2 . Parkinson’s disease (帕金森病) is the second most common neurodegenerative (神经退行性) disease worldwide. It affects about 1% to 2% of people aged 65 and over. As the global population ages, the prevalence (流行率) of Parkinson’s disease will increase greatly. Nowadays, more than 6 million people worldwide have Parkinson’s disease, and there are about 60,000 new patients each year.

A recent study was carried out by Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. The study monitored the health of hundreds of Parkinson’s patients for up to five years. They studied two groups of people. One group of 147 people practised regular (有规律的) tai chi, aided by training class to improve their technique. The traditional Chinese exercise combines slow gentle movements with deep breathing and relaxation. The other group of 187 patients continued with their common care, but didn’t practise tai chi.

After five years of study, the researchers found that Parkinson’s disease progressed more slowly in the tai chi group. This group also saw fewer falls, less back pain and fewer memory problems than the other group. At the same time, sleep and quality of life continuously improved. An earlier test of people with Parkinson’s who practised tai chi for six months found greater improvements in walking, posture (姿态) and balance than those not on the programme. Experts say the findings support earlier studies on the benefits of exercise for those with Parkinson’s.

Writing in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, researchers say their study shows that tai chi has the long-term beneficial effects on Parkinson’s disease, which include making quality of life last longer, reducing the task on nursing care and drug (药物) use, while still helping to keep patients active. Tai chi has a potential improvement effect on both motor and non-motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease patients. They also find that tai chi training is safe for patients with early primary Parkinson’s disease.

This was an observational (观察性的) study, so the relationship between tai chi and improvement in Parkinson’s disease could not be sure. But the researchers will continue to study it.

3 . In the face of all kinds of changes in nature and life, our survival and development have been closely tied to our complexity. An idea called self-complexity refers to people’s thoughts about their different roles. It is the key to a strong and lasting identity (the sense of self) which can help us go through unexpected changes we all face. With self-complexity, people have developed various parts to their identities. For example, imagine a woman who sees herself as student, wife, daughter and tennis player and who has a wide variety of life experiences. Social scientists would say that she has high self-complexity. On the other hand, a man who regards himself only as a student or only as a member of the hockey team and who has limited life experiences would be said to have low self-complexity. For those with high self-complexity, the various parts of the self are separate. This means the positive and negative thoughts about a certain part of the self won’t affect (影响) thoughts about other parts.

A large body of research shows that if you depend too much on any one part of the self, you will become fragile. When one’s identity connects too closely with the only one part that he cares deeply, then one will easily get stressed and burnt out when unexpected changes appear. This is especially true for an athlete during periods of change when his main—and all too often, only—sense of identity feels at risk. Yet while it may be heightened for athletes, it’s a pattern that holds true in all walks of life: if you want to be excellent and experience something fully, then you’ve got to go all in, but only to a point.

If your identity becomes too involved in any one part, then you are likely to suffer when things change. So what you need to do is to challenge yourself to put the various parts of your identity into a whole. This allows you to emphasize (强调) and reemphasize certain parts of your identity at different periods of time. The result is a fluid (流动的) sense of self.

Developing a fluid sense of self doesn’t mean you can be careless or just do things without effort. Caring deeply about the people, activities, and projects you love is undoubtedly the key to a rich and meaningful life. The problem is not caring deeply; it is when your identity is too closely fixed to any single goal.

Before the invention of air-conditioning, southern China’s skywells played a key role in keeping people’s homes cool. Could they do it again today?

A skywell, or “tian jing”, is a typical feature (特色) of a traditional home in southern and eastern China, which can date back to Ming and Qing dynasties. A skywell is almost always in the center of a house. It is enclosed by rooms on four sides or three sides plus a wall. It acts as a transitional (过渡的) space between indoor life and the outdoor environment.

Skywells were designed to cool buildings. When wind blows above a skywell house, it can enter the indoor space through the opening. As the cool outdoor air travels down the walls to the lower storeys, it replaces warmer indoor air, enabling the bottom of the skywell to stay cool. Even when there is no natural wind, air circulation (循环) still takes place, because the temperature is different between the top and bottom of the skywell. Moreover, another part of the cooling effect comes from the evaporation (蒸发) of water. People collect rainwater in their skywells, and when the water evaporates, it cools hot air.

Today, although fewer and fewer people live in skywell houses, some designers take a new interest in the traditional Chinese buildings. They are getting creative ideas from skywells to help keep new buildings cooler. One example is the National Heavy Vehicle Engineering Technology Research Centre in Jinan, which was completed in 2022. The 18-storey glass-walled tower block has a huge skywell in the middle, from the fifth to the top floor. The lifts, toilets and meeting rooms are all set around the skywell, which helps improve the lighting and air circulation of the building and cut the overall use of energy.

Although ancient “green wisdom” like skywells has caught more attention of modern Chinese people, there are some challenges for bringing skywells into modern designs. For one thing, traditional skywells highly depend on their natural conditions, like how much sunlight or rainfall in the area, so adding skywells into modern buildings requires designers to fully consider their projects’ situations. Meanwhile, lighting, air conditioning and water supply have become so convenient that we depend on them with little care about the environmental cost. So it won’t be easy to be green by learning from the past without considering our present behaviours.

8 . Cooking can be a great hobby. After you have learned how to make some recipes (食谱), it is time to try something new! Putting different kinds of cooking together is a fun way to make new and interesting dishes. This kind of cooking makes new recipes using parts of old recipes.

This idea has a long history. A long time ago, people who lived in one place usually cooked the same kinds of foods. They ate the same kinds of foods as their friends and families because those foods were easy to find or make. Since people did not move much from one place to another, these foods became part of the culture of a town, city, or country. Now, people move a lot. When they move from their homes to other countries, they bring their recipes with them. They mix together the tastes from their old recipes with the tastes from the new place.

You do not have to move to new places to have fun with new kinds of food! You can use any recipe you want. But it is important to think about how different foods taste. Do you like ice cream? Ice cream is very sweet and it is easy to make in an ice cream maker. Green tea is tasty and can be used in many recipes. You can make green tea ice cream as a cool snack. But you do not need to stop with green tea and ice cream. You can make a meat recipe, too. If you like coconut milk, you can try making a delicious sauce for meat. Or, you can always make coconut ice cream! It’s delicious.

10 . People always work together to get shared goals, while researchers are busy working out how to make the teamwork work well. Now, two American researchers, Suzanne Bell and Eduardo Salas, have studied the “the Science of Teamwork”.

There are some important findings in their study. “The more you understand the science behind the teamwork, the better your teams will be,” says Bell, a university teacher.

A team’s success often comes from its composition (组成) as Bell describes in her findings. Surface-level factors (表层因素) of team members—such as age, nationality and cultural backgrounds can be important to the team’s result.

However, the “deep-level” factors have a bigger influence (影响) on reaching the goal, such as the abilities, ideas, and feelings of the members. For example, if the goal is to make a new instrument, it’s a good idea to build a team with different thinkers who bring a lot of knowledge, ideas and abilities to the project. But if a team’s goal is to finish the work quickly, different ideas might be less important. If a team member thinks the project will not have a good result, his feelings could badly influence the whole group. That’s because feelings can spread in a team.

Salas also describes useful ways for improving teamwork in their study. “Team building is the best way to train teams,” Salas says. But the results of such programs are not the same.

If you send a group of leaders into the mountains for two days, they might have fun and learn from each other—but it doesn’t mean they’ll magically develop new teamwork skills. “Team training works when we make them experience real teamwork, such as cleaning up a park or writing a report on a project.” Salas says.

Although there is still more work to do to understand teamwork, this study will encourage people to improve their teams in new ways by using science.