【推荐2】Despite all the other fun activities around us today, there's no doubt that many people still love reading. Books can teach us plenty about the world, of course, as well as improving our vocabularies and writing skills. But can novels also make us better people?

According to the Canadian psychologist Keith Oatley, people who read novels may improve their social skills. In his research, Oatley has found that each time we open a novel, we read about the characters and imagine ourselves into their position. When they are in danger, our hearts start to race. Characters hook us into stories. Without necessarily even noticing, we imagine what it's like to be them and compare their reactions with how we respond.

So people who read novels appear to be more skilled at working out what other people are thinking and feeling, which is an important social skill. But does that necessarily make them better people? To test this, Oatley's team carried out an experiment, where researchers "accidentally" drop a number of pens on the floor and then see who offers to help pick them up. Before the pen-drop took place, participants were given a list of questions measuring empathy（共鸣）. Then they read a short story and answered a series of questions to see if they had better performance on empathy. It worked: the people who expressed the most empathy for the characters were more likely to help pick up the pens.

So the research shows that reading novels does make people behave better. It sounds as though it's time to change people's fixed image of the shy bookworm whose nose is always in a book because they find it difficult to get on with real people. In fact, these bookworms might be better than everyone else at understanding human beings.

Singapore is a small, flat, marshy island that has been developed to become the most important port and business center in Southeast Asia and one of the ten wealthiest countries in the world in terms of gross national product per capita.

Singapore has a population of 3.5 million people and a high density of more than 500 people per square kilometer. The superior infrastructure—especially the excellent port and international airport—has made Singapore the import and transshipment center for the region.     1     These functions are complemented by a large variety of maritime service activities, including banking, insurance, communications, and consulting.

Singapore has diversified its service sector to include a wider range of financial, communications, and management activities and has attracted the regional headquarters of many multinational corporations.     2     This diversification, as well as high consumption levels in the domestic market, allowed Singapore to cope with the 1983 oil crisis and 1997 Asian financial crisis somewhat more easily than did other countries in the region.

Singapore has a population of diverse ethnicity and religion, but it is dominated (77 percent) by overseas Chinese, descendants of immigrants who moved to Singapore in the colonial period and followed the religions of Buddhism and Taoism. Other groups include Malays (about 15 percent) and Indians (about 7 percent, mainly Hindu).     3     The promotion is especially among the highly educated in order to reduce labor shortages and ensure a workforce to support the older population. Colonial Singapore was residentially segregated, with the British living next to the government buildings on the east shore of the Singapore River, Chinatown on the west riverbank, and Indian and Malay neighborhoods farther toward the east.

The government has made serious attempts to foster harmony between ethnic groups and to create a sense of national identity by designating four official languages (Mandarin Chinese, English, Malay, and Indian Tamil).     4     They also enforce Singapore’s image of a clean and crime-free environment through very strict rules against litter and graffiti, media censorship, and licensing of satellite dishes and street entertainers.

【推荐2】Social media is taking over our lives: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and now, TikTok. These social media platforms have transformed from a way to stay connected to an industry where even kids can make money off their posts. While this may seem like another opportunistic innovation, it’s really full of hidden false realities.

The median income recorded in the United States of America was about $63,000 in 2018. Tik Tokers can make anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 for a Tik Tok brand partnership, and Tik Tokers with over a million followers can make up to $30,000 a month — $360,000 a year. They are making more than the average person trying to feed their family and keep a roof over their heads, simply by posting a 15-second video.

This is mad in more ways than one. Not only is it an overpaid “job”, but it promotes undeserved admiration from viewers and a false sense of reality. Many of these famous Tik Tokers are still teens, and the effects of fame at such an early stage in life might cause issues later in life, such as mental illness. Teens can be easily influenced by what they are watching. They can put a false sense of self-value into who they look up to and what they represent: money, fame and being considered conventionally attractive.

While TikTok has become a great tool for marketing, it’s important to understand how this content affects young viewers. If we’ re constantly consuming content that shows us all we need to do to be successful is be conventionally attractive and post a 15-second video featuring a new dance, it will challenge our knowledge of what really makes someone successful and will in turn affect our individual work ethics. What about the people who miss birthdays and family holidays due to their jobs and aren’t getting paid nearly as much as these Tik Tokers?

Richard Colyer, president and creator of Metaphor, Inc., had his own view on this issue. “It sounds great that kids can make money for doing the latest dance moves in a 15-second video, but we should feed the minds of kids and not just their __________. TikTok can be great if used properly. Money alone is not good, technology alone is not good and connectedness can be bad if it’s only online.”

Again, as a fellow consumer of TikTok, I do enjoy when I have some time to kill and need a good laugh. I’m not against someone making a living on entertainment, but what does getting famous of a 15-second video teach young people?

【推荐3】Sound may offer a creative way to take the ocean's temperature. Climate change is steadily warming the seas, which have absorbed about 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. This warming contributes to sea-level rise, endangers species and influences weather patterns.

But tracking the warming is tricky. Ship-based observations capture only snapshots in time over a tiny portion of the water. Satellite observations cannot enter very deep below the surface. The most detailed picture of ocean heat comes from Argo, which can drop down to around 6,500feet. But there are only about 4,000 such floats, and they cannot sample deeper parts of the oceans.

In Science, researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences compared the travel speeds of sounds produced by undersea earthquakes to detect ocean warming over wider areas. Because sound travels faster in warmer water, differences in speed can reveal changing temperatures. "They're opening up a whole new area of study," says Princeton University geophysicist Frederik Simons, who was not involved in the research.

Inspired by those early efforts to measure ocean heat with sound, Caltech researcher Wenbo Wu thought to monitor low-frequency sound waves sent out by earthquakes below the seafloor. “I know these earthquakes are very powerful sources, "Wu says, "So why not try to use the earthquakes?"”

He and his team tested the idea near Indonesia’s island of Nias, where the IndoAustralian Plate is bumping under the Sunda Plate. The researchers gathered sound data from 4,272 earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater from 2004 to 2016, and they compared sound wave speeds from quakes that originated in the same spot over the years. By modeling the differences, often just fractions of a second, they found that the ocean near Nias was warming by about 0.08 degree Fahrenheit per decade—more than the 0.047 degree F suggested by Argo’s data. Less than one degree F does not sound large, but it takes considerable heat to warm the entire eastern Indian Ocean.

The new method is promising, says University of Hawaii oceanographer Bruce Howe, who was not involved in the work. Meanwhile Simons and his colleagues are exploring an alternative technique, employing dozens of underwater microphones called hydrophones to catch more earthquake sounds. He notes that finding out the floats’ precise locations will be challenging, however. Overcoming such challenges would fill in important gaps, Wu says, “We really need different methods of gathering the data as much as possible.”