【推荐2】Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence. When Martin Luther King Jr. presented his dream, he chose language that would stir the hearts of his audience. Delivering this electrifying (展性的) message required emotional intelligence — the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions.

Emotional intelligence has been highly recommended by leaders, policymakers, and educators as the solution to a wide range of social problems. If we can teach our children to manage emotions, the argument goes, we’ll have less bullying and more cooperation. If we can cultivate emotional intelligence among leaders and doctors, we’ll have more caring workplaces and more compassionate healthcare.

Emotional intelligence is important, but the uncontrolled enthusiasm has obscured (掩盖) a dark side. New evidence shows that when people sharpen their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating (把持) others. When you`re good at controlling your own emotions, you can hide your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can motivate them to act against their own best interests.

Social scientists have begun to document this dark side of emotional intelligence. In a research led by University of professor Jochen Menges, when a leader gave an inspiring speech filled with emotion, the audience was Jess likely to scrutinize (细察) the message and remembered of the content. Ironically (讽刺的是) audience members were so moved by the speech that they claimed to recall more of it.

The authors call this the awestruck effect, but it might just as easily be described as the dumbstruck effect. One observer reflected that Hitler’s persuasive impact came from his ability to strategically express emotions — he would “ear open his heart — and these emotions affected his followers to the point that they would stop thinking critically and just emote.”

Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be destructive. New evidence suggests that when people have self-serving motives (动机), emotional intelligence becomes a weapon for manipulating others. In a study led by the University of Toronto psychologist Stephane Cote, university employees filled out a survey about their Machiavellian (不择手段的) tendencies, and took a test measuring their knowledge about effective strategies for managing emotions. Then, Cote’s team assessed how often the employees deliberately undermined (逐渐削弱) their colleagues. The employees involved in the most harmful behaviors were Machiavellians with high emotional intelligence. They used their emotional skills to lower the dignity of their peers for personal gain.

Shining a light on this dark side of emotional intelligence is one mission of a research team led by University College London professor Martin Kilduff. According to these experts, emotional intelligence helps people disguise (伪装) one set of emotions while expressing another for personal Professor Kiiduit’s team writes, “The strategic disguise of one’s own emotions and the manipulation of others’ emotions for strategic ends are behaviors evident not only on Shakespeare’s stage but also in the offices and corridors where power and influence are traded.”

Of course, people aren’t always using emotional intelligence for nefarious ends. More often than not, emotional skills are simply instrumental tools for goal accomplishment. A research team discovered that founder Anita Roddick used emotional intelligence to inspire her employees fundraise for charity. As Roddick explained, “Whenever we wanted to persuade our staff to support a particular project, we always tried to break their hearts.”

There is growing recognition that emotional intelligence-like any skill-can be used for good or evil. So if we’re going to teach emotional intelligence in schools and develop it at work, we need to consider the values that go along with it and here it’s actually useful.

【推荐3】Bees and butterflies are active during the daytime. They get a lot of attention of their roles as pollinators. As these insects have become more endangered, many people have taken action to protect them. But it's a different story for moths. Moths are seen much less often, because they are active at night. They're mainly known for beating against windows when they are attracted by lights. As a result, they are often ignored by humans. But moths also play an important role in pollinating plants.

Last year, scientists studied insects around nine ponds on farmlands in the United Kingdom. They visited these ponds once a month from March to October. The researchers studied three groups of insects: moths, bees that normally work together(like honeybees or bumblebees), and flying insects which work alone, such as butterflies, wasps, hoverflies and other bees.

The bodies of bees and hoverflies are hairy(when you look close enough). Moth bodies often seem furry. All of these insects spread pollen more or less by accident, when pollen from one flower sticks to their bodies and falls off when they move to other flowers.

At the ponds, the scientists caught these flying insects and tried to collect pollen from their bodies. In all, the researchers checked 838 moths, 632 other insects which work alone, and 1548 honeybees and bumblebees. By studying the pollen they collected, the scientists were able to see which plants the moths had pollen from 47 different kinds of plants, including seven plants that bees don't normally visit. The honeybees and bumblebees had pollen from 46 different kinds of plants. The other insects that work alone had visited 45 different kinds of plants.

Richard Walton, who led the study, says that bees usually choose the plants with the most nectar and pollen. But moths are less choosy. There are many different kinds of moths and they pollinate many different plants, filling in the gaps left by the daytime pollinators.

Not only do moths pollinate plants, they also provide important food for birds and bats. But, like many other insects, the number of moths has dropped greatly in the last 50 years, mainly because of pesticides and the loss of natural lands. Just like bees and butterflies, moths are worth protecting. "Moths are not at all less important," says Dr. Walton.

【推荐3】Swot satellite is scheduled to be launched Thursday morning to conduct a comprehensive survey of Earth’s vital resource. By using advanced microwave radar technology it will collect height-surface measurements of oceans, lakes and rivers in high-definition de tail over 90% of the globe. It’s really the first time to observe nearly all water on the planet’s surface.

The major mission is to explore how oceans help to minimize climate change by absorbing atmospheric heat and carbon dioxide in a natural process. Oceans are estimated to have absorbed more than 90% of the extra heat trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere by human-caused greenhouse gases. Swot will scan the seas from the orbit and precisely measure fine differences in surface elevations (高度) around smaller currents and eddies (漩涡), where much of the oceans’ decrease of heat and carbon is believed to occur. “Studying the mechanism will help climate scientists answer a key question: What is the turning point at which oceans start releasing, rather than absorbing, huge amounts of heat back into the atmosphere and speed up global warming, rather than limiting it,” said Nadya Shiffer, Swot’s program scientist.

By comparison, earlier studies of water bodies relied on data of rivers or oceans taken at specific points, or from satellites that can only track measurements along a one-dimensional line, requiring scientists to fill in data gaps through extrapolation (外推法). Thanks to the radar instrument, Swot can scan through cloud cover and darkness over wide ranges of the Earth. This enables scientists to accurately map their observations in two dimensions regardless of weather or time of day and to cover large geographic areas far more quickly than was previously possible.

“Rather than giving us a line of elevations, it’s giving us a map of elevations, and that’s just a total gamechanger,” said Tamlin Pavelsky, Swot freshwater science leader.