【推荐1】You’ re enjoying a quiet evening at home when suddenly your neighbor’s dog starts barking (吠叫) and doesn’t stop. Sure, dogs need to bark every now and then, but if the barking is getting in the way of your daily life, you need to do something.

Before you take action, make records of when the dog is disturbing. Record the dates and times when the barking appears to find out the features of the barking. Check them carefully and get your facts straight. You might notice the barking only happens when the owners are at work, or during thunderstorms.

After two to three weeks, visit your neighbors with the facts, your neighbors might not even realize the barking is a problem, for the worst noise may happen when they are gone.

Explain the times when the harking gets had, then suggest a way to solve the problem. Ask if the dog can stay inside during storm, or suggest a dog training class. Be open to compromise (妥协) because the owners might have other ideas about how to deal with the noise.

Befriending the dog could help. Have your neighbors introduce you to their dog. If they become more comfortable in your presence, they’re less likely to bark when they see you or when they are in the backyard. You might even be able to use commands such as “quiet” once the dog trusts you.

Avoid gossiping (流言蜚语) with other neighbors about the dog. “That’s when things become worse.” After all, most people will want to solve the problem.

【推荐2】It is like a scene from a horror film：a spider web is several meters wide，which is home to thousands of spiders.And that was what Jason G．Goldman，an animal behavior researcher，found along a muddy path in the Peruvian Amazon jungle—the web arched from tree to tree，a structure containing too many spiders to count.They appeared to function as a society，just like ants or bees.

Anelosimus eximius，the species Goldman met in the rainforest，is not the only kind of social spiders in the world，but it does construct the biggest webs.Some can reach more than 7.6m long and 1.5m wide.A web of that size could contain as many as 50,000 individual spiders.

Anelosimus eximius was first discovered more than a century ago by a French scientist named Eugene Simon.More social spiders have been discovered since.One was found as recently as 2006.

An Anelosimus eximius colony(群体) contains adult males and females as well as youngsters，but the majority of spiders on the web are females. Males account for only between 5% and 22% of any colony’s population.Social spiders work together to build，maintain and clean their webs.They work together to catch prey(猎物)，and dine together when they trap a large feast.The females work together to care for the young in the colony.They feed their youngsters by vomiting(吐出) up food for them，just like mother birds.

Why did these spiders become social？Researchers have discovered three ecological(生态的) elements that often lead to cooperative(合作的) living among spiders.

Social spiders tend to feed on bigger prey，for one thing.Spiders living in places where it is difficult to hunt large or more profitable prey alone may eventually figure out that it is in their interest to work together.

A．	B．
C．	D．

【推荐3】A bite from a tsetse fly (采采蝇) is an extremely unpleasant experience. It is not like a mosquito, which can put its thin mouthpart directly into your blood, often without you noticing. In contrast, the tsetse fly’s mouth has tiny saws on it that saw into your skin on its way to suck out your blood.

To make matters worse, several species of tsetse fly can transmit diseases. One of the most dangerous is a parasite that causes “sleeping sickness”, or “human African trypanosomiasis” to give it its official name. Without treatment, an infection is usually fatal.

Like so many tropical diseases, sleeping sickness has often been neglected by medical researchers. However, researchers have long endeavored to understand how it avoids our bodies’ defence mechanisms. Some of their insights could now help us eliminate sleeping sickness altogether.

There are two closely-related single-celled parasites that cause this deathly sleep: Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense and T. b. gambiense. The latter is far more common: it is responsible for up to 95% of cases, mostly in western Africa. It takes several years to kill a person, while T. brucei rhodesiense can cause death within months. There are still other forms that infect livestock.

After the initial bite, sleeping sickness symptoms often start with a fever, headaches and aching muscles. As the illness goes on, those infected become increasingly tired, which is where it gets its name. Personality changes, severe confusion and poor coordination can also happen.

While medication does help, some treatments are toxic and can themselves be deadly, especially if they are given after the disease has reached the brain.

It is worth noting that sleeping sickness is no longer as deadly as it once was. In the early 20th Century several hundred thousand people were infected each year. By the 1960s the disease was considered “under control” and had reached very low numbers, making its spread more difficult. But in the 1970s there was another major epidemic, which took 20 years to control.

Since then, better screening programmes and earlier interventions have reduced the number of cases dramatically. In 2009 there were fewer than 10,000 cases for the first time since records began, and in 2015 this figure dropped to fewer than 3,000, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organisation. The WHO hopes the disease will be completely eliminated by 2020.

While this decline looks positive, there may be many more cases that go unreported in rural Africa. To eliminate the disease completely, infections have to be closely monitored.

More problematically, a series of new studies have shown that the parasite is more complicated than previously believed.

Sleeping sickness has always been considered — and diagnosed — as a blood disease, because T. brucei parasites can readily be detected in the blood of its victims.

【推荐1】Sometimes, you just can't help it. Maybe you're watching a sad movie, or thinking about the friend who moved away. Next thing you know, you feel pressure in your throat, your eyes are watering, and you have tears running down your cheeks.

According to Ad Vingerhoets, a professor of psychology at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, who is one of the few scientists in the world who have studied crying, there are three types of tears. Basal tears are the first type. They act as a protective barrier between the eye and the rest of the World. Next are reflex tears. They wash your eyes clean when something gets in them. Finally, there are emotional tears. “These are released in response to emotional states,” explains Vingerhoets.

Scientists believe crying has something to do with how humans developed and learned to depend on each other. “Humans are very complex social creatures,” says Lauren Bylsma, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania. "It seems that tears serve to arouse help and support from others,” She says.

Vingerhoets agrees, "I think that the reason why humans shed tears（流眼泪）has something to do with our childhood, " he says. "that's the time when we are still dependent on adults for love and protection and care. The major advantage of emotional tears is that you can target them at a specific person." Vingerhoets says this ability could have come in handy in prehistoric times, when humans were living among dangerous animals. Tears were a safer way to get attention. "In this case, it is better to use a silent signal to ask for help, "he says.

Vingerhoets and Byhma do frequent studies to better understand why humans cry. According to Byhma, there is still much more to discover. "It's surprising, "she says, "how much we still don't know.”

Everybody loves self-improvement. That’s why we’re such enthusiastic consumers of “top 10” lists of things to do to be a more productive, promotable, mindful— you name it—leader. But these lists seldom work. What if we didn’t think of self-improvement as work? What if we thought of it as play—specifically, as playing with our sense of self?

Traditionally, people work on themselves, committed to doing everything in their power to change their leadership style. You set your goals and objectives, you are mindful of your time, and seek efficient solutions. You’re not going to deviate (偏离) from the straight and narrow. You focus on what you should do, especially as others see it, as opposed to what you want to do. It’s all very serious and not whole of fun. There is one right answer. Success or failure is the outcome. We judge ourselves.

In contrast, no matter what you’re up to, when you’re in “play” mode, your primary drivers are enjoyment and discovery instead of goals and objectives. You’re curious. You lose track of time. Like in all forms if play, the journey becomes more important than a pre-set destination.

Much research shows how play develops creativity and innovation. Play with your own idea of yourself is similar to playing with future possibilities. So, we stop evaluating today’s self against unachievable ideal of leadership that doesn’t really exist. We also stop trying to will ourselves to “commit” to becoming something we are not even sure we want to be—what we call the “feared self”, which is composed of images negative role models. And, we shift direction from submitting to what other people want us to be to becoming more self-authoring. As a result, when you play, you’re more creative and more open to what you might learn about yourself.

Unfortunately, we don’t often get —or give ourselves—permission to play with our sense of self. In life, we equate playfulness with the person who dips into a great variety of possibilities, never committing to any. We find inconsistency distasteful, so we exclude options that seem too far off from today’s “authentic self”, without ever giving them a try. This kills the discontinuous growth that only comes when we surprise ourselves.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once said, “people tend to play only with serious things—madness, disaster, other people.” Playing with your self is a serious effort because who we might become is not knowable or predictable at the start. That’s why it’s as dangerous as it is necessary for growth.

【推荐3】You’re out to dinner. The food is delicious and the service is fine. You decide to leave a big fat tip. Why? The answer may not be as simple as you think.

Tipping, psychologists have found, is not just about service. Instead, studies have shown that tipping can be affected by psychological reactions to a series of different factors from the waiter’s choice of words, to how they carry themselves while taking orders, to the bill’s total. Even how much waiters remind customers of themselves can determine how much change they pocket by the end of the night.

“Studies before have shown that mimicry(模仿) brings into positive feelings for the mimicker,” wrote Rick van Baaren, a social psychology professor. “These studies show that people who are being mimicked become more generous toward the person who mimics them.”

So Rick van Baaren divided 59 waiters into two groups. He requested that half serve with a phrase such as. “ Coming up !” Those in the other hall were instructed to repeat the orders and preferences back to the customers. Rick van Baaren then compared their take-home pay. ’The results were clear—it pays to mimic your customer. The copycat(模仿者) waiters earned almost double the amount of tips to the other group.

Leonard Green and Joel Myerson, psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis, found the generosity of a tipper maybe limited by his bill. After research on the1,000 tips left for waiters, cabdrivers, hair stylists, they found tip percentages in these three areas dropped as customers’ bills went up. In fact, tip percentages appear to plateau(稳定期) when bills topped $100 and a bill for $200 made the worker gain no bigger percentage tip than a bill for $100.

“That’s also a point of tipping,” Green says. “You have to give a little extra to the cabdriver for being there to pick you up and something to the waiter for being there to serve you. If they weren’t there, you’d never get any service. So part of the idea of a tip is for just being there.”

【推荐1】Psychologists who study moral judgments have found that when people are faced with moral dilemmas, they tend to respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.

In a 2014 paper led by Albert Costa, volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the “trolley problem”: imagine that a runaway trolley bus is rushing toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move. You are next to a switch that can change the trolley to a different set of tracks, therefore saving the five people, but resulting in the death of one who is standing on the side tracks. Do you pull the switch?

Most people agree that they would. But what if the only way to stop the trolley is by pushing a large stranger off a footbridge into its path? People hesitate to say they would do this, even though in both situations, one person is sacrificed to save five. But Costa and his colleagues found that setting the dilemma in a language that volunteers had learned as a foreign tongue dramatically increased their stated willingness to push the sacrificial person off the footbridge, from fewer than 20% of respondents working in their native language to about 50% of those using the foreign one.

Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing modes of thinking: one of these, a quick “feeling” and the other, careful consideration about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more careful mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language reminds our brain to prepare for painstaking activity.

An alternative explanation is that differences arise between native and foreign tongues because our childhood languages are associated with greater emotion than those learned in more academic environment. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less filled with the emotional reactions that appear when we use a language learned in childhood.

What is a multilingual(多语言的) person’s “true” moral self? Is it my moral memories that taught me what it means to be “good”? Or is it the reasoning I’m able to apply when free of such unconscious restrictions? Or perhaps, this research simply indicates what is true for all of us: regardless of how many languages we speak, our moral compass is a combination of the earliest forces that have shaped us and the ways in which we escape them.

【推荐2】Imagine a cat that does not need someone to clean up after it keeps an older people company and helps them remember to take their medicine. That is the shared dream of the toy maker Hasbro and scientists at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The researchers received a $ 3-million-dollar from the National Science Foundation for a special project. They want to find ways to add artificial intelligence, or AI, to Hasbro’s “Joy for All” robotic cat.

The cat has already been for sale for two years. Though priced at over 1,000 dollars, it sold quite well. It was meant to act as a “companion”(陪伴) for older people. Now the project is aimed at developing additional abilities for the cat. Researchers are working to decide which activities older adults may need the most. They hope to make the cat perform a small number of activities very well. Such activities include finding lost objects and reminding the older people to take medicine or visit their doctor. They also want to keep the cost down to just a few hundred dollars.

It is an idea that has appealed (有吸引力) to Jeanne Elliott. Her 93-year-old mother Mary Derr lives with her in South Kingstown. Derr has dementia (痴呆). The Joy for All cat that Elliot bought this year has become a true companion for Derr. The cat stays with Derr and keeps her relaxed while Elliott is at work. Elliot said a robotic cat that helps her mother to remember to take her medicine and be careful when she walks would be greater.

The researchers are trying to learn how the improved cats will complete helpful activities and how they will communicate. They say that they do not want a talking cat, however. Instead they are trying to design a cat that can move its head in a special way to successfully communicate its message. In the end, they hope to create an exchange between the human and the cat in which the human feels the cat needs them. By doing so, the researchers hope they can even help prevent feelings of loneliness and sadness among elderly people.

【推荐3】By analyzing the fossilized teeth of some of our most ancient ancestors, a team of scientists led by the universities of Bristol (UK) and Lyon (France) have discovered that the first humans significantly breastfed their infants (婴儿) for longer periods than their contemporary relatives.

The results, published in the journal Science Advances, provide a first insight into the practice of weaning （断奶）that remain otherwise unseen in the fossil record.

The team sampled minute amounts from nearly 40 fossilized teeth of our South African fossil relatives, early Homo, Paranthropus robustus and Australopithecus africanus. They measured the proportions of their stable calcium isotopes （同位素）in the tooth enamel（牙釉质）, which are a function of the mother milk intake by infants. They show that early Homo offspring（后代） was breastfed in significant proportions until the age of around three to four years, which likely played a role in the apparition of traits that are specific to human lineage（血统）, such as the brain development.

In contrast, infants of Paranthropus robustus, that became extinct around one million years ago and were a more robust species in terms of dental anatomy, as well as infants of Australopithecus africanus, stopped drinking sizeable proportions of mother milk in the course of the first months of life.

These differences in nursing behaviors likely come with major changes in the social structures of groups as well as the time between the birth of one child and the birth of the next.

One of the study's lead authors, Dr Theo Tacail said: "The practice of weaning -- the duration of breastfeeding, age at non-milk food introduction and the age at cessation of suckling -- differs among the modern members of the hominid family which includes humans and modern great apes: orangutan, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.

The development of such behavioral differences likely played major roles in the evolution of the members of human lineage, being associated for instance with size and structure of social groups, brain development.

However, getting insights into these behavioral changes from fossils that are millions of years old is a challenge and, so far, little evidence allow discussing nursing practices in these fossil species.

The findings stress the need for further exploration of calcium stables isotopes compositions in the fossil record in order to understand the co-evolution of weaning practices with other traits such as brain size or social behaviors."

http://www.dentaldailynews.com/first-human-ancestors-breastfed-for-longer-than-contemporary-relatives/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190829115427.htm