【推荐2】Travel Is Good For Your Health

Americans are losing their vacation days, leading to more stress, anxiety and other negative effects because of not taking time off from work. In fact, a report by Project: Time Off, shows U.S. employees took about 16 vacation days in 2013, down from about 20 in 2000. Apart from taking away yourself the chance to improve your productivity and work performance, not taking a break can lead to overloaded stress and other potentially damaging.     1    

After all, vacations offer the chance to relax and restore your health.     2     You should travel to new places because traveling somewhere new can enable you to put yourself in new surroundings and recharge your brain power.

    3     According to Dr. Margaret J. King, the director of the Center for Cultural Studies & Analysis, “There are lots of psychological benefits when you travel from home and work to ‘third places’, not just experiencing the environment. With a short list of activities each day, freed up from the projects and relationships, the mind can reset, as does the body, with stress relief the main outcome.” she says.

Little sleep mixed with high stress can lead to anger and negative consequences on your cognitive performance and efficiency. Max Hirshkowitz, chairman of the board of the National Sleep Foundation says a vacation is a great opportunity to catch up on sleep.     4     “Keep that time,” he says. “Make it an important thing you need.”

Many studies suggest that travel can improve our emotional state. A 2014 survey conducted by Diamond Resorts International found over three-quarters of people said feeling happier when they planned a trip at least once a year. Dr. Leigh Vinocur, a certified physician and spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians, isn’t surprised by the findings. “It’s hard to sit on a beautiful beach somewhere and think about paperwork or deadlines. That is why over three-quarters of people to the Diamond Resorts International survey reported feeling happier when they regularly had a vacation. Regular vacations while taking time for yourself and your family lowers your stress level.     5    ” she says. Besides, studies show that looking back on the pleasant vacation may keep happiness long after your trip.

【推荐1】Citizen Science is a term used to describe non-specialist research and data collection carried out by private individuals, foundations and organizations using the power of the Internet to cooperate around the globe. Here we offer some remarkable examples of programs.

Rozalia Project

The Rozalia Project for a Clean Ocean is devoted to connecting people of all ages to their underwater world, to inspire them to be part of the plastic pollution solution by using underwater robots and sonar（声呐）as well as nets to locate and remove marine debris（废弃物）. Rosalia Project is committed to accurate data collection and working with sailors, fishermen, boaters, concerned citizens, schools, authorities and more to clean up and progress solutions to the marine debris crisis.

Surfrider Foundation

Among its many citizen science initiatives, Surfrider has a chapter-run program called the Blue Water Task Force, a water testing program designed specifically to fill in the data gaps left by agency programs to help with resource distribution in areas with the biggest concerns for public health risk. The Blue Water Task Force citizen science program tests approximately 25 surf spots and streams that discharge onto popular recreation sites.

Hearts in the Ice

Hearts in the Ice is an innovative（创新的）project launched in 2018 that will create global dialogue and social engagement around climate change in the Polar Regions. In August of 2019, citizen scientists Hilde Falun Strom and Sunniva Sorby moved into a 20-square-meter cabin（小屋）known as Bamsebu. The goal of the project is to show rapid climate change and what we can do to reduce the effects. Life at Bamsebu was broadcast and published via Iridium satellite through social media to scientists, school children, adventures, and interested citizen from around the world.

【推荐2】Ask most people anywhere in the world what they want out of life and the reply will probably be“to be happy”. Ed Deiner，an American psychology professor，has spent his whole life studying what makes people happy，comparing levels of happiness between cultures and trying to find out exactly why we enjoy ourselves.

Many people would say that this question does not need an answer. But Professor Deiner has one anyway. “If you’re a cheerful，happy person，your marriage is more likely to last，and you’re more likely to make money and be successful in your job. On average，happy people have stronger immune systems（免疫系统），and there is some evidence that they live longer. ”

So who are the world’s happiest people？It depends on how the word is defined. There is individual（个人的）happiness，the sense of joy we get when we do something we like. But there is also the feeling of satisfaction we get when we know that others respect us and approve of how we behave. According to Professor Deiner，the Western world pursues individual happiness while Asia prefers mutual satisfaction.

“In the West，the individualistic culture means that your mood matters much more than it does in the East. People ask themselves if they are doing what is fun or interesting. They become unhappy when they can’t do any of these things. If you ask people from Japan or China whether they are happy，they tend to look at what has gone wrong in their lives. If not much has gone wrong，then they are satisfied. ”

“People from Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries have the happiest culture，”Professor Deiner found. “The biggest cultural difference is to do with pride and shame. Hispanic cultures report much more pride and much less shame than others. ”

Income（收入）also makes a big difference to people’s happiness，but only at the lowest levels. Average income earners in the US are much happier than people in poverty. But millionaires are only a little bit happier than people on average incomes. It seems that money makes us happy when we have enough to feel safe.

【推荐3】Ready or not, here they come: Scientists who played hide-and-seek with rats found that their furry subjects seemed to love the game- and they were remarkably good at it.

The researchers taught six adolescent male rats how to play a one-on-one version of hide-and-seek. They equipped a large room with cardboard barriers and small containers to serve as hiding places for humans and rats, respectively. The game started when the rat was placed in a small box in the middle of the room. If the rat was the “seeker,” the scientist would hide and then remotely open the box. If the rat was the “hider the scientist would crouch (蹲伏) by the box when the rat came out. This prompted the little rodent to running quickly for cover. All six rats learned how to be the seeker. Five of them were able to handle hiding as well.

Compared with something like playful wrestling, hide-and-seek is more complex for several reasons. It requires an understanding of the rules, a clear grasp of players’ distinct roles and the ability to assume different roles on different rounds. This unconventional experiment sheds light on the sophisticated sense of play in these tiny rodents, and also hints at the evolutionary usefulness of this type of play.

Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist (神经生物学家) at the University of Chicago, said that she was most impressed by the discovery that the rats didn’t just learn hide and seek—they wanted to play it. Play probably helps young animals learn how to socially interact, Mason said. She pointed to evidence that when rodents are prevented from playing during early development, they don’t grow into normal adults. Instead, they become anxious, they don’t play well with others and they aren’t great parents.

【推荐1】Baby bats learn language from peers (同伴) in their social group, and will adopt the group’s dialect, or accent, instead of their mother’s, researcher said on Tuesday.

The findings shed new light on crowd-learning of language, a skill thought to belong mainly to humans and just a few other mammals. It also shows that bats are different from songbirds, which tend to learn songs by copying one of their parents. “The ability to copy vocalizations (发音) from others is extremely important for speech learning in humans, but it’s believed to be rare among animals”, said lead author Yossi Yovel of Tel Aviv University.

For the study, researchers captured 14 pregnant Egyptian fruit bats. They separated them into three different bat social groups, where they raised the young bats with their mothers. Each bat group was exposed to a different recording of bat vocalizations.

“The baby bats all adopted the manner of vocalizing of the group they heard, not their mothers. The difference between the vocalizations of the mother bat and those of the group is comparable to the difference in a London accent and, say, a Scottish accent,” Yovel said.

“The babies heard their mothers’ London dialect, but also heard the Scottish dialect produced by many dozens of Scottish bats. The babies eventually adopted a dialect that was more similar to the local Scottish dialect than to the London accent of their mothers.”

Researchers hope to conduct future studies to examine how bats’ dialects change when they leave their social groups, and if it affects how they integrate with others.

【推荐3】China will have the most 5G connections of any nation by 2025, according to a new study, while Europe will fall behind Korea, the United States and Japan in terms of 5G penetration (渗透) by that year.

5G is the fifth generation of network technology. It is expected to bring unbelievable speeds to Internet users, with some operations running 10 times faster than on 4G networks. 5G is also expected to unlock the potential in a lot of new services, including artificial intelligence, science of robots self-driving cars, and the Internet of things.

The GSMA said that China's three major mobile operators--China Unicom, China Mobile, and China Telecom--are already moving ahead with 5G networks. While most nations will have 5G by updating existing foundations, the study noted that China plans to build part of its 5G networks.

One of the most distinguishing actors between Chinese mobile operators and those in the rest of the world is the intention to erect the new and independent 5G networks. That is, China is determined to build a completely advanced 5G. The high cost underlines China's seriousness about paying whatever it takes.

Korea will lead the world in terms of 5G penetration in 2025, when 66 percent of the nation's total connections will be 5G, according to GSMA. This compares to 50 percent in the US, 49 percent in Japan, 36 percent in China, 30 percent in Europe, and a global average of 18 percent. Out of the five economies leading on 5G, Europe will have the lowest participation in 2025, as the area is moving more slowly in having its 5G networks.