【推荐1】Have you ever noticed the birdsong you used to wake up to as a child has been thinning? Such has been the case in Australia for the endangered eastern bristlebird, with its numbers declining dramatically in the past 40 years.

At first glance, there is nothing too unique about the eastern bristlebird. Its song, while beautiful, doesn’t stand out in a typical Australian forest. Since the 1980s, researchers have been trying to understand why the eastern bristlebird has seen such rapid decline. Time an again, fires taking place unexpectedly come up as the main factor — along with the increase in fire frequency, climate change and habitat loss.

Fire can be deadly for many wild animals, but there is something special about the bristlebird that makes it particularly vulnerable (脆弱的) to large, frequent fires. Eastern bristle-birds, despite being able to fly, appear not to appreciate the view of a top story. They don’t choose to live in the treetops, or even on lower branches of trees. They preferred low, dense vegetation (植被).

This habitat structure is important for many small animals even less noticeable than the bristlebird, such as spiders, beetles and worms. This means the bristlebird can act like an indicator how the entire understory ecosystem is doing. Unfortunately, low, dense vegetation is often the first to burn and disappear during a fire. Worse still, it takes years for an understory to recover fully.

The eastern bristlebird may only be one fire away from extinction,signaling a possible collapse of their ground-level ecosystem. However, all hope was not lost as this knowledge had led to emergency rescues of bristlebirds. And translocation programs, which has been an important strategy for saving almost every vulnerable native Australian species, are in place for this little unremarkable bird.

【推荐2】In 1973, when Melissa Greene was in 6th grade, her parents bought the first apartment on Hutchinson Island on the southeastern Atlantic cast. The first time she and her siblings ran down to the wild shore, they were shocked by the seashells there. Every tide left a wrack line of seashells. Today, on the same stretch of beach, she rarely finds the large, undamaged shells that were common in her childhood. “It’s a shocking difference,” she says, “what you don’t see any more are the deep piles of whole shells, quarter-sized and above, and the largest shells that we saw for years.”

Among the most admirable natural objects throughout human history, seashells contain both the surprise and wonder still promised by a trip to the beach and the profound changes underway on our coasts. Some of the largest and best-known marine mollusks (软体动物) have declined under fishing pressure. They are also harmed by rising ocean temperatures and acidifying waters and by other pollution. They can be reduced by the severe erosion-a persistent problem on Hutchinson Island.

With beaches seeing record tourism numbers, more people can mean fewer shells. “It is not as much individual collecting as the many ramifications of massive tourism,” says the paleo-biologist Michal Kowalewski at the Florida Museum of Natural History.“Mass tourism means more boats, more beach maintenance, more machinery, all contributing to changes in shorelines.”

Over twenty years ago, Sanibel became the first city in the U.S. to ban the practice of collecting and killing mollusks for their shells. Delaware’s state parks are among increasing numbers of state and national parks taking so-called low-impact beachcombing a step further: Asking visitors to leave empty shells alone, too. At Delaware Seashore State Park, signs advise visitors to “Leave shells where they lay or snap a photo of a marine critter in the sand. After all, the point of enjoying nature is because it is in a natural state.”

【推荐1】Scientists have long sought to prevent sharp memories from dulling with age, but the problem remains stubborn. Now research published in Scientific Reports suggests virtual reality might help older people recall facts and events based on specific details.

The study involved 42 healthy older adults from the San Francisco Bay Area. Half spent a dozen hours over four weeks playing a virtual-reality game called Labyrinth; they put on headsets and walked in place, wandering virtual neighborhoods while completing tasks. The other half, in the control group, used electronic tablets to play games that did not require navigating or recalling details. After 15 sessions, the latter performed roughly the same as before on a long-term memory test based on picking out objects they had seen about an hour earlier, But the Labyrinth players' scores rose, and they: were less frequently tricked by objects that resembled ones they had viewed.

“It likely stimulates the hippocampus—a brain area important for long-term memory,” says cognitive neuroscientist Peter Wais of the University of California, San Francisco, who designed the VR game with his colleagues.

“What they're trying to do is uniquely suited to VR,” says Meredith Thompson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology education researcher, who studies learning through VR games. VR can provide greater immersion and engagement than other games, she says, adding that after this proof-of concept study. “it would be great to actually follow people over time and see what this type of game does for long-term memory.” Wais's team is now investigating how long the observed effects last and which elements of the training have the most impact.

“It's great that they measured expectations for improvement for the intervention and placebo conditions," says Daniel Simons, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign cognitive psychologist. Experiments with other gares that claim to train the brain have often failed to evaluate this, he notes. But he also adds that it remains unclear low test performance in a laboratory setting might translate to real-world situations. The outcome, Simons notes, “needs to be repeated, ideally with a much larger group, before it's treated as a strong finding.”

【推荐3】We all know that decision-making and behavior vary across diverse societies and people are influenced by cultural norms (规范) before they grow into an adult. But the stage that the normative information starts to come into play remains a secret.

Dr. Bailey House, a psychology expert at the University York, and his team conducted a new research, which was focused on eight societies across the world. The team examined the behavior of children and adults when they were asked to engage in specific sharing tasks. Once the sharing patterns were established among the adults in each community, the scientists worked with the subjects to figure out the possible reactions they’ll have.

Children from both urban and rural communities in eight countries were presented with two options: to keep a reward for themselves and give another reward to a stranger, or to keep both rewards for themselves. Children under seven mostly chose the selfish option in all communities, while children eight and older were much more likely to follow the adults’ patterns and share.

These results suggest that during middle childhood, at the ages of from 8 to 12, children become sensitive to culturally-specific information about how to behave. This “information” is encoded (把---编码) in local norms, which children acquire through a developed human psychology for leaning and agreeing with normative information.

Dr. Bailey House said, “One of the implications of the study is that we should start to pay attention not just to what children know but why they start to respond to the norms. The next step is to pose the question of what is happening in a child’s development between the ages that makes them more responsive to social norms around them. The goal of the work is to better understand how culture and psychology work together to produce human diversity in cooperation and other behaviors.”