【推荐1】Almost every morning for the past two decades, Juliet the macaw (金刚鹦鹉) has been visiting the local zoo in Rio de Janeiro to interact with others of her kind through the metal enclosure.

Macaws are social birds, so being lonely is a tough burden to bear for Juliet, a beautiful blue-and-yellow macaw who calls Rio home. No one really knows much about her. Zoo staff named the bird Juliet, but they don't even know if she is actually female. It's really hard to tell with macaws, and to determine her true gender (性别) they would need to capture the bird, and either examine her gonads (生殖腺) or take blood or feather samples. And there's really no need to put Juliet through all that stress just to satisfy human curiosity. All that everyone knows is that Juliet loves coming to the zoo every morning to be with others of her species.

Macaws have an average life expectancy of about 35 years, and Juliet has been around for at least two decades. Yet, she has never had a mate, built a nest or had chicks, and she probably never will, because there's just no one to do it with.

Luckily, there is hope for Rio's loneliest bird. Through Refauna, an initiative which reintroduces species into protected areas, scientists want to raise some 20 chicks that will, receive training on wild food sources, as well as enemies and power line avoidance, before being released into the wild.

The birds will be released into Rio de Janeiro's giant Tijuca Forest National Park, where Juliet is believed to spend her nights. Scientists hope the birds will help keep balance in the local eco-system, by breaking seeds that other birds can't, thus spreading those seeds. But they will also become welcome company for Juliet, allowing her to fly with others of her kind for the first time in 20 years. And maybe she'll even find love.

【推荐1】It is not uncommon for people to say they have no sense of direction. The sense of direction represents the ability to find one’s way. In other words, it is about getting from point A to point B without a hitch. The journey begins with determining the initial position using landmarks in the environment. It’s really about choosing a route and following it. It is also a question of testing that this same route is the correct one, with the mental representation of space or the help of tools such as maps. Finally, the ability to identify the point of arrival is obviously very important.

In a study published in 2009, scientist Giuseppe Iaria, a scientist of the University of Calgary (Canada), who specializes cognitive neural (认知神经) networks indicated that people lacking a sense of direction have a special condition: Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD).

The sense of direction requires large neural networks for proper functioning, according to the expert. However, the fact is that a majority of people are unable to put a map in their head while on the move. In her book Mind in Motion (2019), Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University (USA) Barbara Tversky explains how most people do it.

She introduces a combination of methods. It’s a mix of turn-by-turn directions, bird’s-eye views and general information in the form of maps. However, it should be noted that most medium-complexity navigation (导航) directions depend in part on the ability of people to understand the perspective of a map. In other words, people without a sense of direction follow a route in pieces. Thus, they have no expanded understanding for space and navigate their environment without any mental map of their destinations.

However, there is a solution, namely to guide the person through a series of short routes.

【推荐1】If you have a high temperature or are recovering from heart surgery, it is difficult to be fully focused at work. Sick days are meant to prevent people from hurting themselves, their co-workers, or customers on the job. However, working from home has changed this logic.

The work-from-home revolution has raised the bar for what counts as being sick. At the height of the pandemic people worked from home even with serious symptoms such as fever, shortness of breath or nausea. Many still do. Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University has been tracking work- from-home habits since before the Covid-19 popularized them. In a recent working paper, he presents the results of a randomized controlled trial at a large multinational company, where sick days fell by 12% for employees working from home two days a week relative to those coming in full time.

To be in bed not doing anything means discomfort both physically and mentally. Salaried workers, who are often evaluated on the basis of their attendance, find it hard to call in sick for a few days now that they don’t need to worry about spreading germs in the office. For high-achievers, putting in the hours is not a chore but a way of life. As the economic recession (萧条) puts future job security into question, showing yourself to be useful becomes even more important.

Though all this is understandable, it is also troubling. Being even mildly sick can impair brain function. It is difficult to exercise proper judgment if one cannot focus on the task at hand. It is why people with lower oxygen concentration sometimes remove protective clothes atop Mount Everest; some freeze to death. Firing off emails while feeling dizzy will put the body under further stress. Soldiering on (硬挺) may make the employee both sicker and less productive for longer. Digital presenteeism (超时工作), for that is what such persisting amounts to, is in no one’s interest.

【推荐2】A perfumer is responsible for designing and composing perfumes and other fragrance compositions. To become a perfumer, it is important to follow a recognized training at a perfume school. The training to become a perfumer will generally take at least ten years. At the end of the training, a perfumer must be able to distinguish and name about three thousand different basic chemical odors(气味). As a perfumer, you also have to deal with a number of important rules of life that a perfumer must observe, such as not drinking alcohol, not eating spicy dishes and not smoking, because this will seriously affect the sense of smell of a perfumer.

Professional perfumers should in most cases be regarded as chemists. As described earlier, becoming a professional perfumer is not easy, because it is a long and heavy training. It is only the major international perfume brands that employ professional perfumers. This does not change the fact that anyone can try to design perfumes independently. There are quite a lot of people active in the field of making perfume, but these people cannot be classified as professional perfumers.

The development of new perfumes is important, because good perfumes can bring in a lot of money for manufacturers. Those well-known perfumes are usually expensive, because perfume manufacturers spend a lot of budget on development and marketing. The cost of perfume is usually not in the fragrance or perfume bottle. It is the costs in the development and the marketing that make good perfume expensive. In addition, perfume manufacturers spend a lot of time conducting market research and styling.

How exactly a perfumer and the perfume industry work is of course a big secret, but in general, a perfumer spends all day smelling and putting together different scents in order to be able to come up with a new perfume. Nowadays, computers are also used to further analyze certain odors. New fragrances are usually made in different variants until the best result is achieved and the perfume company is satisfied. Developing a new perfume scent generally takes several months after a lot of testing.

【推荐3】Animals, including humans, feel sound as well as hear it, and some of the most meaningful communication happens at frequencies (频率) that people can’t hear. Elephants, for example, use these low-frequency sounds to, among other things, find family or a mate across long distances. Whales do it, too.

But you don’t have to weigh a ton to make a sound. In fact, you don’t have to be bigger than a pea. Consider, for example, the tree-hopper, a curious little animal that lives on the stems (茎) of the leaves. University of Missouri biologist Rex Cocroft has spent much of his time listening closely to tree-hoppers with his team.

The team discovers that all the sounds being heard from tree-hoppers are produced by males. They do it by vibrating (振动) their abdomens (腹部) to make a wide variety of strange sounds. There is almost no airborne sound produced with these vibrational sounds. Cocroft explained, “If a tree-hopper were to stand on your finger and produce a sound, you would feel the vibration but hear no sound.”

They showed that some sounds, not surprisingly, seem to be aimed at attracting females. And some are aimed at other males.

Cocroft explained, “When two males meet each other, or when they are mate-searching on a branch, we’re hearing ‘purring, bdddddrrrr…’ sounds that males give.” Normally, a person couldn’t hear any of this, because the sound travels along the stem, inside it. And that’s how other tree-hoppers detect it.

Cocroft said tree-hoppers have very sensitive legs. And they stand around on stems, which are good at spreading vibrations. So they just use what nature gives them to communicate with each other.

“They have so many different forms of social behavior and grouping,” Cocroft explained. “And once there are animals living in groups, then there will be all sorts of interesting possibilities for communication.”