【推荐1】Dopamine (多巴胺) is often considered as the source of pleasure. But that’s not quite what it does. Dopamine is what makes us desire things. And it’s that desire that gives us the motivation to get up and do things.

In fact, your brain considers something more important than others mainly depending on how much dopamine it’s expecting to get. If an activity releases a lot of dopamine, you’ll be motivated to repeat it, over and over. So which behavior releases dopamine? Any activity where you expect there’s a possible reward releases it.

And in today’s digital society, we are flooding our brains with unnaturally high amounts of dopamine on a daily basis, even if we don’t know it. Some examples of high dopamine behavior include: visiting social media websites, playing video games, etc.

And you might think, “Oh so what? It’s not like it’s harming me in any way.” But you’d be wrong. Our bodies have a biologically balanced system. Whenever an imbalance occurs, our body adapts to it. Basically, your brain gets used to having high levels of dopamine and those levels become your new normal. Thus, you develop a dopamine tolerance. This can be a huge problem because the things that don’t give you as much dopamine don’t interest you any longer. That’s why people tend to prefer playing video games or surfing the Internet, compared to studying or working on their business.

But it is possible to make doing difficult things feel easier. Separate yourself from the unnaturally high amounts of dopamine, or at least expose yourself to it far less frequently. Only then will normal, everyday, low dopamine activities become exciting again and you’ll be able to do them for longer. That’s why you might want to limit your phone and computer usage, along with other high dopamine-releasing behavior.

We are all dopamine addicts to a certain extent. And that’s a good thing because dopamine motivates us to achieve our goals and improve ourselves. But it’s up to you to decide where you’re going to get your dopamine.

【推荐2】It is something one half of the population has long suspected and the other half always vocally denied– women really do talk more than men. In fact, women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman chalking up 20,000 words in a day – 13,000 more than the average man.

Women also speak more quickly, devote more brainpower to chit-chat, and actually enjoy hearing their own voices, a new book suggests. The book – written by a female psychiatrist, Dr. Luan Brizendine – says that inherent (生来就有的) differences between the male and female brain explain why women are naturally more talkative than men.

In The Female Mind, Brizendine says the differences can be traced back to the womb (子宫), where the sex hormone (激素) called testosterone moulds the developing male brain. The areas responsible for communication, emotion and memory are all reduced before a baby boy is born.

The result is that boys – and men – chat less than their female peers and struggle to express their emotions to the same extent. “Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road,” said Brizendine.

There are, however, advantages of being the strong, silent type. Brizendine explains in her book that testosterone also reduces the size of the section of the brain involved in hearing – allowing men to become “deaf” to the most logical arguments put forward by their wives and girlfriends.

Other scientists, however, say many of the differences between the male and female personality can be explained by social conditioning, with a child’s upbringing greatly influencing their character.

Deborah Cameron, an Oxford University linguistics professor with a special interest in language and gender, said the amount we talk is influenced by who we are with and what we are doing. “If you look through a large number of studies you will find there is little difference between the amount men and women talk,” she added.

【推荐3】WHAT IS SCIENCE GAMES? With a focus on collaboration, connection, discovery, and fun, students in British Columbia will have an opportunity to participate in a 3-week science journey in July 2023! At Science Games, students from Grades 1–6 across BC explore science first-hand in an online group led by engineers and geoscientists.

This interactive event hosted online gives students the chance to investigate the ways science affects their everyday lives. Diving deep into the world of innovation, participants will connect with other like-minded students and work together online to create their own solutions during each Saturday activity session.

2023 VIRTUAL PROGRAM SCHEDULE

2023 SCIENCE GAMES REGISTRATION

To participate in these sessions, your child must be signed up as a 2023 Science Games participant and pay a $25 registration fee. If there is a financial barrier to your participation in the 2023 Science Games, you can apply for a scholarship for a reduced rate. The online Science Games Bursary application form will be available when registration launches.

Parents/Guardians can register their child/children as:

Individual Participants

Group Participants

Please note:

You can group registrations with a group code, but you can only share your code with 2 other Science Games participants.

Science Games participants will also receive a package from Engineers and Geoscientists BC at the end of June. This package includes items that are necessary for participation in a particular Science Games activity.

Have any other questions about Science Games 2023? Email us at sciencegames@egbc.ca.

【推荐1】When you donate to a charity, do you ever wonder where your money is actually going, and who it' s helping? Do you worry that the organization isn’t accurately reflecting your values, or isn't totally transparent?

A new app, called Sparrow, promises to take the guesswork out of giving and ensure donors make a meaningful influence. They' re doing this by allowing donors to choose a specific “rule” and tie it to their giving. For example, you can set it up so that every time you fill up your gas tank, a small part of the sale goes to an environmental nonprofit of your choice. You can set a cap on your donation and choose how long you want the app to track it. And, the app doesn't take a cut of your donation, meaning that every dollar you give is passed through to the charities you want to support.

Dan Ariely, one of the founders, is a world' s leading expert in decision-making and analyzing. He's developed apps and invented card games. He writes for the Wall Street Journal and has made many TED talks. CEOs of Amazon, American Express, McDonald's have Ariely on speed dial, hoping to pick his brain about human behavior and what motivates consumers.

To use Sparrow, users first set up “giving rules” - choosing things you do or events happening in the world and pairing them with an automatic donation to one of the company' s chosen collections of evidence-based charities. Then, as you go about your life, some of your activities will cause the rules to function and the donations are automatically transferred to the nonprofits from your bank account.

New York Times bestselling author A. J. Jacobs said, “I' m a huge fan and I hope it takes off and floods evidence-based charities with funds.”

And Ariely said, “By taking evidence-based approaches to building the evidence-based movement, I believe we can do even more good.

【推荐2】Yuan Longping, known as the “father of hybrid rice (杂交水稻之父)”, is one of China’s most famous scientists. Yet, he considered himself as a farmer because he continually worked the land in his research. Indeed, his slim but strong body was just like that of millions of Chinese farmers, to whom he devoted his life.

Yuan was born in 1930 in Beijing. His parents wanted him to pursue a career in science or medicine. However, what concerned him most was that farmers often had poor harvests and sometimes even had a serious shortage of food to eat. To tackle this crisis, he chose to study agriculture and received an education at Southwest Agricultural College in Chongqing.

After graduating from Southwest Agricultural College in 1953, he worked as a researcher. Yuan realized that larger fields were not the solution. Instead, farmers needed to boost yields (产量) in the fields they had. How this could be done was a challenging question at the time. Yuan was convinced that the answer could be found in the creation of hybrid rice. A hybrid is a cross between two or more varieties of species. One characteristic of hybrids is that they usually attain a higher yield than conventional crops. Through intense effort, Yuan overcame enormous technical difficulties to develop the first hybrid rice that could be used for farming in 1974. This hybrid enabled farmers to expand their output greatly.

Witnessing the development of hybrid rice, Yuan once said “I saw my super hybrid rice plant growing as high as sorghum (高粱). The panicle (head of rice) was as large as a broom, and the grains as big as peanuts. I was very happy to rest under them with my assistant.”

Today, it is estimated (估计) that about 60 percent of domestic (国内的) rice consumption in China is made up of crops produced from Yuan’s hybrid species and his species have allowed China’s farmers to produce around 200 million tons of rice per year.

【推荐3】In 1947 a group of famous people from the art world headed by an Austrian conductor decided to hold an international festival of music, dance and theatre in Edinburgh. The idea was to reunite Europe after the Second World War.

It quickly attracted famous names such as Alec Guinness, Richard Burton, Dame Margot Fonteyn and Marlene Dietrich as well as the big symphony orchestras(交响乐团). It became a fixed event every August and now attracts 400,000 people yearly.

At the same time, the “Fringe” appeared as a challenge to the official festival. Eight uninvited theatre groups turned up in 1947, in the belief that everyone should have the right to perform, and they did so in a public house no longer used for years.

Soon, groups of students firstly from Edinburgh University, and later from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham were making the journey to the Scottish capital each summer to perform theatre by little-known playwrights(剧作家) in small church halls to the people of Edinburgh.

Today the “Fringe”, once less recognized, has far outgrown the festival with around 1,500 performances of theatre, music and dance on every one of the 21 days it lasts. And yet as early as 1959, with only 19 theatre groups performing, some said it was getting too big.

A paid administrator was first employed only in 1971, and today there are eight administrators working all year round and the number rises to 150 during August itself. In 2004 there were 200 places housing(给……提供场地) 1,695 shows by over 600 different groups from 50 different countries. More than 1.25 million tickets were sold.