1 . Whether you’re hiking through Yellowstone or camping in the Ozarks, choosing the best backpacking stove (炉子) to take with you can make a big difference. Read on for some of our top picks.

Backpackers love its convenient built-in igniter (点火器), powerful heat output, and four-pronged (四管的) pot stabilizer, which provides a more stable platform for cooking than three-pronged stoves.

The Solo Titan burns twigs, pine cones, leaves, and any other biofuels you may find out in nature, offering a safe and natural alternative to burning gas. The Titan is considered mid-size, ideal for cooking for several people.

Based on hundreds of reviews, hikers say they’re impressed by this gas-powered stove’s easy setup. The Star X2 also features Heat Exchange Technology, which the company says provides superior wind-resistance in different weather environments, helping to reduce overall boil time.

Weighing just 2.9 ounces, the Soto Amicus is well known for its light weight and attractive appearance. Multiple Amazon reviewers praise this backpacking stove’s easy setup and four integrated pot stabilizers, which create a stable base for cooking in the wilderness.

2 . Autonomously copying other people’s thoughts or options or simply going with the crowd is often referred to as “herd (群体) behaviour”. Herding can appear to make a lot of sense. In an earlier article, I discussed the so-called “wisdom of crowds”, which suggests that average judgments of large groups of people often outperform individual choices.

Psychology research has attempted to model herd behaviour and suggests that the phenomenon relies on the existence of social connections or patterns between individuals as well as specific mechanisms of passing on information. A key condition is the human ability to “mentalize”, which means being able to read and interpret someone else’s mental state and using the information to explain their options. This action of mentalizing is responsible for people’s tendency to attach meaning to options by the herd, even if many behaviours may have come about at random.

Herd behaviours, while common and easy to explain, hold significant dangers. Contrary to the so-called “wisdom of crowds”, which emerges when the judgments of individual group members are independently collected to produce an average opinion, herd behaviours typically rely on so-called “information cascades”, where people take on others’ beliefs or copy their options without critically evaluating the underlying reasons. This frequently leads to the mirroring of unreasonable or stupid behaviours.

Blindly following the herd can be dangerous. So how can we resist the tendency of following the crowd? The sad news is that psychology research suggests that it’s surprisingly difficult to withstand the influences of the herd. In an experiment, researchers found that warning messages about the potential errors of the crowd were surprisingly ineffective in helping subjects make better choices. It appears there is no quick and easy fix. Instead, long-term attitude changes may be necessary, which could involve individuals adopting more critical approaches towards their peers’ opinion, and questioning others’ behaviours as opposed to blindly following them.

3 . Shakespeare described sleep as “the main course in life’s feast, and the most nourishing”. New research suggests it may also be a key nutrient in defend us against Alzheimer’s disease.

Poor sleep has long been linked to Alzheimer’s, but the relationship is similar to the chicken-and-egg puzzle. It isn’t clear which came first. During deep sleep, the brain produces slow electrical waves and flushes out neurotoxins (神经毒素) including amyloid (淀粉样蛋白) and tau (微管蛋白) , two indicators of the disease.

Studies have shown that even one night of terrible deep sleep can lead to an increase of amyloid. A week of disrupted sleep can raise the amount of tau, which is especially insidious because over time it can strangle neurons from the inside out.

A study in the Annals of Neurology found that a sleep pill called suvorexant could reduce amyloid and tau in middle-aged adults with no cognitive problems. The two-night trial showed that amyloid dropped 10%to 20%, and a key form of tau 10%to 15%in people who received a high dose compared to a placebo (安慰剂) group. But these effects need to be studied over longer periods of time—including in older adults at higher risk of Alzheimers. But the study suggests that improving sleep quality among middle-aged adults could help reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s later in life.

What has puzzled neurologists, however, is that some people with high levels of amyloid who may appear to have Alzheimer’s based on brain scans nonetheless function normally. Neurologists assume that this is because some people have higher levels of “cognitive reserve.” which enables them to function normally despite neurological damage. But there’s another X factor, which scientists have struggled to identify. A new study suggests it may be sleep, and in particular deep sleep.

“Think of deep sleep almost like a life raft that keeps memory afloat, rather than memory getting dragged down by the weight of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Matthew Walker, a neuroscience professor at UC Berkeley.

4 . While work on lab-grown meat has made the headlines in recent years, similar work on fruit is less common. Scientists at Plant & Food Research in New Zealand are aiming to change that by growing fruit tissue (组织) from plant cells (细胞) that they hope will one day taste, smell and feel like real fruit. Researchers hope that the program will help guarantee the country’s food security.

“Here in New Zealand, we’re good at growing traditional horticultural crops (园艺作物),”said Dr. Ben Schon, the lead scientist for the Food by Design program at the government-backed Plant & Food Research, “but looking into the future, there’s a lot of change coming in the world with population growth, increasing urbanisation (城镇化) and climate change.”

The program aims to grow fruit tissue without the parts that are usually discarded like the peel of the banana. Providing consumers with only the tissue of fruit will help reduce food waste, said Schon.

Lab-grown foods could play an important role in sustainable (可持续的) agriculture but are still in the very early stages of development, according to Dr. Ali Rashidinejad, a senior food scientist at Massey University in Palmerston North. Since lab-grown food is a completely new idea, once it is developed, it will then have to prove its safety through long expensive experiments. The Plant & Food Research program started 18 months ago, but scientists warn that the end goal of getting something that is nutritional and enjoyable to eat is some years away and might not be achievable at all.

The technology would probably be suitable for growing fruit tissue within cities, said Dr. Sam Baldwin, a strategy leader at Plant & Food Research, in the hope that it would reduce the cost and carbon emissions created when transporting food into urban centres.

5 . I love reading. My taste in books is fairly wide ranging with few exceptions, one of them being mysteries. So, I was quite surprised to find myself lost in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache novels, all 18 of them.

After I received a cancer diagnosis (诊断) in December of 2022, Peter, one of my closest friends, told me to read Penny’s books. I took his advice. The characters in the novels took hold of my mind and transported me away from the fear during the treatments.

Suffering side effects from my treatments, my world became quite small. With my limited energy, I read one book after another, repeating Inspector Gamache’s words, “All will be well.” I whispered these words to myself before every medical treatment.

On one especially uncomfortable night, lying on the bed with my book, I was suddenly transported not to Inspector Gamache’s world, but to the bedroom of my childhood with a different book in hand, The Hidden Staircase, a Nancy Drew mystery. When my parents’ marriage was falling apart at that time, I always sought comfort from Nancy. Returning to my Inspector Gamache mystery that night, I realized that perhaps it was the memory of those lonely nights from my childhood that kept me from reading mysteries. I never wanted to feel fear like that again, and yet here I was afraid of what would become of my life if the cancer wasn’t cured. Now the fighting was within me. Could I really trust that all would be well?

Although there is nothing fair about a cancer diagnosis, my belief that problems can be solved has only gotten stronger. But most of all, I still believe in the power of the written words to help us through dark nights when sleep is slow to come. There is no mystery in that.

8 . A professor at the University of South Florida recently published a paper she knew barely anyone would read. At least, not outside her field. The paper had to do with the impact of algae (海藻) blooms and depletion (退化) of coral reefs on the region’s tourism industry.

The work of completing the paper was glum, says Heather O’Leary. It involved tracking visitors’ reactions to the environment on social media. “Part of the data for months was just reading posts: dead fish, dead fish, dead fish,” she recalled. “We were really thinking every day about the Gulf of Mexico and the waters that surround us, about those risks, and the risks to our coastal economy.”

O’Leary wanted people to pay attention to her paper and raise their environmental awareness. But she couldn’t come up with any solutions. However, attending concerts at USF’s School of Music inspired and gladdened her. She reached out to its director of bands, Matthew McCutchen. “I’m studying climate change and what’s going down at the coral reefs,” he remembered her saying. “And I’ve got all this data from my paper and I’d like to know if there’s any way that we can turn it into music. So people can know about my paper.”

Indeed there was. Composition professor Paul Reller worked with students to map pitch, rhythm and duration to the data. It came alive, O’Leary said, in ways it simply couldn’t be done on a spreadsheet.

“My students were really excited to start thinking about how students from other majors, such as the music students, heard patterns that they did not normally hear in some of the repetitions,” she said. In this case, she said, the patterns revealed the economic impact of pollution on coastal Florida communities.

With music, she added, “you can start to sense with different parts of your mind and your body that there are patterns happening and that they’re important.” “The world is going to see more and more of these ‘wicked problems’, the ones that take multiple people with different types of training and background to solve.”

Now,a group of professors and students are working to bring together music and the environment in related projects, such as an augmented (增强的) reality experience based on this composition. The group wants to spread awareness about the algae blooms, data literacy (数据认知) and environmental protection.

9 . Putting down the book I was reading, I turned to my mum. “Next year, when I go to high school…,” I started, thinking of all the novels I’d soon finish. But before I could finish my sentence, Mum ________ my words. “There will be no high school,” she said. “We don’t have ________ for uniforms or school shoes or books.”

My family were very poor and the kids all ________ school, including me. Years later, I met George and got married. Life went on,________ the desire to study never left me. “When we retire, I want to go to university,” I told George. I wanted to ________ to myself that I could do it.

In 2015, we ________ and I seized my chance. At the age of 66, I was ________ to a program with the University of the Sunshine Coast which helped ________ students prepare for university.

Walking onto campus that first day in February 2017, it was clear I was the ________ student there. My biggest challenge wasn’t the course work; it was the ________.

Before ________ my first paper, I turned to two girls next to me. “How do I send this in?” I asked. They kindly showed me, but as I clicked “send” I was ________ all that work had disappeared into the black hole of cyberspace never to be seen again.

I loved campus life and ________ all my subjects. When I was invited to ________, I cried. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. My family all came to my graduation ceremony in April 2023 and sat in the front row.

If you’re thinking of getting a ________, just do it. I have three great grandchildren now and if I can get a degree aged 73, so can you.

10 . LEGO is to begin selling braille (盲文) bricks to help blind and partially sighted children learn to read the touch-based alphabet (全部字母).

After the first announcement of its braille bricks in 2019, LEGO has announced that shoppers would be able to buy the accessible kit for the first time. Up until now, the LEGO Foundation has given out the kits free of charge, as part of a pilot program, to organizations specializing in the education of children with vision impairment (障碍).

While some view braille as old-fashioned, given modern technology that can turn written text into spoken word, blind adults say they like to read with their fingers while listening to other things.

The European Blind Union says knowledge of braille leads to improved spelling, reading and writing, contributing to higher levels of education and better employment opportunities for those who are vision impaired.

Dave Williams, who works for the Royal National Institute of Blind People, which acts for blind and partially sighted people, said, “Who would want a greeting card read to you? And there are things like board games.” And he added learning braille with LEGO helped give those who could not read print independence.

Lisa Taylor, mum to seven-year-old Olivia, said, “Olivia first discovered LEGO braille bricks at school and they had such a big impact on her curiosity about braille. Before then, she found it hard to get started with the symbols but now she’s improving all the time.”