5 . The Voynich manuscript (手稿) is a 234-page book filled with writing in a strange language now called Voynichese. It also features many strange drawings of unknown plants, people and charts. Based on the images alone, it seems to have something to do with medicine.

The language in the manuscript appears nowhere else and has become one of the greatest linguistic riddles of our day, Since its discovery, it has attracted researchers, been called a hoax (骗局), and been the subject of a huge number of articles.

By carbon dating the manuscript, researchers are pretty confident that it was constructed in the early 1400s. And through the magic of linguistic analysis, most people agree that the manuscript is not a hoax. Or, if it is, it’s a very, very complex hoax.

A paper published in 2016 by computer scientist Greg Kondrak and his student Bradley Hauer gained a lot of attention. Their theory was based on the idea that Voynichese was made with a substitution cipher (替代密码). That means it was written in a real language, and then each of the letters in that language was replaced by a specific Voynichese letter.

This is where the computing power comes in. By having a computer compare the text of the Voynich manuscript to 380 languages, Kondrak and Hauer ran the substitution cipher through as many languages as possible and determined if the text would make sense. In the end, they figured out that the original language was Hebrew, and they even translated some of the text. There are a few problems with their results, though: they compared the manuscript to modern Hebrew, not 15th-century Hebrew; they had to make “spelling corrections” for it to make sense; and, possibly most egregious (过分的) of all, they got their results using a translating app.

Despite all the innovations in code-breaking over the last century, the Voynich manuscript still rejects our advances. If Voynichese is indeed ever solved, artificial intelligence could very likely play a role.

6 . When Sharaine and Wilson moved their family to Rhode Island, they already had a houseful. Five kids, a busy schedule, a long list of house projects and a whole new neighborhood _______ little time for anything else. And then Paul _______.

At 82 years old, Paul had just lost his wife, but he is still handy and _______. He walked across the street carrying a ladder to meet the new neighbors and _______ a little help with fix-up projects.

Sharaine remembers, “Our biggest _______ of moving into a new neighborhood was what if the new neighbors don’t like us. We have a lot of _______; they make a lot of noise.” But those fears were quickly put to   _______. Paul knows a lot about tools and _______ an old house that Sharaine and Wilson moved in, and he soon became a(n) _______ visitor of the family.

Thanks to Paul’s kind help, Sharaine and Wilson had no ________ in making a new friend. And neither did the kids, Paul made sure the kids crossed the street ________ after school, helped with homework and even ________ the little ones to brush their teeth.

“The kids run up to him like that’s their own ________,” Sharaine says. And that keeps Paul ________. There are neighborhood cookouts, birthdays, home projects and so on. He is also busy ________ a grandpa.

7 . Improved air quality to reduce ozone (臭氧) pollution may have avoided the loss of 1.5 billion birds during the past 40 years, a study found. That’s nearly 20% of bird life in the United States today.

Ozone, a gas that appears in nature, is also produced by human activities, including by power plants and cars. The ozone in the upper atmosphere protects the Earth from the harmful ultraviolet rays (紫外线) of the sun. But ground-level ozone is harmful and pollutes the air we breathe.

To examine the relationship between bird populations and air pollution, the researchers used models that connected bird observations from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird program with ground-level pollution data. They tracked monthly changes in bird populations, air quality, and regulation status (治理现状) for 3,214 US counties over a period of 15 years. The findings suggest that ozone pollution is most harmful to the small birds — such as sparrows, warblers and finches — that make up 86% of all North American land-bird species. Ozone pollution directly harms birds by damaging their breathing systems, and indirectly harms their food sources.

“Not only can ozone cause direct physical damage to birds, but it also can harm plant health and reduce numbers of the insects that birds eat,” said co-author Amanda Rodewald. “Not surprisingly, birds that cannot get high-quality habitat or food resources are less likely to survive or reproduce successfully. The good news here is that environmental policies intended to protect human health and return important benefits to birds too.”

This work contributes to our ever increasing understanding of the connection of environmental health and human health.

8 . Children's average daily time spent watching television or using mobile device increased from 53 minutes at 12 months old to more than 150 minutes at 3 years old, according to an analysis by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Children aged 7 were more likely to spend the highest amount of screen time if they had been in bad home-based childcare or were born to first-time mothers.

“Our results indicate that screen habits begin early,” said Edwina Yeung, an investigator in National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), “This finding suggests that interventions to reduce screen time could have a better chance of success if introduced early.”

In the research, mothers of 4,000 children responded to questions on their kids' media habits when they were 12, 18, 24, 30, and 36 months of age.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends avoiding digital media exposure for children under 18 months of age, introducing children 18 to 24 months of age to screen media slowly, and limiting screen time to an hour a day for children from 2 to 5 years of age. In the current study, researchers found that 87% of the children had screen time exceeding these recommendations. However, while screen time increased throughout infancy, after 8 years of age, screen time fell to under 1. 5 hours per day. The researchers believe this decrease relates to time consumed by school-related activities.

The study authors classified the children into two groups based on how much their aver- age daily screen time increased from age 1 to age 3. The first group, 73% of the total, had the lower increase, from an average of nearly 51 minutes a day to nearly an hour and 47 minutes a day. The second group, 27% of the total, had the higher increase, from nearly 37 minutes of screen time a day to about 4 hours a day. Higher levels of parental education were associated with the lower odds of inclusion in the second group.

9 . Eric knew he was in trouble. His _________ had ballooned to 320 pounds, and he was _________ more than $1,000 a month on medications (药物) for high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol.

In 2010, a _________ told him to buy a funeral plot, because he would need it in five years. He was 51 years old. So he went to talk with a naturopathic (自然疗法的) doctor about _________ weight. She said, “Get a shelter dog.”

Eric was _________, but he took that advice, _________ to the Humane Society Silicon Valley near his home in San Jose, Calif. He told the shelter, “I want a(n) _________ fat middle-aged dog, like me.” That’s how he _________ Peety.

Peety needed to be _________, so Eric and Peety walked, for at least a half hour a day. Eric, who was __________ as an area sales manager for GE appliances, shifted to a plant-based __________. Over the course of a year, he lost 140 pounds. Peety lost 25. Eric __________ the medications.

It wasn’t just the walks with Peety that __________ Eric’s life. The dog helped keep him from backsliding (倒退) into his old, __________ lifestyle. “He looked at me like I was the best person on the __________, and I wanted to become the person he thought I was.”