【推荐1】Having spring around makes you feel different after such a long winter journey. The power of sunshine brings us a lot of comfort, optimism, self-confidence and of course a smile. Imagine how great it will be if we are so positive all year round!

Living like this is possible if you really think about it. In order to exist in such a state of happiness, we must have sunshine radiating from within ourselves, shining from our hearts, minds and souls. Actually, that’s your choice, and if you think that way then your own life will reflect that attitude of yours!

In order to make “sunshine” or rather, “light” part of our being, it is so important that you watch your thoughts, your words and your actions so that you will accept what you really feel you’d like to create in your own life. Watch your thoughts and really become aware of how many negative thoughts pass through your mind about yourself and other people around you. Watch to see how often you gossip about other people, which is actually often attached with feelings of jealousy and insecurity about yourself.

You are also supposed to take a close look at your “intention”. How many of you do something for another person without expecting to receive something in return? It might not even have to be a material or physical thing you expect; expecting to be recognized for what you have done is enough to create conditions on your attention. Think about it!

Putting all of these together, it seems that most of us are creating monsters inside us just by simply talking, thinking and not putting our heart out with the right intention towards helping someone else. If you take all your negative attitudes in one hand and measure your need to feel “sunshine” in the other, you will see how both these elements really contradict each other.

Be brave and break your patterns and your habits this spring, and by doing so, you will allow the true sunshine to take place by radiating out from your heart and into your life and the lives of the people around you!

【推荐2】I don’t think I need to tell you that reading is good for you — great for you.     1     Sometimes, people do want to read — they’ve got a book at home sitting on the shelf that they fancy — but can never seem to find the time. Well, my friends, this post is for you.

●     2    

Obviously, to get yourself motivated to read, read something that interests you. Society, animals, philosophy, science, art — whatever you want. If you’re drawn to the book, you’ll be more willing to pick it up and read it.

● Have a goal.

Some people set radical (激进的) goals for themselves like reading one book a week. Obviously, you don’t have to be as radical as that.     3     It’s all up to you. But setting a goal and trying to reach it gives you a focus that’ll help you get the job done.

●     4    

If you’re determined, use every possible moment. On the bus. On the subway. On your lunch break. When you’re at the gym. You won’t regret it, I promise!

● Just start.

Sometimes the thing preventing us from reading is our own mind. Our mind will make up all kinds of excuses not to do something. Not get out of bed. Not clean the house. Not shower. And in this case, not read. The trick to bypassing (避开) this mental block is to just pick up the book and read!     5     Once you start reading, it’s quite difficult to stop!

【推荐1】Massive heat waves and droughts are already becoming a threat to farmers. Over the next three decades, California’s San Joaquin Valley alone could lose up to 535,000 acres of farmland as a result of the shortage of water supplies.

Jennifer Brophy, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, is working on methods she hopes will be used to change commercial plant species so they can survive severe conditions. She is developing new genetic engineering techniques that can help plants grow in a variety of different conditions. By changing the genome (基因组) of both commercial crops and soil bacteria, she thinks it may be possible to help plants survive droughts.

To make plants respond to extreme climate, Brophy is building what she calls “genetic circuits (基因回路).” In addition to changing the genes within plant cells, this method also changes how and when those genes are activated (激活). If the plant senses a specific sugar, it can express one protein; if it senses another signal, it’ll express a different protein, kicking off an entirely separate chain of events. If both signals are there, the plant may be able to express something else entirely. “Using circuits, you can have plants respond in new ways to all these different inputs,” she says.

Humans can learn from the weather forecast whether it’s going to be really hot or really dry in the next couple of weeks so that we can plan accordingly. “A plant doesn’t necessarily know what’s coming. It just knows if it’s hot or mild right now,” says Brophy. This can lead to problems when weather becomes unstable. A plant that usually flowers in spring may flower in winter if there are a few unseasonably warm days. When temperatures fall again, the flowers die and ruin a year of crops. “It’d be great to be able to communicate with plants to tell them, ‘hey, you should wait on that flowering,’” she adds.

Controlling plants’ growth at this level is an exciting prospect, but actually putting it into practice is along way off. At the moment, Brophy is testing the concept in the lab using a small weedy plant called Arabidopsis, trying to figure out how to activate certain genes on command.

【推荐2】Australia is home to some of the world’s deadliest animals. However, few are as dangerous as the cane toad（蔗蟾蜍）. Native to Central and South America, the innocent-looking animal is an invasive species that was imported to Australia in 1935 to control the native cane beetles that were harming sugarcane crops. With very few natural enemies, their population began to grow rapidly. Experts say that there are currently over 200 million cane toads in Australia, and the number is still growing.

The increasing population is proving to be deadly for some native Australian animal species that prey（捕食）on the toads. That’s because when the toads sense danger, they release a milky substance that is so poisonous that it kills the predator（捕食者）almost instantly.

While some animals have learned to avoid the toads altogether or just attack their belly, the Australian monitor lizards（大蜥蜴）continue to be affected seriously. The lizards are well-known for trapping these poisonous toads. Unfortunately, in most cases, it turns out to be their last meal since it takes the cane toad less than 30 seconds to release enough poison to kill the hunter.

After extensive efforts to control the toad’s population growth failed, a team of researchers from the University of Sydney came up with a creative plan. They decided to train the monitor lizards to avoid the cane toads! To carry out the plan, they went to a remote area in the Kimberley region of Australia that had not yet been invaded by the toads, and fed the wild lizards on young cane toads. Though the smaller animals release the same poison as the adults, they do so in smaller doses. Therefore, while the poison does make the predators sick, it does not kill them. The researchers say it took just one or two trials to teach the lizards to avoid cane toads altogether. They could avoid the animals even when the larger cane toads arrived. According to the researchers, eighteen months after the study started most of the trained lizards keep alive, while those that were not exposed to the small toads die from their poison.

【推荐3】Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence. When Martin Luther King Jr. presented his dream, he chose language that would stir the hearts of his audience. Delivering this electrifying (展性的) message required emotional intelligence — the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions.

Emotional intelligence has been highly recommended by leaders, policymakers, and educators as the solution to a wide range of social problems. If we can teach our children to manage emotions, the argument goes, we’ll have less bullying and more cooperation. If we can cultivate emotional intelligence among leaders and doctors, we’ll have more caring workplaces and more compassionate healthcare.

Emotional intelligence is important, but the uncontrolled enthusiasm has obscured (掩盖) a dark side. New evidence shows that when people sharpen their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating (把持) others. When you`re good at controlling your own emotions, you can hide your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can motivate them to act against their own best interests.

Social scientists have begun to document this dark side of emotional intelligence. In a research led by University of professor Jochen Menges, when a leader gave an inspiring speech filled with emotion, the audience was Jess likely to scrutinize (细察) the message and remembered of the content. Ironically (讽刺的是) audience members were so moved by the speech that they claimed to recall more of it.

The authors call this the awestruck effect, but it might just as easily be described as the dumbstruck effect. One observer reflected that Hitler’s persuasive impact came from his ability to strategically express emotions — he would “ear open his heart — and these emotions affected his followers to the point that they would stop thinking critically and just emote.”

Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be destructive. New evidence suggests that when people have self-serving motives (动机), emotional intelligence becomes a weapon for manipulating others. In a study led by the University of Toronto psychologist Stephane Cote, university employees filled out a survey about their Machiavellian (不择手段的) tendencies, and took a test measuring their knowledge about effective strategies for managing emotions. Then, Cote’s team assessed how often the employees deliberately undermined (逐渐削弱) their colleagues. The employees involved in the most harmful behaviors were Machiavellians with high emotional intelligence. They used their emotional skills to lower the dignity of their peers for personal gain.

Shining a light on this dark side of emotional intelligence is one mission of a research team led by University College London professor Martin Kilduff. According to these experts, emotional intelligence helps people disguise (伪装) one set of emotions while expressing another for personal Professor Kiiduit’s team writes, “The strategic disguise of one’s own emotions and the manipulation of others’ emotions for strategic ends are behaviors evident not only on Shakespeare’s stage but also in the offices and corridors where power and influence are traded.”

Of course, people aren’t always using emotional intelligence for nefarious ends. More often than not, emotional skills are simply instrumental tools for goal accomplishment. A research team discovered that founder Anita Roddick used emotional intelligence to inspire her employees fundraise for charity. As Roddick explained, “Whenever we wanted to persuade our staff to support a particular project, we always tried to break their hearts.”

There is growing recognition that emotional intelligence-like any skill-can be used for good or evil. So if we’re going to teach emotional intelligence in schools and develop it at work, we need to consider the values that go along with it and here it’s actually useful.

【推荐1】Women interpret emojis differently to men, research suggests. Scientists say this is because these small digital pictographs can be ambiguous and be perceived differently by different people. The researchers surveyed 523 adults (49% men and 51% women) to review 24 different emojis. Each emoji — taken from Apple, Windows and WeChat platforms — represented one of the six emotional states labelled by the team: happy, disgusted, fearful, sad, surprised, and angry.

They found women were able to more accurately interpret happy, fearful, sad and angry emoji labels compared to men. No gender differences were observed for surprised or disgusted emoji, the team said. Dr. Ruth Filik, associate professor in the School of Psychology at The University of Nottingham, said: “What I found most interesting and surprising is that there are so many individual differences in how people interpret these emojis.”

“It is important to note that the results reflect how often participants labelled the emoji in the same way as the researchers. So, we should think of the results in terms of there being differences across people in how they interpret emojis, rather than some people being better at it than others. We should keep these differences in mind when using emojis in our messages.”

The researchers said that stylised images of faces expressing different emotions can add both nuance as well as potential ambiguity to messages sent via texts, emails or even social media. To understand more about how emojis are interpreted, the team recruited 270 people from the UK and 253 from China, who were aged between 18 to 84 years old.

Each emoji was assigned an emotion label by the researchers, which they say may not correspond exactly with the emoji as used in real life. In addition to gender, the team also found age to play a role in how emoji are interpreted, with younger adults faring better than the older ones in matching the emoji with their assigned labels. The researchers say ambiguity of emojis is worth further research, “especially when communicating across gender, age, or cultures”.

【推荐2】People who grow up outside of cities are better at finding their way around than urbanites, a large study on navigation suggests. The results, described online on March 30 in Nature, hint that learning to handle environmental complexity as a child strengthens mental muscles for spatial skills.

Nearly 400,000 people from 38 countries around the world played a video game called Sea Hero Quest, designed by scientists and game developers as a fun way to collect data about people’s brains. Players piloted a boat in search of various targets.

On average, people who said they had grown up outside of cities, where they would have probably encountered lots of complicated paths, were better at finding the targets than people who were raised in cities.

What’s more, the difference between city residents and outsiders was most obvious in countries where cities tend to have simple layouts (布局), such as Chicago with its streets laid out at 90-degree angles. The simpler the cities, the bigger the advantage for people from more rural areas, cognitive scientist Antoine Coutrot of CNRS and his colleagues report.

Still, from these video game data, scientists can’t definitively say that the childhood environment is behind the differences in navigation. But it’s possible. “As a kid, if you are exposed to a complex environment, you learn to find your way, and you develop the right cognitive processes to do so,” Coutrot says.

Other factors have been linked to navigational performance, including age, gender, education and even a superior sense of smell. Figuring out these details will give doctors a more precise baseline (基准) of a person’s navigational abilities. That, in turn, might help reveal when these skills weaken, as they do in early Alzheimer’s disease, for instance.