【推荐1】Here’s a word you may not have heard before: dogfooding. Dogfooding is short for “eating your own dog food”. It’s a term that has been used for years among software developers. It means using the software you write for your customers yourself.

This has great advantages because you are able to see what the user experience is like for your customers. You are also more likely to fix a bug (故障) if it affects you in your daily work.

For a long time, the compiler (编译程序) for Microsoft’s C#programming language was written in C++. Then the C# team at Microsoft created a new compiler called Roslyn, which is written in C#. It is a lot faster than C++ and it has the advantage of now being cross-platform (it works on different types of computers). It is the result of dogfooding.

No one really knows where the term “dogfooding” or “eating your own dog food” comes from. In a 1980s advertisement on TV, actor Lorne Greene mentioned he fed Alpo dog food to his own dogs. And the CEO of Kal Kan Foods also supposedly ate the company’s dog food product at yearly company meetings.

However, the first mention of the term in relation to computer programming was in a 1988 email from Microsoft manager Paul Maritz, titled Eating our own Dogfood, encouraging another Microsoft manager to use their products as a way to understand and improve them.

Nowadays, the term has been used in other fields. For example, teachers can dogfood their lessons whenever possible. This means taking their own tests or doing their own homework. By doing this, they can find all kinds of problems that they’d never notice if they just created tasks and gave them straight to students.

【推荐1】Scientists have made an amazing discovery: large quantities of species of frog and salamander (火蜥蜴) glow under certain types of light.

Jennifer Lamb and Matthew Davis, at St Cloud State University in Minnesota, in the US, studied 32 different species of amphibians (两栖动物), mostly frogs and salamanders. Lamb and Davis shone blue torchlight on a frog that they were studying and were surprised to see it glow green. They wondered how many others would do the same, so they went to an aquarium (水族馆) in Chicago, US, and shone lights on all the amphibians.

They found that most of the animals lit up green, an effect that showed more clearly when seen through a yellow filter (指示灯). The team say their results have surprised them and they don’t yet know why the amphibians glow like this, but plan to do more research. This glow-in-the-dark ability is known as biofluorescence (生物荧光), and many animals, such as chameleons (变色龙), jellyfish (水母), sharks and sea turtles, can do it. Scorpions (蝎子) glow a bright blue under ultraviolet light (a type of light that causes sunburn).

Biofluorescence is caused by substances (物质) in the body that can absorb one colour of light and then give it out as a different colour. Usually animals absorb blue light and give off green, red or orange light. The bright green might warn off predators (捕食性动物) or help animals like the amphibians signal to each other, or it might even identify individuals, a bit like a call or smell that others can recognise.

“There is still a lot out there that we don’t know, ” Lamb told The New York Times newspaper. “This opens up a whole window into the possibility that organisms can see fluorescence (荧光) — their world may look a lot different from ours.”

【推荐2】Many people enjoy biscuits at teatime. But people with diabetes have to be careful about eating sweet food.

Diabetes is a metabolic（代谢的）disease. If a patient's blood sugar is not well controlled, serious problems can occur. A patient may experience dizziness and fatigue, but also have kidney failure, blindness and heart disease, according to Medical News Today.

But a new research may make it possible to “treat diabetes by eating biscuits”. Researchers from Peking University and East China Normal University successfully developed a new cell using synthetic（合成的）biology technology. Their study was published in Nature Chemical Biology in November.

In their research, diabetic mice implanted with the cells can increase insulin（胰岛素）levels and lower blood sugar as long as they eat specific amino acid（氨基酸）biscuits. It only takes 90 minutes for the mice to reduce their blood sugar, which amounts to the time after an insulin injection, Liu Tao, one of the authors, told Science and Technology Daily.

This kind of biscuit does not directly lower blood sugar levels, but is a “key” to insulin. The special amino acids in the biscuits help to start the insulin translation process. The end result is controlled blood sugar, according to Ye Haifeng, one of the authors.

“This unnatural amino acid is similar to the ingredients added in many health drinks and is very friendly to the human body, ” Liu told Science and Technology Daily. Maybe one day, people will need to take artificial amino acids before meals, or eat foods containing artificial amino acids suitable for diabetics, so they can control their blood sugar.

Although scientists in synthetic biology have paved the way for possible future treatments, their findings won't be ready for patients anytime soon. “Synthetic biology is still an early-stage discipline compared to the traditional diabetes therapeutic development timeline, with most technologies currently in the preclinical stages in the lab, ” Ira Pastor, CEO of the life sciences company Bioquark, told US News.