1 . Hem an Bekele is not your typical high school student．Rather than spending his free time playing video games or staring at his phone, this 14 year-old from Fairfax, Virginia was calling professors and conducting experiments, all to create a soap that could treat skin cancer, and to make it affordable for everyone who needs it．His work won him the grand prize in this year’s 3M Young Scientist’s Challenge, a competition that encourages kids to think of unique ways to solve everyday problems.

Growing up in Ethiopia, Bekele found in pity that people working outside were likely to end up getting skin cancer．Skin cancer did have cures and was treatable in most cases．However, the average price of skin cancer treatment globally was almost $40,000．Those shocking statistics really inspired him to create a more accessible solution．He started doing experiments and working on different things, and that turned into his bar of soap as a project.

A lot of his research and development started in his family’s kitchen and in his basement．But as he reached the final of the competition, he realized that he did need to do a little bit more outside of just his house．So he reached out to people at University of Virginia and people at Georgetown, and he got a lot of assistance．The number one person would be Deborah Isabelle, who helped him organize and structure his ideas during the finalist competition．Bekele said that he definitely couldn’t have done that all by himself.

Bekele’s award-winning soap is a compound based bar of soap and it’s charged with different cancer fighting chemicals．The color of the soap is a bit of a dark type of white and it has a rough surface, which could be a good exfoliant（去角质剂）．It does have a strong medicine smell and feel a bit stickier．The whole point of it is that even once you wash off the soaps, the medicinal parts will stay on your skin．It can activate the body’s immune cells to defend cancer.

Bekele won 25,000 prize money and he was going to use it to continue research．He said, “I still need a lot of resources to be able to conduct this research, so this money will definitely help me achieve it.”

4 . The rise of body neutrality You define (定义) beauty yourself. You are more than a number in measurement. Love yourself the way you are. Body positive messages like theses seem to be everywhere from social media to TV advertisements.

Body positivity’s aim to boost acceptance and appreciation of a variety of body types and sizes may explain why it has such a broad appeal. While some find the body positivity movement to be helpful, others have begun calling the movement toxic and suggesting it may be time to move on from this way of thinking.

More recently, people have voiced concerns. Some feel that the focus on loving your looks actually strengthens society’s stress on appearance over other values. Much body positivity content in advertisements may bring a stereotype (刻板印象) to viewers because it does little to challenge the hidden assumption that people are valued mainly for their appearance. Therefore, the movement still encourages people to be graceful and engage in beauty practices from head to toe. And if you fail to be body positive, it’s you that are at fault.

Many are now moving away from the body positivity movement and the pressures that come from it entirely, and instead are getting behind the body neutrality (中立) movement. Instead of focusing on physical appearance, body neutrality is a profound idea that we can exist without having to think too much about our bodies.

We are all more than just our bodies. We are complicated beings with a range of emotions and feelings about our bodies. And because body neutrality de-emphasizes (不强调) the focus on appearance, it motivates us to better acknowledge all the things our bodies are able to do. Being grateful for being able to take up your hobbies and appreciating your body for what it’s capable of doing are both examples of body neutrality.

Body neutrality can be beneficial to us. It is associated with the positive body image and mental well-being. The good news is that there are many ways you can develop body neutrality, including writing-based treatment, yoga and spending time in nature.

5 . There is no doubt that when you receive a compliment, you feel good and when you receive a criticism, you feel upset and want to refuse it.

You shouldn’t be surprised by your reaction to the negative comment, as it’s human’s survival mechanism to avoid being criticized. Clearly, we don’t want to be seen as failures, so we’d rather shut our eyes and cover our ears than have to take any criticisms from others.

Imagine you’re learning to play the guitar, and you have just done your first public performance. Your teacher says, “You did well,” which may not be as useful in helping you improve your performance skills as “Your timing needs some work.” So I believe that criticisms are better than compliments.

No one would argue that healthy nutrition is a bad thing. However, too much food or drink — no matter how healthy they may be — can make us ill. Too many compliments take us away from our original enthusiasm of enjoying an activity. We start doing the activity only for the sake of receiving self-satisfying praise. Without the expectation of praise, our enthusiasm to complete things begins to be lost.

Launched in 2010, Microsoft KIN only lasted on the market for 48 days. It was very obvious that most 15 to 30-year-olds preferred Androids, BlackBerrys and iPhones to the Microsoft KIN. If criticism and feedback from the target group had been received while the phone was in development, Microsoft KIN could have avoided the huge embarrassment and its final failure.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about constructive criticism, which I like to think of as “healthy criticism”. The right kind of criticism is honest feedback that will benefit you. Feedback forces you to reconsider your actions and the way you work. If you use constructive criticism wisely, it can guide you away from bad practices, giving you support and courage to move forward to be a better person in the future.

6 . The U. S. is in the midst of a “loneliness epidemic”. For a lot of people, the feeling is even more noticeable during the holidays. In addition to the emotional impact of chronic loneliness, it has some dramatic health consequences: increased risk of heart disease and stroke, infections, cancer, even death.

People may feel lonely when their social needs are not met by the people around them. Laetitia Mwilambwe-Tshilobo, a social cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton University, says loneliness epidemic captures two distinct groups: first, people with a low number of social connections; second, people who feel they have poor quality existing relationships.

Elisa Baek, a social neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, co-authored a study that looked at whether lonely people view the world differently than non-lonely people, specifically among college freshmen. Baek found that while non-lonely people were all similar in their neural responses, lonely people had responses that were really different — not just from the non-lonely group, but also from each other. Baek says that these idiosyncrasies (特性) in how lonely participants process the world, “may pose challenges in how these people are able to achieve social connection and feel connected with others.”

To study these changes to the brain, Baek’s team collected fMRI data — a measure of blood flow changes in the brain — while first-year college students watched short videos to measure how similarly participants’ brains responded to the videos. The videos ranged from dramatic and comedic clips to instructional demonstrations in order to reproduce experiences participants might have in daily life. She says it’s the closest they could get to study people’s brain activity — and how they process the world — while they were going about their lives.

Mwilambwe-Tshilobo, who is not involved in the study, says the research accurately highlights how individual differences affect people in experiencing loneliness. “Trying to connect more deeply with one or two or three other people may be more important than to try to get to know everybody and being on good terms with everybody. It doesn’t have to be someone who is like-minded. It’s more like: How can we get on the same page with people who we might not start off on the same page with, but that might form deeper connections afterwards?” she adds.

7 . Major Sports Leagues in the US

NFL

Formed in 1920, the National Football League has a religious following in the US and around the world. It’s one of the most profitable leagues in the whole world. The NFL consists of 32 teams, which are sub-divided into NFC and AFC, which compete against each other every year to win the Super Bowl, the halftime show of which features major hit musicians.

NBA

Initially formed in 1946 as the BAA (Basketball Association of America), it merged (合并) with National Basketball League in 1949 and changed its name to NBA. The National Basketball Association might not be the biggest sports league financially, but it has a larger international following than other leagues. The keyword “NBA” was among the most googled keywords in 2021, which indicates how popular it is in the world.

MLB

Baseball is considered to be the national pastime activity of the US and the Major League Baseball is its highest level in the country. The MLB might not be popular as NFL in other parts of the world, but international supporters still make a large portion of the total fanbase. Formed in 1903, the MLB is the oldest US sports league and now has 30 teams, which was a merger between the National League and the American League.

NHL

Founded in 1917, the National Hockey League is the second-oldest sports league in the US and Canada and consists of a total of 32 teams. Three of the best performing teams from each division make it to the playoffs plus two wild card teams. All teams compete to win the prestigious Stanley Cup. Most of NHL’s revenue comes from TV and gate receipts with hockey-crazed Canadians being the primary market.

8 . A study published Tuesday in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that words expressing angry feelings sound alike in several unrelated languages. They’re less likely than other words to include the sounds L, R, W or Y. And more friendly versions of such words often have these sounds added. The finding suggests that certain rules may link the world’s languages, no matter how different they are.

Ryan McKay, co-author of the paper, happened to discover that some of the English curses (诅咒语) seem to have something in common; They’re often short and include the sounds B, P, T or K. Then Dr. McKay teamed up with his colleague Shiri Lev-Ari to learn whether these rules went beyond English.

During the experiment, they asked fluent speakers of Arabic, Korean, German and Spanish to list the worst words they could think of. Once they’d made a list of each language’s most commonly used curses, the researchers compared these with neutral (中性的) words from the same language. To their surprise, the rules still apply.

Next, the scientists asked the same people to listen to pairs of invented words, such as “yog” and “tsog” and guess which word in each pair was a curse. The subjects were more likely to guess that words without L, R. W and Y, such as “tsog”, were curses. Finally, the researchers looked through the dictionary for English curses and their cleaned-up versions. Once again, the cleaned-up versions included more of the sounds L, R, W and Y.

“Most 20th-century language scientists held that any word could have any meaning,” said Dr. McKay. “With curses, though, the sounds themselves seem to carry meaning. This can shape and change our understanding of how languages are formed.”

“It is the first time for researchers to study curses across languages and the finding is very interesting,” said Benjamin Bergen, a language scientist at the University of California, who was not involved in the study. “But it is just another case of what’s called sound symbolism in the language study: A word sounds like what it means.”

9 . The first wave of concerns over artificial intelligence(AI)in 2023 appeared soon after New Year’s Day when classrooms reopened and schools from Seattle to Paris started blocking ChatGPT, a powerful software based on AI large language models, because teenagers were using it to do their homework.

The AI large language models behind such products as ChatGPT work by repeatedly guessing the next word in a sentence after having “learned” the rules from a huge amount of/human-written works. Although they often get facts wrong, their answers appear so natural that Keven, their inventors begin to worry about their possible use for spreading false information.

People became more worried when various AI products started to create not just texts but novel images, music and human voices, which threatened the livelihoods of anyone who writes, draws or sings for a living. It led to strikes by Hollywood writers and actors and legal challenges from artists and bestselling authors. Some of the most respected scientists even warned that the technology’s unchecked progress was possibly threatening human existence. “In the longer term, they might manage our attention,” pioneering AI scientist Fei Fei Lisaid. “They would tell us which video to watch, which book to read or whose communication to respond as AI technology’s abilities improve rapidly. They could be a very good assistant, but also with really big risks.”

Li hoped that 2023 is going to be a year for people to think about what Al is, how to use it and what the effects are — all the good, the bad and the ugly.

“It’s easy to forget that they are not the first wave of AI products. Computer vision techniques developed by Li and other scientists have helped sort through a huge database of photos to recognize objects and individual faces and guide self-driving cars. Speech recognition advances have made voice assistants like Siri and Alexa a normal thing in many people’s lives,” said Tom Gruber, co-founder of Siri Inc.

10 . For most of December, Adele Adkins had the top-selling album in Australia, followed by Ed Sheeran, and then there was a collection of songs that took everyone by surprise.

Songs Of Disappearance is a collection of calls from endangered Australian birds. Last month, it briefly reached No.3 on the country’s top 50 albums chart (排行榜) — ahead of Taylor Swift.

Anthony Albrecht, a PhD student at Charles Darwin University, produced the album with Professor Stephen Garnett. “I knew it was a crazy thing to suggest. But Stephen’s a little bit crazy like me and he let me do it,” Albrecht said.

Songs Of Disappearance was published with a university report which found that 1 in 6 Australian bird species are now threatened. The album records 53 of those species.

“Some sing what you might think of as bird songs, but not all of them,” said SeanDooley, who represents the conservation organization Bird life Australia. “Songs from the golden bowerbird sound like a death cry from some sci-fi series. And the love songs from Christmas Island frigate bird, which has a piece of skin hanging under its mouth that caninflate (膨胀) like a huge red balloon, sound as bizarre as its unusual looks.”

There’s also the Christmas Island pigeon. When people hear that pigeon, they might think that it’s a human making silly noises, Dooley added.

The Charles Darwin University and Bird life Australia report does document successes in protecting endangered birds, the hope being that the album will protect more species.

“The increased awareness can make a difference,” Dooley said. “When we have a community on board, that brings pressure to the government to do the right thing. We know that these conservation actions do work.”