a number of other behaviors that are contagious, such as laughing and itching.” Gallup says. One thing is certain: reading this story probably made you yawn!

【推荐1】Our world is full of sounds. Sound is so essential to life and survival that it made Tel Aviv University researcher Lilach Hadany ask: What if it wasn't just animals that could sense sound—what if plants could, too?

“Sounds are a natural resource-one that plants would be wasting if they didn’t take advantage of it as animals do,”said Hadany. If plants had a way of hearing and responding to sound, she figured, it could help them survive and reproduce.

Hadany's team started their study by investigating flowers. Evening primrose（夜来香）, which grows wild on the beaches and in parks around Tel Aviv, emerged as a good candidate, since it has a long bloom time and produces measurable quantities of nectar（花蜜）.

To test the primroses in the lab, Hadany's team exposed plants to five sound treatments: silence, recordings of a honeybee from four inches away, and computer generated sounds in low, intermediate（中等的）, and high frequencies. Plants given the silent treatment had no significant increase in nectar sugar concentration. The same went for plants exposed to high-frequency（158 to 160 kilohertz）and intermediate-frequency（34 to 35 kilohertz）sounds.

But for plants exposed to playbacks of bee sounds（0.2 to 0.5 kilohertz）and similarly low-frequency sounds（0.05 to 1 kilohertz）, the final analysis revealed an unmistakable response. Within three minutes of exposure to these recordings, nectar sugar concentration in the plants increased by 20 percent.

A sweeter treat for pollinators（传粉者）, their theory goes, may draw in more insects, potentially increasing the chances of successful cross-pollination. Indeed, in field observations, researchers found that pollinators were more than nine times more common around plants another pollinator had visited within the previous six minutes.

“We were quite surprised when we found out that it actually worked.” said Hadany.“But after repeating it in other situations, in different seasons, and with plants grown both indoors and outdoors, we feel very confident in the result.”

【推荐3】If you easily make mistakes when in a hurry, a new study from Michigan State University—the largest of its kind to date-found that meditation (冥想) could help you improve the situation.

The research tested how open monitoring meditation (OMM)—or, meditation that focuses awareness on feelings or thoughts as they unfold in one’s mind and body—altered brain activity in a way that suggested increased error recognition.

“People’s interest in meditation is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits.” said Jeff Lin, MSU psychology doctoral candidate and study co-author. “But it’s amazing to me that we were able to see how one session of a guided meditation could produce changes to brain activity in non-meditators.”

“Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open monitoring meditation is a bit different,” Lin said, “It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your mind and body. The goal is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind travels without getting too caught up in the scenery.”

Lin and his MSU co-authors—William Eckerle, Ling Peng and Jason Moser—hired more than 200 participants to test how open monitoring meditation affected how people detect and respond to errors.

The participants, who had never meditated before, were taken through a 20-minute open monitoring meditation exercise while the researchers measured brain activity through electroencephalography (脑电图), or EEG. Then, they completed a computerized distraction (分心) test.

“The EEG can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got precise measures of brain activity right after mistakes compared to correct responses,” Lin said. “A certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error recognition. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the meditators relative to controls.”

“These findings show what just 20 minutes of open monitoring meditation can do to improve the brain’s ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes,” Moser said.