4 . Have you ever had an experience where you meet someone new, learn their name and think to yourself, “Wow, they really look just like their name!” What does this mean, exactly? Scientists are suggesting that humans tend to associate people’s names with their appearance, and can even guess someone’s name based on how they look.

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel collected thousands of photos of people faces. They labeled each photo with four names. Then, they asked volunteers to guess which of the four names was correct.

The volunteers were able to guess the right name 38 percent of the time. It seems that humans are able to recognize certain characteristics of faces that can give them clues about someone’s name, Reader’s Digest reported.

However, this only works when we’re looking at names within our own culture. In addition, the volunteers were not as good at guessing the real names of people who use nicknames more often than their real names. This shows that a person’s appearance is affected by their name only if they use it often.

“This kind of face-name matching happens “because of a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, as we become what other people expect us to become,” Ruth Mayo from the university told science news website EurekAlert.

Previous studies have shown that gender and race stereotypes can affect a person’s appearance. The researchers believe there are also similar stereotypes about names. For example, people tend to think that men named Bob should have rounder faces because the word itself looks round. People may think that women named rose are beautiful. They expect them to be delicate and feminine, just like the flower they are named for.

In many countries, tattoos are in fashion （时尚）. On TV you can often see a famous actor or musician with a tattoo on his arm or foot. Many sports players have them, too. In the US, tattoos are very popular. Forty percent of Americans aged between 26 and 40 have a tattoo, and 60 percent of customers in US tattoo parlors are women. These people are often professional people like doctor, teachers and lawyers.

However, tattoos are not modern. In fact, they are very old in human history. For example, archaeologists* found a human in ice from 5,000 years ago. He had 57 tattoos on his back, ankles, legs, knees and feet. Tattoos were used for many different reasons. In ancient Egypt, people got tattoos because they were “beautiful”. But in ancient Rome, tattoos were negative and put on criminals* and prisoners. In India, tattoos were religious *.

In the 16^th and 17^th century, European sailors arrived on the islands of Polynesia. They saw tattoos for the first time. The people on the islands had tattoos on their shoulders, chests, backs and legs. Often the tattoos were of animals or natural features like a river or a mountain. The European sailors liked them and made their own tattoos, so the idea traveled to Europe. Tattoos in Polynesia are still important today. They show information about a person’s history, their island or their job.

So is there a connection between traditional tattoos and fashionable tattoos? And can you call tattoos a fashion? Chris Rainier is an expert in tattoos and his book Ancient Marks has photos of tattoos from all over the world. He thinks people in modern societies often have tattoos because they are a connection to the traditional world. But tattoos aren’t a fashion like clothes or a haircut because you can’t put them on and take them off again like a jacket or a hat. They are permanent* and for life.

Normally, the Full Moon shines brightly all night long, lighting homes, trees, cities, and fields. Sometimes, though, a strange event happens. The Full Moon turns dark in a lunar eclipse.

What causes a lunar eclipse?

The first key is, the Sun makes light, but the Moon doesn’t. When you see the Moon shining at night, you’re seeing sunlight bouncing off the Moon.

The second key is, the Moon goes around us about once a month. Once a month, the Moon is on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun. Then the Sun fully lights the side of the Moon that we see. We call this event a Full Moon. That’s when the Moon shines brightest.

The third key is, during a lunar eclipse, Earth gets in the way. When you go outside on a sunny day, your body blocks some of the sunlight and casts a shadow over things that lie on the opposite side of you from the Sun. Earth also casts a shadow, and sometimes it falls on the Moon. Then we have a lunar eclipse.

A lunar eclipse occurs only during a Full Moon, since that’s the only time when Earth is between the Sun and the Moon. Normally, though, there’s no eclipse because the Full Moon passes above or below Earth’s shadow.

The lunar eclipse begins when Earth’s central shadow starts to move over the Moon. With each passing minute, Earth’s shadow will cover more and more of the Moon. And then the Moon will be totally eclipsed. That means the whole Moon will be in Earth’s shadow.

During the eclipse, the Moon won’t disappear from view, but it will look a different color. Sometimes the eclipsed Moon looks black. Other times it’s gray, copper, orange, or reddish.

The total eclipse will last about an hour. Then the Moon will slowly come out from Earth’s shadow, growing brighter and brighter.

An hour or two later, the Full Moon will be back in business, shining brightly on homes, trees, cities, and fields again.

Are Human Beings Getting Smarter?

Do you think you’re smarter than your parents and grandparents? According to James Flynn, a professor at a New Zealand university, you are! Over the course of last century, people who have taken IQ tests have got increasingly better scores—on average, three points better for every decade that has passed. This improvement is known as “the Flynn effect”, and scientists want to know what is behind it.

IQ tests and other similar tests are designed to test general intelligence rather than knowledge. Flynn knew that intelligence partly comes down from our parents and partly results in our environment and experiences, but the improvement in test scores was happening too quickly to be explained by heredity. So what was happening in the 20th century that was helping people get higher scores on intelligence tests?

Scientists have offered several explanations for the Flynn effect. Some think that the test scores improve just because we take many more tests. We learn test-taking skills that help us do better in, any test. Others have pointed to better nutrition since it results in babies being born larger, healthier, and with more brain development than in the past. Another possible explanation is a change in educational styles, with teachers encouraging children to learn by discovering things for themselves but not just memorizing information. This could prepare people to do the kind of problem solving in intelligence tests.

Flynn limited the possible explanations when he looked carefully at the test data and discovered that the improvement in scores was only on certain parts of the IQ test. Test-takers didn’t do better on the arithmetic or vocabulary parts of the test. They did better on the parts that required a special kind of reasoning and problem solving. For example, one part of the test shows a set of abstract shapes, and test-takers must look for patterns and connections between them and decide which shape should be added to the set.

According to Flynn, this visual intelligence improves as the amount of technology in our lives increases. Every time you play a computer game or work out how to program a new cell phone, you are exercising exactly the kind of thinking and problem solving that helps you do well in one kind of intelligence test. So are you really smarter than your parents? In one very specific* way, you may be.

Sumo, a sport which was founded in Japan, has a problem. It may have to give up some past traditions in order to become a major international sport, and one of the biggest changes may be allowing women to compete.

Traditionally, women cannot enter a sumo ring. That caused a problem for the woman governor of Osaka. She could not enter the ring to give prizes to the winners of a big sumo competition in Osaka. In the end, her man assistant had to hand out the prizes.

The governor of Osaka only wanted to stand in the ring to hand out prizes. Other women want to enter the sumo ring to compete! However, they are all kept out of the ring. Many people think this would be bad for sumo because there is a rule in the Olympics. All sports in the Olympics must be open to men and women. So unless sumo opens the ring to women, it will never become an Olympic sport.

However, Sumo has already spread from Japan to other countries. In fact, since the 1990s, women’s sumo has been growing popular in Europe. Women athletes from Europe seem to be quite good at sumo! This has led to another problem. Women athletes from outside Japan are winning more sumo competitions than women athletes from Japan! At an international competition in Warsaw, Poland, only one Japanese athlete won a medal. All the other medals went to women who were not from Japan.