【推荐2】Sonia Kleindorfer was a new director of the Konrad Lorenz Research Center in Austria. At her institute, Konrad Lorenz was a famous Austrian zoologist who could correctly name each kind of goose, which made Kleindorfer feel a certain amount of pressure. “I can do five, but when the next five come, I start to have a mental meltdown,” she says. So she contacted a more technically-minded colleague and asked him: Could he write a program to distinguish these faces?

He said, yes, but he’d need a database of geese photos to work with. Kleindorfer got her team out there, snapping pictures of the geese from every angle. After building the database, they wrote a piece of facial recognition AI that could ID a goose, by looking at specific features of its beak (喙). After a couple of years, the team reports that their goose recognition software is now about 97% accurate.

“Geese have such drama—there are archrivals (劲敌), and jealousy and retribution (报答),” Kleindorfer says. To find out how faces figured into this drama, she presented the geese with full-sized pictures of themselves, their partners, or another member of the flock. She showed evidence that geese seemed to recognize photos of their partners and friends, but not themselves. For further study, Sonia Kleindorfer hopes birdwatchers will someday be able to snap a picture of a goose, ID it, and share its location with scientists. But she adds, just remember, her new research suggests that bird watching goes both ways: Geese can remember faces too. “If you are ever not kind to a goose,” she warns, “that goose may find you again.”

Kleindorfer thinks that facial recognition is going to play a really important role in conservation and ecology. “We need more computer scientists trained in behavioral ecology and we need more conservation scientists trained in computer science,” she says. “But working together, I think we can do this.”

【推荐3】As days are getting shorter and colder, people can often find themselves feeling sad or lacking the motivation to do anything. One possible reason for those feelings is seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which is common during the cold months.     1     If your dog loses interest in its favourite games or walks, they may be experiencing it. Here’s how to give your dog’s mood a boost.

Analyzing your dog’s behaviour will help you get a better understanding of whether they may be feeling sad.     2     Knowing what to expect throughout the day and feeling comfortable in their surroundings is very important for a dog.

Even when you’re inside, make sure to spend time playing or training your dog. Try to come up with new games that require you to interact with your dog. This is a great way to get your pet excited and boost their mood, and yours, too.

As with humans, the lack of sunlight during the winter can cause lower mood levels, so it is very important for your dog to get as much sunlight exposure as possible.     4     You can also try other strategies such as moving their bed closer to a window, or even use more artificial lighting.

The winter months are colder and darker, and it might be inviting to skip an exercise or a walk outside, but much like humans, this can have a significant effect on your dog’s mood.     5    

【推荐1】The Mattel toy company created a new Barbie doll with the famous British scientist Jane Goodall as its model. The company issued the new doll this week, the latest member of the Barbie toymaker’s “Inspiring Women”. Mattel said the doll, made from used plastic, honored Goodall’s deep research on chimpanzees (黑猩猩) in Tanzania and her efforts to protect the wild animals.

The doll was dressed in a light brown shirt and shorts, much like that seen in many images of Goodall at work in Africa. It also came with a notebook, telescopes and another doll modeled on the real chimp Goodall named David Greybeard. He was the first chimpanzee with which she built trust in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. The relationship permitted her to study the animals extremely closely. “I wanted a doll to be me even before this idea came up,” the 88- year-old scientist said. She praised Mattel for developing new Barbies standing for a wider number of working women.

Lisa McKnight agreed. She is the Executive Vice President and Global Head of Barbie and Dolls for Mattel. She said, “We hope that this collection inspires kids to learn more about green careers and how they can protect the planet, and act out stories about environmental protection through doll play.”

Goodall started her research in what is now Tanzania in the 1960s. She produced much research on wild chimpanzees over the years. She recorded how they made and used tools, lived in communities, and showed a high level of emotional understanding.

Goodall wanted to teach children that if they wanted to have a good effect on the changing environment, they must act. Goodall said, “Hope is about action on climate change, loss of wildlife, unfriendly lifestyles and pollution. We reach out to others because there are people working on each one of these problems…”

【推荐2】Here’s a depressing number for you: 12. Just 12 percent of engineers in the United States are women. In computing it’s a bit better, where women make up 26 percent of the workforce — but that number has actually fallen from 35 percent in 1990.

There’s no single solution to such an annoying problem, but here’s an unlikely one: robots getting more girls interested in STEM. Specifically, robot toys for kids — simple yet powerful toys for teaching youngsters how to engineer.

These days, many toys targeting at getting kids interested in science and engineering are gender specific. “Sometimes there’s this idea that girls need special Legos, or it needs to be pink and purple for girls to get into it, and sometimes that makes me annoyed,” says Amanda Sullivan, who works inhuman development at Tufts University.

So Sullivan decided to try a specifically non-gendered robot toy called Kibo. Before playing with Kibo, boys were significantly more likely to say they’d enjoy being an engineer than the girls did. But after, boys had about the same opinion, while girls were now equally as likely to express an engineering interest as the boys. “I think that robots in general are novel to young children both boys and girls,” Sullivan says. “So aside from engaging girls specifically, I think robot toys like Kibo bring an air of excitement and something new to the classroom that gets all kids excited about learning.”

There’s a problem, though. While Sullivan proves that these kinds of robot toys can get girls interested in engineering, that doesn’t mean it will sell. “If you look at sales data, it clearly shows that they’re not being used by girls,” says Sharmi Albrechtsen, CEO and co—founder of SmartGurlz. “Even the ones that are considered no gender difference are towards boys. That’s the reality of the situation.” Gender sells — at least when it’s the parents doing the buying.

【推荐3】They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But when it comes to tackling a tricky task, researchers have found that getting angry can also be a powerful motivator.

The experiments suggest people who are angry perform better on a set of challenging tasks than those who are emotionally neutral.

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, details how researchers at Texas A&M University conducted experiments involving more than 1,000 people, and analysed survey data from more than 1,400 people to explore the possible impact of anger on people in various circumstances.

In one experiment, students were shown images previously found to cause anger, desire, amusement, sadness or no particular emotion at all. Participants were subsequently asked to solve a series of anagrams (变形词).

The results reveal that for a challenging set of anagrams, those who were angry did better — although no difference was seen for easy anagrams.

The researchers say one explanation could be down to a link between anger and greater persistence (坚持), with the team finding those who were angry spent more time on the difficult set of anagrams.

In another experiment, participants who were angry did better at avoiding flags in a skiing video game than those who were neutral or sad, and were on a par with (同水平) those who felt amusement or desire.

“This pattern could indicate that general physical arousal (激起) had a benefit for game scores, as this would be greater in anger, amused, and desire conditions compared to the sad and neutral conditions,” the researchers write. However, no such differences in performance was found when it came to an easier video game.

“People often prefer to use positive emotions as tools more than negative and tend to see negative emotions as undesirable,” said Lench, the first author of the study. “Our research adds to the growing evidence that a mix of positive and negative emotions promotes wellbeing, and that using negative emotions as tools can be particularly effective in some situations.”