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What makes modern science uniquely powerful is its refusal to believe that it already possesses ultimate truth. The reliability of science is based not on certainty but on a complete absence of certainty. As John Stuart Mill wrote in “On Liberty” in 1859, “The beliefs which we have most warrant (依据) for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”

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Assuming alcohol does enhance the likelihood of a person interacting with someone they find attractive. Bowdring believes her findings could reveal one process supporting the rewarding yet potentially dangerous nature of alcohol - including its impact on risky behaviour.

“If you’re going to consume alcohol, I think it is worth reflecting on how can you do it in a way that’s safe and consistent with your goals,” Bowdring said. “People may benefit by recognizing that valued social motivations and intentions change when drinking, in ways that may be appealing in the short term but possibly harmful in the long term.”

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In my twenties, when I was almost constantly in a state of anxiety, I never went on holiday. I was scared of flying, scared of my boss noticing how much nicer life was without me in the office. I thought not going on holiday made me a harder worker,when actually it just made me a more tired one. Then, a boss pulled me aside to tell me that he wasn’t going to thank me for not taking my holidays. I then booked a cheap beach holiday with a friend, and was genuinely amazed to find I felt much better for it.

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4 . The term “beer goggles” is said to have been coined by male North American university students in the 1980s. Yet despite unconfirmed evidence for the phenomenon, the link between alcohol intoxication (醉酒) and physical attraction has not been systematically studied.

Prof Bowdring of the University of Pittsburgh invited 18 pairs of male friends into the laboratory to rate the attractiveness of men and women they viewed in photos and videos. On one occasion, both men were given enough cranberry juice to raise their blood alcohol concentration to about 0.08% - the legal limit for driving in England — and on the other occasion, they both received a non-alcoholic drink. After providing attractiveness ratings for the photos, they were asked to select which of these individuals they would most like to interact with in a future experiment.

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5 . The Yurok people have lived along the Klamath River, which flows from the Cascades in Oregon southwest through Northern California, for thousands of years, protecting the region and river from which they — and others — draw sustenance (生计).

But as development and pollution continue to reduce the number of fish in the river and the quantity and quality of its waters, the Yurok Tribe is legalizing (合法化) the tribe’s longstanding care by granting the Rights of Personhood to the Klamath, the first river in North America to have such rights declared.

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6 . To reduce coffee cup waste, Cup Club is already replacing millions of takeaway cups in the UK, while Recup in Germany, has performed a deposit system that simply adds a small extra fee to any coffee cup which is returned to the buyer after the cup is deposited in any registered collection point.

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7 . Nick Verel, a 53-year-old kidney transplant (肾脏移植) recipient in Ohio, should have been near the top of the list to receive a COVID-19 vaccine (疫苗). Yet like millions of others, he wasn’t having any luck scheduling an appointment. Nick would sit with computers on his lap trying for hours to book an appointment on different sites, which ended up in vain no matter how concentrated he was. “I felt hopeless,” Nick says.

Then he heard about Zwinggi, a 40-year-old mother of three who was helping to secure appointments for vulnerable individuals like Nick. So he messaged Zwinggi on Facebook: Can you help? Thirty-five minutes later, Zwinggi reported back — Nick successfully had an appointment to get the vaccine.

8 . If you are of the “no regrets” school of life, you may think that all this regret is a recipe for unhappiness. But that isn’t the case. Letting yourself be overwhelmed by regret is indeed bad for you. But going to the other extreme may be even worse. To extinguish your regrets doesn’t free you from shame or sorrow but causes you to make the same mistakes again and again. To truly get over our guilt requires that we put regret in its proper place.

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9 . In the study, the researchers sought to understand how the brain uses this following information to adjust our perception of what we initially heard. To do this, they conducted a series of experiments in which the subjects listened to isolated syllables and similarly sounding words. Their results produced three primary findings: The brain’s primary auditory cortex (听觉皮层) is sensitive to how ambiguous a speech sound is at just 50 milliseconds after the sound’s appearance. The brain “replays” previous speech sounds while interpreting the following ones, suggesting re-evaluation as the rest of the word unfolds. The brain makes commitments to its “best guess” of how to interpret the signal after about half a second.

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10 . After rescuing the lonely animal, Sam and Vera found it extremely emotional to have to release her back out into the wild to fend for herself — even though they knew it was the right thing to do. But after having such a strong bond with an animal, it was really difficult to see her go. They had put so much time, effort and energy into raising her but to see her walking in a herd of blesboks made it all worthwhile.

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