【推荐1】It can be hard to follow a healthy, balanced diet if you’re working long hours in the lab.    1    How can we encourage ourselves to eat good brain food? Here, we wrote some advice to help you get through your daily tasks and keep our body and spirit going.

•    2    Stimulate(激励) your appetite(食欲) by changing your food choices. Have more fruit and vegetables into your diet and reduce eating red meat and meat products. Each new day you can try a new meal experience.

•Find time to snack(吃点心) healthily. Take short food breaks to help keep your blood-sugar level reasonably high. Eating a piece of fruit every three hours or so, for example, could prevent hunger. And when you eat, relax.    3    If you stand in the lab for a long time, sit down.

•Enjoy your food. Change your meal break into a pleasant event by sharing it with others. If everyone takes turns preparing a dish from their home country or area, then you can all enjoy delicious dishes of different cultures.    4    

•Drink lots of water. Working inside, where the air is often dry, can speed up water loss. Two litres a day of water is recommended by many health experts. Drinking plenty of water will increase your blood volume(量) and thus boost(促进) your brain concentration levels.    5    It is helpful when working in warm offices and cooled labs.

【推荐1】Have you ever heard someone say, “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”, or give you advice about why it’s vital to start the day with a healthy breakfast? It seems that this meal, for many of us, is necessary for our day to start well, but is it really that important?

The word “breakfast” comes from “breaking the fast”— the idea of ending the period in which we don’t eat during the night. The regeneration process that takes place while we sleep consumes some of our natural food reserves. Breakfast gives us an opportunity to replenish those reduced stores of things like protein and calcium. So, in that way, a healthy breakfast makes sense.

There are also many often-quoted studies which seem to connect a state of being overweight with not eating breakfast. In fact, it leads many health experts to advise a healthy breakfast to not only control but also lose weight. In a US study, 50,000 people were monitored over seven years, and those who ate a healthy breakfast were found to have a lower BMI (体重指数), which seems to suggest that breakfast may indeed help people maintain a healthy weight.

But it might not be as simple as that. Alexandra Johnstone, professor of appetite research at the University of Aberdeen, suggests those who do not have breakfast might be less aware of healthy diets and nutrition, and people who eat breakfast might have a healthier lifestyle overall exercising and not smoking, for example. And he also points out that with the rise in popularity of intermittent (间歇性的) fasting to lose weight, there may also be some benefits to not eating breakfast, like improving blood sugar control and lowering blood pressure.

So, while breakfast has its benefits, it might not be the most important meal. It seems that a healthy lifestyle with a balanced diet might be more important for many of us than just one single meal.

【推荐2】Eating a traditional Mediterranean-type diet-rich in foods such as seafood, fruit, and nuts- -may help reduce the risk of dementia (痴呆) by almost a quarter, a new study has revealed.

Experts at Newcastle University found that individuals who ate a Mediterranean-like diet had up to 23% lower risk for dementia than those who did not. This research, published today in the journal BMC Medicine, is one of the biggest studies of its kind.

Scientists analyzed data from 60,298 individuals from the UK Biobank, including individuals from across the UK, who had completed a dietary assessment. The authors scored individuals based on how closely their diet matched the key features of a Mediterranean one. The participants were allowed for almost a decade, during which time there were 882 cases of dementia.

The authors considered each individual’s genetic risk for dementia by estimating what is known as their polygenic (多基因的) risk-a measure of all the different genes that   are related to the risk of dementia. They found that there were similar associations between sticking to Mediterranean diet and dementia risk in individuals with higher and lower genetic risk for this condition, which may indicate that even for those with a higher genetic risk, having a better diet could reduce the likelihood of developing the condition.

Dr Janice Ranson, joint lead author on the paper, said: “Dementia impacts the lives of millions of individuals throughout the world, and there are currently limited options for treating this condition. Our study shows a Mediterranean diet that has a high intake of healthy plant-based foods may be important for future strategies to reduce dementia risk. For example, the dementia prevention efforts could go beyond general healthy diet advice and focus on choosing specific foods and nutrients.”

The authors caution that their analysis is limited to individuals who self-reported their ethnic background as white, British or Irish, as genetic data was only available based on European countries, and that further research is needed in a range of populations to determine the potential benefit.

【推荐1】Beijing has made history as the first city in the world to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Let’s look back on some of the important factors that made the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games so impressive.

In recognition of Beijing’s status (地位) as the world’s first city to host both the Summer and Winter games, the 2022 Olympic torch featured a similar design to the 2008 Olympic torch by the same color combination and artistic forms. What truly took viewers’ breath away was the moment when torch bearers (火炬手) passed the flame to another during the Olympic Torch Relay. The two Olympic torches locked into each other at the top, which represented fire and ice, symbolizing how it would bring light and warmth to the winter sports scene.

The Winter Olympic mascot “Bing Dwen Dwen”, a cartoon image of a panda wearing a spacesuit, like a winter sports athlete from the future, has enjoyed wide popularity at home and abroad since its first appearance in 2019. “Bing Dwen Dwen” is a great combination of Chinese culture and the Olympic spirit. “Hopefully Bing Dwen Dwen can become a classic and leave lasting memories in Olympic history,” said Cao Xue, head of the Beijing 2022 mascot design team.

Soon after the announcement of “Bing Dwen Dwen”, Beijing organizers also introduced “Shuey Rhon Rhon” as the mascot of the 2022 Beijing Paralympic (残奥会)Winter Games.

As the countdown to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics continued, the new high-speed railway line connecting the capital with Olympic host city Zhangjiakou began to enter service. By cutting the travel time between the two from three hours to 47 minutes, the bullet train can run up to 350 kilometers per hour without a driver, becoming the world’s first smart high-speed railway. So, what makes them “smart”? Well, equipped with 5G signals, intelligent lighting and sensors to collect real-time data and detect any operational problems, the trains can automatically start, stop and adjust to the different speed limits between stations.

【推荐2】By showing storylines based on several real-life cases that shook the nation, Crime Crackdown, one of the most popular TV series in the summer of 2021, has stimulated Chinese viewers’ interest in efforts to fight against organized crime launched by the Chinese government in 2018.

The TV series follows a national anti-gang supervising (督导) group and local police officers as they take on gangs (帮派) and the corrupt officials that offer these illegal groups a “protective umbrella”. The first 22 episodes of the series, starring actors Sun Honglei and Zhang Yixing and actresses Wu Yue and Jiang Shuying, have earned a 7.8/10 on Chinese media review platform Douban from more than 140,000 reviews and nearly 2.2 billion views on Chinese streaming platform Tencent Video.

Li Eryun, general producer of the series, said that shows or films about efforts to fight against organized crime are still a rare sight in China. He and the show’s other general producer Huang Xing jumped at the chance to produce such a show in May 2019. They received support from the Committee of Political and Legal Affairs of the CPC Central Committee, which gave them access to case files so that they could write scripts for the show. Huang noted that their goal was to make a series that carried out its social responsibilities while also being entertaining.

According to the two producers and the show’s director Wu Bai, the success of the series comes down to their masterly handling of something simple. For example, the character Dong Yao, is a corrupt official whose hair turns white from stress. The idea came from an observation Wu made while watching a video of a trial. Wu noticed the defendant (被告人) had a white hair in his dark hair a week after the trial began, and after a month, half of his hair had turned white. Three months later, his hair had become completely white.

The popularity and success of the drama were acknowledged by not only mainstream media, but also cultural critics and scholars.