【推荐1】With the recent discussion about the health benefits of fish oil and other wellness plans, it can make you feel less worried to know that one thing never changes: Exercise is good for your health. Any movement, even walking, brings about a host of cardiovascular(心血管的)effects that can help you live longer, feel better, and not run out of breath when chasing children or small animals.

The question of how much exercise is best, though, is open to discussion. The answer often depends on your goals. For heart health, sessions four to five times weekly might be perfect. For mental health? As The Independent reports, scientists believe there’s a pretty specific prescription(处方): Exercising for 45 minutes three to five times a week.

Researchers at Yale University and the University of Oxford made the study. They examined 1.2 million subjects(实验对象)who filled out the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey at two-year intervals(间隔时间)between 2011 and 2015.

Subjects who didn’t exercise at all had an average of three-and-a-half days per month when they felt mentally unwell — stressed, depressed, or suffering from emotional problems — while those who exercised regularly reported an average of just two days.

The study found that having three to five 45-minute sessions of exercise a week was best for reducing the reported problems of feeling stressed or depressed. Exercising for longer periods — some subjects reported more than 90 minutes in the gym — was connected with a drop-off in mental health benefits. Subjects who spent three hours at a time exercising actually reported an increase in depressive symptoms(症状).

Researchers also found that the kind of exercise undertaken made a difference. While all kinds of exercise helped, people who took part in team sports promoting social communication and gym classes like cycling described greater self-satisfaction with mental health.

Because the study included self-reported outcomes and exercise wasn’t monitored, it’s possible that the subjects could have misread the amount of exercise performed. The study, however, makes a convincing case for a popular opinion: If exercise were a pill, doctors everywhere would be prescribing it.

【推荐3】Rock climbing may seem like a sport possibly full of danger.     1     But experts say it offers participants a wide variety of physical and mental health benefits that are not always found in other sports. Here are four reasons you may wish to give rock climbing a try.

Build muscle strength. It’s not surprising that pulling your body up a cliff wall builds muscle in your arms.     2     In addition to giving your biceps (二头肌) and triceps (三头肌) a workout, it can build a lot of upper-body strength when you climb, especially in the hands and fingers.

    3    . Much of rock climbing’s skill lies in determining and memorizing your climbing route beforehand. You also need to be able to work out some problems on the fly so that you can change your route if you encounter unexpected obstacles.

Improve communication skills. Roped climbers have a companion on the ground called a belayer (保护者), who handles the rope through a device to manage the tension or slack (松弛). Throughout a climb, the climber must constantly communicate with the belayer about when the climber wants to rest and when it’s time to come down.     4    

Combat depression.     5     Researchers in Germany found rock climbing to be successful psychotherapy for adults with depression, thanks to its physical, social and mental benefits.

【推荐1】If you know someone who is generally ill-tempered, it might please you to know that they're probably not as smart as they think they are. "Anger differs significantly from other negative emotions, such as sadness, anxiety or depression," said Marcin Zajenkowski, a psychologist in Poland. Previous research has shown that anger is an unusual negative emotion, which is often associated with positive qualities, like optimism.

But how anger affects perceived intelligence was unclear. Zajenkowski and his colleague suspected that angry people might be more likely to overestimate how smart they are. To test this, the researchers surveyed more than 520 undergraduate students attending schools in Warsaw. The students answered a series of survey questions to gauge how easily and how often they get angry. Then, the students took a survey to assess their own intelligence before taking an objective intelligence test.

In general, the students with a higher tendency to get angry also overestimated their cognitive abilities, the study found. On the other hand, the students who were more neurotic, a quality that's often associated with anger, generally underestimated their intelligence. Neuroticism refers to negative qualities including unreasonable anxiety and strong upset.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the researchers found that narcissism was a key factor in how people judged how smart they were. The more ill-tempered personalities were associated with "narcissistic illusions," Zajenkowski said.

It's important to note that while the study found that angry people tend to be more narcissistic and overestimate their intelligence, anger was unrelated to actual intelligence level. And, although the researchers found an association between the two qualities, it's unclear whether there's a cause-and-effect relationship between anger and overestimating intelligence. More research is needed to explore that link. And the study didn't test how anger affects perceived intelligence in the heat of the moment. The study assessed anger as a personality quality, but anger is often a temporary emotion. Additional research is needed to find out if people who don't anger easily might be overly confident in their abilities only in the moment when they're upset.

【推荐2】Intuitive(直觉的) eating is often misunderstood as “eat whatever you want, whenever you want”. As a parent, this interpretation of intuitive eating would sound like a terrible idea. Intuitive eating isn’t about eating any food any time. Rather, it’s about allowing our body to be the interpreter of what feels good and trusting our body to manage the imperfections in our eating patterns. Getting off kids’ back about eating what and trusting their body’s experience of food is key to helping them develop a positive relationship with their body and with eating.

To help kids learn about those eating patterns, parents and caregivers can use the phrases “mouth hunger” and “tummy(肚子) hunger” to help kids explore the different ways our bodies experience food without using outside signals and negative messages. Discussing “mouth hunger”, the sensation of desiring something based on taste and sensation alone, and “tummy hunger”, eating something based on a deep sense of feeling satisfied, can help children start to tune in to their internal experience of food.

For instance, asking kids to explore what their mouth is hungry for allows them to recognize that a part of their body is enjoying something about the food. “Mouth hunger” is about the immediately satisfying experience of eating and all the sensations that go along with it: crunchy, chewy, sweet-the mouth likes it all! In fact, it can even help to explain to kids that “mouth hunger” is a little bossy and sometimes it doesn’t listen to “tummy hunger”.

Involving kids in a discussion of which foods satisfy their “tummy hunger” can help empower kids to talk about foods which help build muscles, promote growth, and deeply satisfy them. “Tummy hunger” is recognizing which foods make our body feel uniquely healthy and content. It’s not only powerful to help kids recognize what their “tummy hunger” actually wants and needs, but also a great place to talk about diversity and differences in bodies.

【推荐3】Unlike human students, computers don't seem to get bored or frustrated when a lesson is too easy or too hard. But just like humans, they do better when a lesson plan is just right for their level of skill. Coming up with the right curriculum isn't easy, though, so computer scientists wondered what if they could make machines design their own?

That's what researchers have done in several new studies to create artificial intelligence (AI) that can figure out how best to teach itself. The work could speed learning in self-driving cars and household robots, and it might even help handle previously unsolvable math problems. In one of the new experiments, an Al program tries to quickly reach a destination by navigating a 2D grid (网格) populated with solid blocks. The"agent" improves its abilities through a process called reinforcement learning, a kind of trial and error.

To help it navigate increasingly complex worlds, the researchers considered two ways in which it could draw the maps. One method randomly distributed blocks; with it, the Al didn't learn much. Another method remembered what the AI had struggled with in the past, and maximized difficulty accordingly. But that made the worlds too hard and sometimes even impossible to complete.

So the scientists created a setting, using a new approach they called PAIRED. First, they coupled their Al with a nearly identical one, which they called the antagonist (敌手). Then, they had a third AI design the world that was easy for the antagonist-but hard for the original protagonist (主角). That kept the tasks just at the edge of the protagonist's ability to solve. The designer used a neural network to learn its task over many trials. After training, the protagonist solved the problems offered to it successfully. The PAIRED approach is a clever way to get Al to learn, says Bart Selman, a computer scientist at Cornell University and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.