1 . Saving Mr. Banks (2013) ★★★

BBC One, 10:30 p.m.

John Lee Hancock’s film unapologetically tells the Disney side of the twisted making of Mary Poppins. It presents Walt Disney’s (by Tom Hanks) struggle with PL Travers (by Emma Thompson), who wrote the original books, as a kind of Norman Conquest of charm over a brilliant but unhappy writer. The sugar-to-medicine rate is 15 parts to one, but there’s nothing wrong with true sweetness.

The Dark Mirror (1946, b/w) ★ ★ ★

BBC Two, 8:05 p. m.

Olivia de Havilland, one of the last surviving stars of golden-age Hollywood cinema, died last month, so this film makes for a sad rewatch. It’s an old-fashioned thriller in which psychiatrist (精神病医生) Lew Ayres has to decide which identical twin ( both played by de Havilland) has committed a murder. The entire story is somewhat unrealistic but de Havilland fully shows her acting skills. Robert Siodmak directs.

Jonathan Edwards: One Giant Leap ★ ★ ★ ★

BBC Two, 8:30 p.m.

Twenty-five years ago, medals for British athletes were very rare indeed. The 1995 World Athletics Championships brought just one gold for the UK, for triple-jumper Jonathan Edwards, whose world record leap (跳) of 18. 29 m stood for two decades. This film tells a story of pressure, faith and positive thinking.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) ★ ★ ★ ★

ITV4, 9:55 p.m.

In the famous college experiment of the title, a psychology professor set up a make-believe prison and randomly assigned students to be either prisoners or guards to study the effects of unearned authority. The frightening results are captured (捕获) in Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s recreation. Ezra Miller plays a prisoner abused by the guards, while Billy Crudup is excellent as the unknowable professor.

5 . If our kids don’t fall, they don’t learn to get up. I still remember the day in high school that my mom forgot to pick me up from school. I’m the oldest of four children, and no doubt she’d had a long day with the other kids and it’d slipped her mind. After waiting at school for an hour, I walked the three miles home, and when I got to my house, I shut our front door with anger, stormed into the kitchen and screamed in my mom’s face that she’d forgotten me.

Later that night, my dad told me I no longer had a ride to school the next day. I figured my mom would still take me, but when the morning came, she refused. It was midterm, and as a straight-A student ready to start college applications, being late wasn’t an option (选择). In my mind, missing these tests would have been the end of my academic career. I begged my mom. I told her she was ruining my future and everything I’d worked for. But she held her ground, and that day, I walked to school. And I missed my tests.

My mom didn’t rescue me from failure. She let me suffer from it. She let me figure it out. She let me learn. Now, as a mom myself, I’ve realized that I want my kids to experience failure because failure is how we grow, learn and think outside of ourselves. It’s how we self-educate to learn what’s right and respectable, and what’s not. It’s how we become responsible and enthusiastic. Falling down makes us better because we learn how to get up.

6 . Research has shown that disrupting one's natural “morning lark” (早起鸟) or “night owl” (夜猫子) tendency can result in immoral behavior at work.

Who doesn't love a flexible work schedule? Being able to make your own hours, come in when you're ready and leave when you're done, step out to attend a child's presentation at school, have a midday appointment, or even squeeze in a quick workout or nap as a guaranteed pick-me-up — flexibility greatly improves one's quality of life.

The benefits don't stop there, however. Research has shown that having flexible work hours actually makes one a better person. How so? It's been found that disrupted sleep patterns —in the form of having to act outside of your normal inclination to be a morning “lark” or a night “owl” — can result in strange, unethical, and out-of-line behavior.

Science journalist Linda Geddes said, “If you don't get enough sleep, research suggests you are more likely to have unethical behavior, such as being mean, bullying your fellow employees or falsifying receipts. But it's not just owls: the larks tend to behave more unethically in the evening, and owls in the morning. So ideally, you want to introduce flexible working."

Employers would be wise to allow their employees to start whenever they feel ready — whether it's at the crack of dawn or at 11 a.m., and to allow breaks or pauses in the day as needed — because that would mean better productivity, performance, and behavior.

This shift is already happening, with the New York Times recently reporting that 27 percent of US employers now offer the flexibility to work outside normal business hours, up from 22 percent in 2014; and 68 percent allow telecommuting as needed (up from 54 percent in 2014). With the national unemployment rate at its lowest in 50 years, employers are having to become more competitive in what they offer workers, and flex-hours seem like a no-brainer, highly beneficial to all.

7 . Covid-19 has brought a great deal of trouble for all of us since March 2020. During this time, mobile phones have been the solution for the boredom and restlessness caused from staying indoors. The most downloaded apps on play store 2020 are;

TikTok

TikTok was the most downloaded app. With over 111.9 million downloads, TikTok has seen a huge growth in 2020, twice more than what it got in 2019. 20% of its total downloads were from India and around 9. 3% of the total downloads were in the US.

Zoom

Zoom was the second most installed app in the overall downloads category. With nearly 94. 6 million installs, Zoom is the most used app for online meetings and virtual classrooms. 17% of its downloads were in the US and India. Offices and educational institutes were shut down and to continue working and studying from home, people relied heavily on Zoom for video conferencing and calling.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp ranked third in overall downloads with more than 100 million downloads. It is one of the most popular and widely used chat applications; WhatsApp also supports communication between international phone networks.

Facebook

It ranked fourth in the overall downloaded list. Facebook is the world’s most popular social networking application. Facebook builds technologies that give people the power to connect with friends and family, find communities and grow businesses.

8 . English Language Courses at ELC Los Angeles

At the English Language Center (ELC) Los Angeles you will find a variety of English courses and programs that meet the highest academic standards of any English language school in the United States. Through its 40 years of teaching students at all levels from all over the world, ELC has developed teaching and training techniques and programs that really work for everyone.

ENGLISH COURSES OFFERED AT ELC LOS ANGELES

● GENERAL ENGLISH COURSES

Intensive English Course

Semi-intensive Course

Individual Intensive Course

● TEST PREPARATION COURSES

Cambridge Preparation Course

TOEFL Preparation Course

● BUSINESS ENGLISH COURSE

Individual Executive Business English Course

ENGLISH CLASSES LOS ANGELES FACT FILE

● Length of lesson: 50 minutes

● Number of levels: 12

● Average number of students per class: 8-9

Maximum number of students per class: 10 (14 during July and August only)

ADDITIONAL SERVICES AT ELC LOS ANGELES

The ELC Los Angeles staff is eager to assist international students in achieving their long-term learning goals. ELC offers the following support services to ensure each student's time at ELC is enjoyable, effective and worry-free:

● Student Visa

ELC has been approved by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)to issue the SEVIS Form I-20. Students enrolling in a minimum 24-lesson-per-week course are eligible (有资格的) to receive an I-20 form in order to apply for an F-1 student visa in their country.

● English Level Evaluation with Multi-level- Placement

Each student benefits from our English level evaluation with multi-level placement. Our method means students usually have different teachers for different levels and ensures that students study English in the learning environment that is best for them.

● University Admission Services

ELC is pleased to offer free counseling and university placement services to all ELC students interested in continuing their education at an American college or university in California and around the United States.

9 . Just like humans, birds too rely on sound to communicate. However, they do not have a “language” in the true sense of the word and instead produce a variety of sounds to convey different emotions.

Often, birds recognize their mates(or young) by sound rather than sight. Hungry young birds use begging calls to let their mothers know it is feeding time. Alarm calls, flight calls and warning calls are other sounds made frequently by adults.

A new study shows that songbirds rehearse(排演) their songs even in their sleep. The activity in the brain of the birds when asleep is similar to the brain activity when the birds were awake and singing. The team used tiny recording devices to measure the activity of individual brain cells in four songbirds both when they were singing and when they were asleep.

Apparently the bird stores a song after hearing it, and then rehearses it later in its sleep. Scientists now believe the birds “dream of songs and tunes” to help them master the fine art of singing and that sleep plays a key role in the learning process!

Many songbirds learn to sing listening to adult birds of the same species. However, if separated from the adults, the young birds develop sounds which are hard to understand instead of normal song patterns. Researchers carried out an experiment in which a male bullfinch (灰雀) was raised by a female canary(金丝雀). The bullfinch soon learned the canary’s song and when it was later mated to a female bullfinch, Mr.Bullfinch taught his children the canary’s songs.

Last year, a British survey of London’s songbirds showed that the city’s birds are losing their tunes. Birds could hardly hear one another, over the traffic noise; as a result, instead of copying the sweet notes of the adults, young birds were copying the sounds they heard most often, namely car horns and beeping cellphones!

10 . Tracking wildlife is a tough job. Take the case of a one-eared leopard named Pavarotti.

Kasim Rafiq, a wildlife biologist at Liverpool John Moores University. “So I used to get up at the crack of dawn, follow his tracks and try and find him. So one day, I went out, and I was looking for him. And his tracks took me off road through this woodland area...and...”

Before he knew it, the wheel of his Land Rover was stuck in a deep hole. He wasted several hours getting it out. And then, on the way back to camp, he came across some local tour guides and their safari (观赏野兽的旅行) guests, who’d had way better luck spotting Pavarotti. “Basically, they laughed and they talked to me that they’d seen him that morning.”

Rafiq then realized that tourist wildlife sightings might be an untapped source of information about wild animals.

So he and his team worked with a safari lodge in Botswana to analyze 25,000 tourist photographs of wildlife. They compared those data to the estimates they made with traditional wildlife biology methods.

It turned out that the estimates from tourists’ photos were just as good as those gleaned (四处搜集) from traditional methods. And the tourists were actually the only ones to see elusive (难以捉摸的) leopards — the researchers would have missed the cats without the citizen science data. The results are in the journal Current Biology.

The idea is not to put wildlife researchers out of a job. “The reality is there are so many interesting things we still have to find out about these large carnivores (食肉动物) and so many conservation (保护) projects that need to be carried out that we don’t have the time or resources to do them all.” And tourist photos might help make sure that all the local carnivores are spotted.

Thanks for listening for Scientific American-60-Second Science. I’m Christopher Intagliata.