【推荐1】Among the more practical advice that can be offered to international travelers is wisdom of the toilet. I do not mean those squats (下蹲) you see at the gym. No, strong glutes (臀肌) will not save you here. I mean the deep squat. This position is so stable that people in China can hold it for minutes and perhaps even hours…

Of course, squat toilet is not unique to Asia, nor is the deep-squatting position. But so common is the position in Asia and so rare it is in the West that it’s been nicknamed the “Asian squat”. Bryan Ausinheiler, a physician in California said, “The squat is a great model for a multi-segmental movement pattern. You have to fold everything up underneath you.” There’s a lot going on.

But the key factor seems to be ankle flexibility. This is also in part. Ausinheiler says, why kids have no problem squatting. “I measured my daughter’s ankle flexibility when she was one day old,” says Ausinheiler. “She has 70 degrees of ankle dorsiflexion (背屈)! Normal in the West is like 30.” So humans are born squatters; some of us lose it when we stop trying. Body shape also seems to play a role. People with the longest legs have the worst squat.

Believe it or not, no one appears to have actually studied born ability in deep squatting across ethnic groups. “You would have to take kids from the time they’re born in China and never let them do any squats to be a control group, and it’ll never happen,” says Matt Hundson, a physiologist at the University of Delaware, humorously. And finally, it may not matter. Practice and training make the bigger difference.

Some believe America’s squat problems can be blamed on toilet seats. Yet this ability that comes so naturally has been lost ----- and it’s not so easy to get it back. But the position, while doable, is not very comfortable for me.

【推荐2】You have to praise the smoothness（顺畅） of ants on the move. No matter how many of them are going toward a place, there's never a hold-up. A new research paper shows how ants keep traffic flowing by changing their behavior to meet changing conditions.

For their experiments, researchers from the University of Toulouse focused on Argentine ants, animals that often move from colony（群落） to colony depending on where the food is. Making use of Argentine ants' talent for fast travel, the researchers built bridges connecting their colonies. The bridges were different in width from a fifth to three-quarters of an inch. The colonies, too, were of different sizes, ranging from 400 to more than 25,000 ants.

Then the researchers sat back and monitored the traffic. To their surprise, even when those narrower bridges were full of ants, there were no "traffic accidents". "When the number of ants on the bridge increased, ants seemed to be able to understand the situation and adjusted（调整） their speed accordingly to avoid making the traffic flow stop. "the authors note. "Moreover, ants avoided entering a busy road and made sure that the bridge was never too packed to cross.”

The lesson for humans? The traffic problem may lie in our inability to adjust our driving habits for the good of the whole. Driving is fun when there are few cars on the road. Then the traffic moves very slowly. And yet, some impatient driver still acts like he's alone on the road.

The research suggests that projects, like the ever-widening of highways, may never free us from traffic jams. As long as we drive along with our own habits, no matter how many other people are on the road, we'll always end up in a traffic jam. Indeed, less space may actually be a good thing. It leaves less room for individual choice and forces us to take a page from the driving book of ants.