【推荐1】On Sept. 2, 2012, the dog Hunter passed away over the Rainbow Bridge at about 15 years old. He was so sweet and gentle. I rescued him from HELP in 2001 when he was about three (after his second visit to HELP). I went to his foster (代养的) home in North Aurora. His foster mom said she just gave him a shower, so he would be presentable. I walked through the door and there were many dogs and toys. I never understood why he came to the shelter twice. He did get two pieces of bread from the table and put them on the floor, but that was my carelessness and I quickly learned that. No more problems.

On the way home that day, I promised him he was home for good and he would never have to worry again—I would love him till the end. That was the best move I had ever made. I just lost my dog Bo two months ago. Now Hunter brought sunshine into my life and saved me. Near the end of his life, I was able to repay him for all he had done for me.

I do not remember his foster mom’s name. I promised to send the latest information to her, but lost her email address. I wish I could tell her what a good dog Hunter turned out to be, but I’m sure she already knew that. If she is still a foster mom, perhaps she will read this.

I should have written this long ago. How time flies! Hunter was the finest dog I had ever raised. We shared thousands of miles on the trail (小径). Everyone who ever met him fell in love with him.

【推荐2】I started out with animals as a volunteer in a safari park. For me, it’s about both providing care and supporting their conservation in the wild, which is what led me to Laos in South East Asia, setting up a sanctuary for Sun and Moon bears. They are facing a tough time - they are caught in the wild, and then sold to bear bile (熊胆) farms where they are treated inhumanely.

It was full-steam ahead right from the start. Before I’d even boarded the plane to Laos, Matt, a friend from charity Free The Bears, had called me saying they had rescued a tiny female Sun bear. They named it Mary.

She was found in a tiny cage on the back of a truck that was filled with rubbish. When I met Mary for the first time, she was scared and weak, but after a few days in a caring environment with the right nutrition she quickly found her feet.

It wasn’t all easy work. I remember taking her for a walk one day and she shot off up a tree far beyond our reach just as we were heading back to our nursery centre. She loves honey, but she was so intelligent (and stubborn) that she wouldn’t just come for it. I ended up having to trick her with a game, and finally managed to get her low enough to grab her.

I have countless memories like that which will always make me laugh. But it’s still mentally exhausting to know that more than 10,000 bears are kept in cages across Asia. So I can’t describe the feeling of great joy when we get them into our centre. Seeing them take their first steps on grass after knowing nothing but bars and concrete is what it’s all about. They deserve to have the life they were intended for.

【推荐3】People with low levels of vitamin D have significantly higher rates of actually every disease you can think of.

Heath experts think most of us don’t get enough of it. Vitamin D is produced by skin with the help of sunlight. It is difficult to obtain sufficient quantities just through diet. And today, 90% of us spend about 18 hours indoors every day. And even when we do go outside, we are armed with sunscreen to protect ourselves from harmful UV rays, which greatly decreases our natural production of vitamin D. That's why people are told to make up with vitamin pills.

The sun benefits us more than that. About ten years ago, Dr Richard Weller researched nitric oxide, a molecule (分子) produced in the body that lowers blood pressure. He discovered a previously unknown biological mechanism by which the skin uses sunshine to produce nitric oxide. It was already suspected that rates of high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke are higher if you are farther from the sunny equator. So are they in the darker months. Then he put forward a theory: could exposing skin to sunlight lower blood pressure?

Sure enough, when he exposed volunteers to 30 minutes of summer sunlight without Sunscreen, their nitric oxide levels went up and their blood pressure went down. Wouldn’t all those rays raise rates of skin cancer? Yes, but skin cancer kills surprisingly fewer than three per 100,000 in the United States each year. For every person dying of skin cancer, about 80 die from diseases caused by high blood pressure.

【推荐1】As birth order is clearly one of the many factors that affect development, we should pay much attention to it. Big brothers and sisters usually develop leadership early in life, mainly because of the responsibilities for younger children given to them by their parents. The danger, experts on family and child psychology report, is that if the older child takes that role to an extreme, he or she can become an overbearing adult.

Studies of nearly 300 people have found that firstborns are usually the most strongly motivated toward achievement. This is mainly the result of parental expectations. Research also suggests that firstborn children generally become more conservative than other children because they receive most of the parental orders and rules. Used to caring for others, they are more likely to move toward such leadership professions as teaching and politics. Less social and flexible because they become accustomed in the very early years to acting alone, they may have difficulty making close friends.

By contrast, the researchers say later children are more likely to be more relaxed and sociable than the eldest child because their parents are more relaxed. However, later children are often less ambitious and may be uncomfortable making decisions for others, and will seek work that fits their needs. This may help explain why younger children tend to favor the creative fields such as music, art, and writing. Later children may make good sellers because persuasion may have been the only tool they had to deal with older children. Younger children tend to remain forever “the baby” enjoyable to be around, but at times too dependent on others.

【推荐3】Researchers at the DogStudies lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have shown that dogs may possess some metacognitive (元认知) abilities. Specifically, when they do not have enough information to solve a problem, they will actively look for more information, similarly to primates (灵长类).

In a recent study, project leader Julia Belger explored whether dogs have metacognitive abilities. To test this, the researchers designed a device involving two V-shaped fences. A reward, either food or a toy, would be placed by one researcher behind one of the two fences while another researcher held the dogs. In some cases, the dogs could see where the reward was placed, while in others, the dogs could not. The researchers then analyzed how frequently the dogs looked through the gap in the fence before choosing an option.

The researchers found that the dogs did check significantly more often for the reward when they had not seen where it was placed. These results show that dogs do tend to actively seek extra information when they have not seen where the reward is concealed.

The results did not allow the researchers to say definitively whether dogs possess meta-cognition, though they displayed some evidence for it. Julia said, “For humans, vision is an important information gathering sense. In this case, our experiment was based on a checking action relying on sight, but the dogs probably also used their sense of smell when checking through the gap. We know that smell is very important to dogs and we could see that they were using it.”

Julia added, “In future, we would like to develop an experiment to investigate under what circumstances dogs decide to use their sense of smell versus sight. This may give us additional insights into their information seeking abilities.”