【推荐1】What would happen if you replace all drinks with water?

We all know what harmful drinks can cause： obesity, heart problems, stomach pain, skin diseases, caries. This list sounds so scary.     1    What would happen with our bodies then?

Chris Bailey, a popular blogger and lecturer, carried out a month-long research about this topic. His conclusion is really impressive and surprising!

You lose weight faster.

Yes, you do! No special diet is required! You replace all drinks with water for 9 days, and you'll lose as equal amount of calories as when jogging for eight kilometers a day!     2    

You speed up your metabolism.

Drinking just 17 fluid ounces (盎司) of water in the morning increases your metabolism (新陈代谢) by 24 percent.     3    And you'll see the impressive result very soon.

Your brain works better.

Did you know your brain is 75 to 85 percent water? Nothing else, just water! So by drinking, you feel it, which helps you concentrate. Drink water to work more efficiently, cope with all daily tasks quickly, and stay energized even late in the evening! Doesn't this sound like a dream?

You eat less.

Sometimes we confuse hunger with thirst.     4    Try it out to drink some water next time you feel hungry. It really works.

Your body releases toxins faster.

Water washes out harmful substances, clearing, moistening your skin and preventing aging. Want to look young and fresh as long as possible? Drink a glass of water right now.

    5    

Five glasses of water a day lower the risk of a heart attack by 41 percent! And there are similar effects on other diseases like bladder conditions, bowel cancer…Want to avoid wasting money on doctors? Just drink more water!

You save a lot of money

How much money do you spend on coffee and juices per week? Well. I don't want to say how much I do because my spending is massive. The price of water is much lower than that of other drinks Think about it!

【推荐1】Jonathan the tortoise, the world’s oldest land animal, turned 190 over the weekend on the island of St. Helena, where he enjoyed a “cake” of seasonal fruits, leafy greens and vegetables, including carrots carved into the number “190”.

Jonathan was brought to St.Helena from the Seychelles in 1882 as a gift. According to Guinness World Records, Jonathan surpassed the previous record holder, Tu’i Malila, who lived in the 1770s until 1965and could be even older. He arrived in St.Helena as a fully mature tortoise, meaning he was at least 50 in 1882.

“The vet is still feeding him by hand once a week to boost his calories, vitamins, minerals and trace elements, as he is blind and has no sense of smell. His hearing though is excellent and he loves the company of humans, and responds well to his vet Joe Hollins’ voice as he associates him with a feast, Guinness World Records said.

“The tortoise enjoys the sun but on very hot days takes to the shade. On mild days, he will sunbathe his long neck and legs stretched fully out of his shell to absorb heat and transfer it to his core,” according to Hollins. When it’s cold, Jonathan has been known to “dig himself into leaf mold or grass cuttings and remain there all day.”

In most cases, the lifespan of a tortoise or turtle depends on the species and level of care they receive. They generally live much longer in captivity than in the wild, because in the wild, they must find their own food in addition to evading predators while not getting medical treatment. Larger turtle and tortoise species also tend to live longer than their smaller counterparts. For more information about animal record holders, click here.

【推荐2】Coffee may be unfriendly to a financial planner, according to researchers from the University of South Florida (USF) “Caffeine (咖啡因), as a powerful stimulant, leads to a higher energetic state, which in turn decreases self-control,” said lead author and USF professor Dipayan Biswas. The findings were published on Thursday in the Journal of Marketing.

According to the study, researchers ran three experiments involving coffee machines at the entrances of a supermarket and home goods store in France and a department store in Spain. Upon entering those places, over 300 shoppers received a cup with nothing in it yet. About half of those shoppers ordered a coffee containing roughly 100 mg of caffeine, while the other half went in with either decaffeinated coffee or water. Importantly, the shoppers also shared their shopping receipts (收据) with researchers as they exited.

Sure enough, people who drank caffeinated coffee bought a significantly higher number of items and spent more money. Interestingly, drinking caffeine also appeared to influence the types of items people bought. Shoppers who drank caffeine bought more unnecessary items, such as decorative candles and fragrances (香水), than the others. However, there were few differences among caffeinated and decaffeinated shoppers when it came to making more practical decisions, including kitchen tools and storage baskets.

The study authors also conducted the fourth experiment in a lab testing the impact of caffeine on online shopping. They separated a group of 200 business school students depending on whether they just drank caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. Then, each person had to pick which items they would buy from a list of 66 options. Again, people drinking caffeine chose more unnecessary items from the list while the others tended to choose more practical goods.

“While moderate (适度的) amounts of caffeine intake can have positive health benefits, there can be unintended results of being caffeinated while shopping,” Prof Biswas concludes.

【推荐3】Adult musk ducks raised in captivity (圈养) can copy the sounds they heard as hatchlings, such as a door slamming, a man coughing and even what was probably a former caretaker’s catchphrase (口头禅), “ You bloody fool! ”

The large, grey Australian waterbirds usually learn to make high-pitched whistles from their older flock mates. But individuals raised in captivity away from other musk dusks have been heard copying the sounds around them associated with human life.

The findings provide evidence that musk dusks now join parrots, seals, bats, elephants and humans as vocal (声音的) language learners, which means they acquire “ words ” based on what they hear as infants, says Carel Ten Cate at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “ Vocal learning is a rare and special trait, so that makes this duck particularly special, ” he says. Ten Cate studies vocal learning in birds and was recently fascinated to come across a story about a talking duck in Australia. So he tracked down the now-retired Australian scientist Peter J. Fullagar, who first noticed the phenomenon more than 30 years ago.

Fullagar shared his conserved audio clips (片段) of 4-year-old Ripper, a male musk duck hand-raised on a nature reserve without other musk ducks. In the clips, Ripper walks around speaking when acting aggressively and copying a slamming door sound when trying to attract females.

Fullagar also shared an audio clip of a second male that was raised on the same reserve with his mother in 2000, along with Pacific black ducks that make sounds “ like common park ducks, ” Ten Cate says. Female musk ducks don’t perform vocal displays, and the young, unnamed duck grew up to copy the black ducks around him.

After Ten Cate ensured the recordings, he used software to confirm that the birds were repeating noises from their environment, in some cases sounds that they had only heard in the first weeks of life. In the recordings, the ducks made these sounds dozens of times in a matter of minutes, at about 4-second intervals (间隔).