【推荐1】Chocolate Is Beneficial in Some Cases

Mental arithmetic became easier after volunteers had been given large amounts of compounds found in chocolate, called flavanols (黄烷醇), in a hot cocoa drink. They were also less likely to feel tired or mentally drained, the findings, presented at the British Psychological Society annual conference in Brighton show.

Prof David Kennedy, director of the brain, performance and nutrition research centre at North-umbria University, and a co-author of the study, said that chocolate could be beneficial for mentally challenging tasks.

    1     “For things that are difficult to do, mentally demanding things that maybe crop up in your work, it would help.” Prof Kennedy said. The flavanols, part of a group of chemicals called polyphenols (多酚), work by increasing the flow of blood into the brain.

For the study 30 volunteers were asked to count backwards in groups of three from a random number between 800 and 999 generated by a computer.     2    . However, the same was not true when the group was asked to count backwards in groups of seven, which the researchers described as more complex task, requiring a slightly different part of the brain.

The findings also show that the volunteers did not get as tired doing the calculations if they had been given the cocoa drink, despite being asked to do them over and over for an hour. The researchers gave the volunteers a total of 500 mg of flavanol.     3    .

Emma Wightman, one of the study’s lead researchers, said: “You can get bars of chocolate that have 100 mg of flavnoal, and we are also going to look at the effect of lower doses of flavanol on the brain.”

Prof Kennedy added: “The amount that you are giving is more than in the diet but there is quite a lot of evidence that general amounts are protective against declining function and that kind of thing.     4    .

【推荐2】I was at the market, shopping for lamb chops all of them were cut super close. Also, there was no fat. “wow, they’re really lean (瘦的),” I said to the butcher (肉贩) “Yeah. I know!” he said, smiling.

“But fat is what makes meat taste good,” I said. He hung his head. “Yeah, I know.” He moved closer to me. “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” Then he disappeared into another room. What the butcher returned with was actual meat, with some actual white material in it and around it.

Lean meat is in when some food experts are rethinking their war against fat. Stores display only lean meat for fear that they seem unconcerned about their customers health. People fear fat.

“People fear food, corrected my butcher. I knew exactly what he was talking about. Some time ago I asked online readers to vote on several matters of personal preference, one of which was how they liked their hamburger cooked. The results were toward well-done, which surprised me, as most of my readers lead a modern lifestyle.

I later learned what had happened with the hamburger vote: Most of the readers actually prefer underdone meat but ”burn" their hamburgers for fear of some food-borne illness. One reader seriously told me that unlike steak (肉排) where 87 percent of the meat is inside and thus clean, ground meat (碎肉) is 100 percent deadly. So he cooks the danger out of it, until it is black outside, gray in the middle, without any taste.

I don’t get any of this. Food should not be something that you must kill before it kills you. So to all the people of the world who are afraid of eating food the way it should be eaten, I just want to leave you with a thought.

If you are very careful about what you eat, you might be able to lower the amount of certain unwanted things. But you can’t avoid eating them altogether, because they are everywhere in our food.

【推荐3】Bubble tea(珍珠奶茶 ), also called boba, is becoming harder to find as the COVID-19-related shortage takes hold. The blockage of the Suez Canal by a large cargo ship in March 2021 is causing delays in the global supply chain, which is a big part of the reasons for the shortage.

“This is an industry-wide shortage,” the owners of Hayward, California-based US Boba Company said on their Boba Guys Instagram page. “Some boba shops are already out. Others will be out in the next few weeks. 99% of boba comes from overseas. ”

Oliver Yoon, vice-president of sales and marketing for Boba Tea Direct, a Chicago-based nationwide supplier of bubble tea products, told Business Insider that the shortage started about a month ago and wasn’t likely to end until the end of April at the earliest.

Alex Ou, owner of Tea & Others in San Francisco, said that 70% of her customers prefer boba drinks. “Some people will not buy drinks if we’re out of boba,” Ou said. “They’re simply here for the boba.”

“We have storehouses on both East and West Coast, so compared with other boba brands, there is little impact on us,” said Mai Shi, manager of Kung Fu Tea. “From this industry-wide shortage, we see the increasing demand for the entire bubble tea category as people want fresh, made-to-order drinks. We are using this as an opportunity to improve our products to attract more customers,” she said.

And despite the shortage, Kung Fu Tea is still planning to celebrate its annual National Bubble Tea Day when it gives its app users a free drink with a $ 4 credit to use on their next order.

【推荐3】Do you think of yourself as a creative person? Many people have this common assumption that creativity is an inborn talent; only a special group of people are born creative, and everyone else just unfortunately doesn't have that special ability. But, this is far from the truth! At the end of the day, creativity is a skill. It's not some natural born talent that some have over others. What this means is that creativity is a skill that can be practiced and improved upon systematically by applying your strongest learning styles.

Let me break another misconception about creativity, which is that it's only used to create completely “new” or “original” things. Again, this is far from the truth. Because everything, including works of art, doesn't come from nothing. Everything originates from some sort of inspiration which is provided by something that already exists. This means that creativity gives birth to new meaning or value by connecting things together.

From this angle, you can see a lot of creativity in action. In technology, Apple combines traditional computers with design and aesthetics to create new ways to use digital products. In music, a musician may be inspired by various styles of music, instruments and rhythms to create an entirely new type of song. These are about connecting different ideas, finding common ground among the differences, and creating new ideas out of them.

The fact is that everyone is born with a creative ability. Creativity, at its heart, is being able to see things in a way that others can't. It's a skill that helps you find new angles to create new possibilities and solutions to different problems. So, if you encounter different challenges and problems that need solving on a regular basis, then creativity is an invaluable skill to have.

【推荐2】When consuming information, we try to acquire more signals and less noise. We feel like the more information we consume the more signals we receive. While this is probably true on an absolute basis, Nassim Taleb argues in the book Antifragile that it is not true on a relative basis. As you consume more data and the ratio (比率) of noise to signals increases, you know less about what’s going on and you are likely to cause more unintentional trouble.

The supply of information to which we are exposed under modernity is transforming humans from a calm person to a neurotic (神经质的) one. For the purpose of our discussion, the first person only reacts to real information, and the second largely to noise. The difference between the two will show us the difference between noise and signals. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore; signals are what you need to heed.

In science, noise is a generalization beyond the actual sound to describe random information that is totally useless for any purpose, and that you need to clean up to make sense of what you are listening to. You can use and take advantage of noise and randomness, but noise and randomness can also use and take advantage of you, particularly with the data you get on the Internet or through other media. The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are likely to get, and the higher the noise-to-signal ratio is.

Say you look at information on a yearly basis—the changes you see will all be large ones. The ratio of signals to noise is about one to one—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, and the other half come from randomness. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise and 5 percent signals, and the changes you see daily will certainly be small.