【推荐1】People who grow up outside of cities are better at finding their way around than urbanites, a large study on navigation suggests. The results, described online on March 30 in Nature, hint that learning to handle environmental complexity as a child strengthens mental muscles for spatial skills.

Nearly 400,000 people from 38 countries around the world played a video game called Sea Hero Quest, designed by scientists and game developers as a fun way to collect data about people’s brains. Players piloted a boat in search of various targets.

On average, people who said they had grown up outside of cities, where they would have probably encountered lots of complicated paths, were better at finding the targets than people who were raised in cities.

What’s more, the difference between city residents and outsiders was most obvious in countries where cities tend to have simple layouts (布局), such as Chicago with its streets laid out at 90-degree angles. The simpler the cities, the bigger the advantage for people from more rural areas, cognitive scientist Antoine Coutrot of CNRS and his colleagues report.

Still, from these video game data, scientists can’t definitively say that the childhood environment is behind the differences in navigation. But it’s possible. “As a kid, if you are exposed to a complex environment, you learn to find your way, and you develop the right cognitive processes to do so,” Coutrot says.

Other factors have been linked to navigational performance, including age, gender, education and even a superior sense of smell. Figuring out these details will give doctors a more precise baseline (基准) of a person’s navigational abilities. That, in turn, might help reveal when these skills weaken, as they do in early Alzheimer’s disease, for instance.

【推荐2】Next time you find yourself tending to your flower garden, you may want to stay quiet. The flowers are listening.

According to Israeli scientists, the plants could hear bees approaching and attempt to attract them with sweeter nectar(花蜜). In several experiments, they found that playing audio recordings of buzzing bees around certain flowers would cause the sugar concentration in the nectar to rise by about 20% in less than five minutes. Such a rapid reaction by plants to sound had never previously been reported. Just to compare, the researchers also tried a higher frequency noise-like that made by a mosquito or a bat-and the flowers did not respond.

This is not the first time that they' ve reacted to what they 're hearing around them. In a 2009 study. Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society found that women's voices helped make plants grow faster. In that experiment, tomato plants were found to grow up to two inches taller when they were tended to by a female gardener. More recently, an Australian study found that some flowers were able to sense noises, such as the flow of water through a pipe.

The ability of inanimate(无生命的) objects to hear what' s around them may seem like something out of a science fiction novel, but it's real. What if we told you that a potato chip bag left on the floor of a break room could listen in an office gossip? You'd think we were crazy. right?Think again. Researchers found that as people were talking around the potato chip bag. they were sending teeny-tiny sound vibrations(振动) into the air. Those vibrations then hit inanimate objects around the room. So next time you're at the gardens or in a grocery. be careful with what you say.Something might be listening.