【推荐2】Do you go to the gym to strengthen your body? Well, you may be missing out on training some vital muscles — the ones involved in breathing. New research shows that training these muscles each day can reduce high blood pressure and promote heart health.

“The muscles we use to breathe atrophy, just like the rest of our muscles, as we get older,” explains Daniel Craighead, a physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. To test what happens when these muscles are given a good workout, be and his colleagues enlisted healthy volunteers aged 18to 82 to try a daily five-minute technique using a resistance-breathing training device called PowerBreathe. The device forces the patient to use their breathing muscles to push and pull air through it, making them stronger.

“We found that doing 30 breaths per day for six weeks lowers blood pressure by about . 9 mmHg(慕米汞柱),” Craighead says. And those reductions are about what could be expected with conventional exercise, he says—such as walking, running or cycling. The impact of a sustained 9 mmHg reduction is significant, says Michael Joyner, a physician at the Mayo Clinic who studies how the nervous system regulates blood pressure. “That’s the type of reduction you see with a blood pressure drug,” Joyner says. Research has shown many common blood pressure medicines lead to about a 9 mmHg reduction. The-reductions are higher when people combine multiple medicines, but a 10 mmHg reduction relates to a 35% drop in the risk of stroke and a 25% drop in the risk of heart disease.

“I think it’s promising,” Joyner says about the prospects of integrating strength training for the muscles used to breathe into preventive care. It could be beneficial for people who are unable to do traditional exercise, he says, and the simplicity is appealing, too, given people can easily use the device at home. However, the technique is not intended to replace exercise, he cautions, or to replace medication -for people whose blood pressure is so elevated that they’re at high risk of having a heart attack or stroke. Instead, Craighead says, “it would be a good additive intervention for people who are doing other healthy lifestyle approaches already.”

【推荐3】Cats certainly know the sound of their food can being opened, but do they know their own name? Cats might be skilled in knowing how to always land on their feet, keep themselves clean, and strategically knock things off the counter, but do they know their own names?

“While cats might not always understand what exactly we’re saying. They definitely can learn to associate sounds with good or bad outcomes,” says Mikel Delgado Cat Behavior Expert with Rover. “When you talk to your cat,they probably respond most to your tone of voice. People tend to talk to their pets in higher-pitched voices which are good at getting their attention.”

Cats can also recognize noises that indicate food or attention is coming. They associate those sounds with a positive experience, so they learn to recognize what they mean.

Delgado adds, “Over time, our pets do learn to associate their name with certain things-like attention, or food. You can help your cat learn their name faster by not using lots of different nicknames, which might be confusing to your pet and they may not always realize that you are speaking to them, “Your cat is more likely to respond to their human's voice versus a stranger’s voice.” says Delgado.

You can train a cat to respond to words the same way dogs do. In order to train,Delgado says you first need to identify what motivates your cat, like a particular treat or toy. Then start with something simple such as sit.

“Over time, your cat makes the connections between their behavior, your response or the sound, and the treat,” says Delgado. “Then when they want a treat, you might notice that they offer the behavior you trained-such as sitting or rolling over-which is why it’s a good idea not to train your cat to do annoying things.”

【推荐3】For much of history, biologists and behaviorists assumed that intelligence of species could be neatly organized into a hierarchy. Modern man was placed at the top, followed by other mammals (哺乳动物). Then came the birds, reptiles (爬行动物) and insects.

However, research suggests that intelligence is actually distributed in different ways across the animal kingdom. In the 1960s, a new generation of researchers pushed the rest of the academic community to define animal intelligence in looser terms. They thought the conventional definition of intelligence — something made up of both consciousness and the ability for abstract thought — was too particular to our own species. Because every animal followed a completely different evolutionary journey, intelligence should be measured in relative terms instead of absolute terms.

In the following decades, a variety of technologies that allow us to observe animals for longer periods of time without disturbing their normal routines revealed that animal behaviors are far more complex than many previous thoughts. In Melbourne, some remote controlled machines are helping researchers to better understand the breeding patterns of southern right whales. Meanwhile, they use the computer to learn to understand, track and predict the movements of organisms.

Regardless of our rapidly changing conception of animal intelligence, it is best recognized when the behavior of an animal is similar to our own behavior. For example, elephants, which are said to remember and return to the tomb sites of dead members of their herd. They also exhibit an unusual interest in the dead bodies of other elephants, signaling their attention to death and perhaps even realizing their own death.

As time passes, we are continuously amazed at the level of cognitive (认知的) complexity exhibited by animals. At times, their madness can be difficult to spot. Modern technology finally allows us to look with some precision. Though the search only got underway a few decades ago, we have already discovered more similarities between animals and ourselves than we previously expected.