【推荐1】Oh, the places you’ll go!

When it comes to habitat, human beings are creatures of habit. It has been known for a long time that, whether his habitat is a village, a city or, for real globe-trotters (周游世界者), the planet itself, an individual person generally visits the same places regularly. The details, though, have been surprisingly obscure. Now, thanks to an analysis of data collected from 40,000 smartphone users around the world, a new property of humanity’s locomotive (移动的) habits has been revealed.

It turns out that someone’s “location capacity”, the number of places which he or she visits regularly, remains constant over periods of months and years. What constitutes a “place” depends on what distance between two places makes them separate. But analyzing movement patterns helps illuminate the distinction and the researchers found that the average location capacity was 25. If a new location does make its way into the set of places an individual tends to visit, an old one drops out in response. People do not, in other words, gather places like collector cards. Rather, they cycle through them. Their geographical behavior is limited and predictable, not fancy-free.

The study demonstrating this, just published in Nature Human Behavior, does not offer any explanation for the limited location capacity it measures. But a statistical analysis carried out by the authors shows that it cannot be explained solely by constraints on time. Some other factor is at work. One of the researchers draws an analogy. He suggests that people’s cognitive capacity limits the number of places they can visit routinely, just as it limits the number of other people an individual can routinely socialize with. That socialization figure, about 150 for most people, is known as the Dunbar number, after its discoverer, Robin Dunbar.

Lehmann says his group is now in search of similar data from other primates (灵长目动物), in an attempt to work out where human patterns of mobility have their roots. For those, though, they will have to rely on old-fashioned methods of zoological observation unless they can work out a way to get chimpanzees to carry smartphones.

【推荐2】An online supermarket company—Ocado in the UK, has recently displayed a robotic hand that can pick fruits and vegetables!

When an embryo is in the womb (子宫), the very first sense it develops is touch. The sense of touch is also the one that lasts the longest—as we get older and our vision and hearing begins to weaken, touch still remains. Humans use their touch to protect themselves, to create emotional relationships with other people and to experience pleasure. Can you imagine life without it?

The sense of touch comes from a net work of nerve endings (神经末梢) and special touch receptors on the surface of the skin. While there are different kinds of touch receptors, they help us judge pressure, texture and vibrations (震动). They are located in our fingertips, palms, soles of our feet, face, lips and tongue.

When we touch something, the mechano-receptors feel the touch and through a network of nerves send signals to the brain. This informs the brain about the location of the touch, the amount of force used, and the speed at which it was used.

Several different techniques have been tried in the past few years to create such a robotic hand—using three fingers. But this latest design by Soma copies the human hand. The gripper (钳子) is made up of flexible materials which grasp the thing based on its size and shape. Then air pressure is used to control the movement of the robotic fingers to pick objects safely and without causing damage.

The next step would be for the robot to judge how ripe the fruits and vegetables are, and apply pressure accordingly. Members of the research team are currently working on adding computerized vision to the robots, so that they can see what they are grasping.

Does all this mean robots can replace people? According to Ocado, it helps improve productivity by removing some of the repetitive tasks done by humans.

【推荐1】California has been facing droughts for many years, with certain areas even having to pump freshwater hundreds of miles to their distribution system. The problem is growing as the population of the state continues to expand. New research has found deep water reserves under the state which could help solve their drought crisis. Previous drilling of wells could only reach depths of 1,000 feet, but due to new pumping practices, water deeper than this can now be extracted (抽取). The team at Stanford investigated the aquifers (地下蓄水层) below this depth and found that reserves may be three times what was previously thought.

It is profitable to drill to depths more than 1,000 feet for oil and gas, but only recently in California has it become profitable to pump water from this depth. The aquifers range from 1,000 to 3,000 feet below the ground, which means that pumping will be expensive and there are other concerns. The biggest concern is the gradual setting down of the land surface. As the water is pumped out, the vacant space left is pressed by the weight of the earth above.

Even though pumping from these depths is expensive, it is still cheaper than desalinating (脱盐) the ocean water in the largely coastal state. Some desalination plants exist where possible, but they are costly to run and can need constant repairs. Wells are much more reliable sources of freshwater, and California is hoping that these deep wells may be the answer to their severe water shortage.

One problem with these sources is that the deep water also has a higher level of salt than shallower aquifers. This means that some water may even need to be desalinated after extraction, thus increasing the cost. Research from the study of groundwater has just been published. New estimates of the water reserves now go up to 2,700 billion cubic meters of freshwater.

【推荐1】There is certainly evidence that actors experience a combination of their real self with their assumed characters. For example, Benedict Cumberbatch said, “My mum says I’m much more impatient with her when I’m filming Sherlock.”

Mark Seton, a researcher at the University of Sydney, has even invented the term “post-dramatic stress disorder” to describe the lasting effects experienced by actors who lose themselves in a role. “Actors may often prolong (延长) habits of the characters they have role-played.” he writes

A recent finding doesn’t involve acting, and it shows that just spending some time thinking about another person seemed to rub off on the volunteers’ sense of self led by Meghan Meyer at Princeton University. Across several studies, these researchers asked volunteers to first rate their own personalities, memories or physical features, and then to perform the same task from the perspective (视角) of another person. For example, they might score the emotionality (情绪性) of various personal memories, and then rate how a friend or relative would have experienced those same events.

After taking the perspective of another, the volunteers scored themselves once again: the finding was that their self-knowledge was now changed —their self-scores had changed to become more similar to those they’d given for someone else. For example, if at first they had said the term “confident” was only loosely related to themselves and then rated the term as being strongly related to a friend’s personality, when they came to rescore themselves, they now tended to see themselves as more confident.

“By simply thinking about another person, we may adapt our self to take the shape of that person” said Meyer and her colleagues. That our sense of self should have this quality might be a little discouraging, especially for anyone who has struggled to establish a firm sense of identity. Yet there is an optimistic message here, too. The challenge of improving ourselves— or at least seeing ourselves in a more positive light— might be a little easier than we thought. By role-playing or acting out the kind of person we would like to become, or just by thinking about and spending time with people who have the kind of features we would like to see in ourselves, we can find that our sense of self changes in desirable ways.

“As each of us chooses who to befriend, who to model, and who to ignore,” write Meyer and her colleagues, “we must make these decisions aware of how they shape not only the structure of our social networks, but even our sense of who we are.”

【推荐2】Search “toxic parents”, and you’ll find more than 38, 000 posts, largely urging young adults to cut ties with their families. The idea is to safeguard one’s mental health from offensive parents. However, as a psychoanalyst (精神分析学家), I’ve seen that trend in recent years become a way to manage conflicts in the family, and I have seen the severe impacts estrangement (疏远) has on both sides of the divide. This is a self-help trend that creates much harm.

“Canceling” your parent can be seen as an extension of a cultural trend aimed at correcting imbalances in power and systemic inequality. Today’s social justice values respond to this reality, calling on us to criticize oppressive and harmful figures and to gain power for those who have been powerless. But when adult children use the most effective tool they have—themselves—to gain a sense of security and ban their parents from their lives, the roles are simply switched, and the pain only deepens.

Often, what I see in my practice are cases of family conflict mismanaged, power dynamics turned upside down rather than negotiated. I see the terrible effect of that trend: situations with no winners, only isolated humans who long to be known and feel safe in the presence of the other.

The catch is that after estrangement, adult children are not suddenly less dependent. In fact, they feel abandoned and betrayed, because in the unconscious, it doesn’t matter who is doing the leaving; the feeling that remains is “being left”. They carry the ghosts of their childhood, tackling the emotional reality that those who raised us can never truly be left behind, no matter how hard we try.

What I have found is that most of these families need repair, not permanent break-up. How can one learn how to negotiate needs, to create boundaries and to trust? How can we love others, and ourselves, if not through accepting the limitations that come with being human? Good relationships are not the result of a perfect level of harmony but rather of successful adjustments.

To pursue dialogue instead of estrangement will be hard and painful work. It can’t be a single project of “self-help”, because at the end of the day, real intimacy (亲密关系) is achieved by working through the injuries of the past together. In most cases of family conflict, repair is possible and preferable to estrangement—and it’s worth the work.