1 . Researchers say they have translated the meaning of gestures that wild chimpanzees（黑猩猩）use to communicate. They say wild chimps communicate 19 specific messages to one another with a "vocabulary" of 66 gestures. The scientists discovered this by following and filming groups of chimps in Uganda, and examining more than 5, 000 incidents of these meaningful exchanges.

Dr Catherine Hobaiter, who led the research, said that this was the only form of intentional communication to be recorded in the animal kingdom. Only humans and chimps, she said, had a system of communication where they deliberately sent a message to another group member.

"That's what's so amazing about chimp gestures, " she said. "They're the only thing that looks like human language in that respect."

Although previous research has shown that apes and monkeys can understand complex information from another animal's call, the animals do not appear to use their voices intentionally to communicate messages. This was a significant difference between calls and gestures, Dr Hobaiter said.

Chimps will check to see if they have the attention of the animal with which they wish to communicate. In one case, a mother presents her foot to her crying baby, signaling: "Climb on me." The youngster immediately jumps on to its mother's back and they travel off together. "The big message from this study is that there is another species（物种）out there that is meaningful in its communication, so that's not unique to humans, " said Dr Hobaiter.

Dr Susanne Shultz, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Manchester, said the study was praiseworthy in seeking to enrich our knowledge of the evolution of human language. But, she added, the results were "a little disappointing".

"The vagueness of the gesture meanings suggests either that the chimps have little to communicate, or we are still missing a lot of the information contained in their gestures and actions, " she said. "Moreover, the meanings seem to not go beyond what other animals convey with non-verbal communication. So, it seems the gulf remains."

2 . Art is everywhere. Any public space has been carefully designed by an artistic mind to be both functional and beautiful. Why, then, is art still so widely considered to be "the easy subject" at school, insignificant to wider society, a waste of time and effort?

Art can connect culture with commercial products in a way that not many other things can; art generates money and holds significant emotional and cultural value within communities. When people attend a concert, they are paying for music, sure, maybe even hotel rooms, meals, and transport, but they also gain an incredible experience, a unique atmosphere and a memory that will go through the rest of their lives. People don't just want material things anymore, they want to experience life-the arts are a perfect crossover（交迭）between culture and commerce.

Furthermore, the arts can bring communities together, reducing loneliness and making people feel safer. Social bonds are created among individuals when they share their arts experiences through reflection and discussion, and their expression of common values through artworks in honour of events significant to a nation's experience.

The arts clearly have a pretty positive impact on physical and psychological health. It is found that people who frequent cultural places or participate in artistic events are more likely to gain good health compared to those who do not; more engagement with the arts is linked to a higher level of people's wellbeing. The Royal Society of Public Health discovered that music and art, when used in hospitals, help to improve the conditions of patients by reducing stress, anxiety and blood pressure.

Children who are involved with the arts make greater achievements in their education: those engaged with drama have greater literary ability while others taking part in musical practice exhibit greater skills in math and languages. Kids with preference for the arts have a greater chance of finding employment in the future. Participating in the arts is essential for child development; encouraging children to express themselves in constructive ways could help to form healthy emotional responses in later life.

Vital to human life, art is celebrated and used by nations across the world for various purposes. Life without art would be boring and dead still, for art is a part of what makes us human.

3 . It’s common knowledge that the woman in Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting seems to look back at viewers, following them with her eyes no matter where they are in the room. But this common knowledge turns out wrong.

A new study finds that the woman in the painting is actually looking out at an angle of 15.4° off to the viewer’s right — well outside the range that people normally believe when they think someone is looking right at them. In other words, said the study author, Horstmann, “She’s not looking at you.”

This is ironic (讽刺), because the entire phenomenon of a person’s gaze (凝视) in a photograph or painting seeming to follow the viewer is called the “Mona Lisa effect”, which is absolutely real. If a person is illustrated or photographed looking straight ahead, even people viewing the portrait from an angle will feel they are being looked at. As long as the angle of the person’s gaze is no more than about 5 degrees off to either side, the Mona Lisa effect occurs.

Horstmann and his co-author were studying this effect for its application in the creation of artificial-intelligence avatars (虚拟头像) when Horstmann took a long look at the “Mona Lisa” and realized she wasn’t looking at him.

To make sure it wasn’t just him, the researchers gathered 24 people to view images of the “Mona Lisa” on a computer screen. They set a ruler between the viewer and the screen and asked the participants to note which number on the ruler intersected (相交) Mona Lisa’s gaze. To calculate the angle of Mona Lisa’s gaze as she looked at the viewer, they moved the ruler farther from or closer to the screen during the study. Consistently, the researchers found, participants judged that the woman in the “Mona Lisa” portrait was not looking straight at them, but slightly off to their right.

So why do people repeat the belief that her eyes seem to follow the viewer? Horstmann isn’t sure. It’s possible, he said, that people have the desire to be looked at, so they think the woman is looking straight at them. Or maybe the people who first coined the term “Mona Lisa effect” just thought it was a cool name.

7 . Randy Kraus was disabled. His left side was useless. He'd been a police officer before, and he was strong and able. Now, he felt he could do nothing.

His trouble started with Parkinson's disease, but it didn't end there. In July, 2002, the 60-year-old Kraus went into the hospital for an operation on his brain to control the shaking. But during the operation，he had a stroke. He was paralyzed. The doctor said, “You may never walk again and you might not even be able to talk.”

Kraus found that he couldn't lift a fork or take a drink by himself. Physical treatment was so painful and slow. What did he have to live for? So Kraus held the gun against his head. Feeling the cold metal on his skin, he began to consider the pain he would cause for his wife, daughters and grandchildren. He didn't pull the trigger (扳机)．

Andrew Garud, his exercise physiologist, told him, “You are where you are. The pace would be slow；the pain would be real. But as long as you are alive, you will have the ability to get better.”

After three months of working with Garud, Kraus wanted to see if he could stand.

He could. Then he took three steps, sat down and cried like a baby.

One step, as they say, led to another. Next he managed a short walk along the edge of a boxing ring (拳击台) in the health club. It was the hardest fight of Kraus's life. People at the gym cheered him on. Garud kept saying he could do more. Now, Kraus can brush his teeth，shave himself and get around the house with a walker. Only the disabled can fully understand little success.

8 . As more and more people speak the global language of English, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken around the world today will be likely to die out by the next century, according the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars from a number of organizations — UNESCO and National Geographic among them — have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect.

Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Center, Yale University, who specializes in the languages and oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following in that tradition. His recently published book, A Grammar of Thangmi and Their Culture, grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.

Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not content to simply record these voices before they disappear without record.

At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials —including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes — which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection. Now, through the two organizations that he has founded — the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project — Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, found in libraries and stores around the world, available not just to schools but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.

10 . There are around 100 tribes(部落)that live in global isolation, mostly in South America and India. The Sentinelese have lived on one of the Andaman Islands in Eastern India for 60, 000 years. They protect their island by fighting against people from outside. Their language is different from any other known language. Another Andaman tribe is the Jarawa. In the past, they were independent and fought against anybody trying to make contact with them. But in 1998, the Indian government built a road across their land, and since then, they’ve had more contact with the outside world.

Some Amazon tribes avoid contact because of unhappy memories. The Mashco-Piro left their vegetable gardens after rubber companies killed most of their tribe at the beginning of the 20th century. Those who survived became nomadic(游牧的)and started hunting animals in the forest.

The Awa live in the Amazon forests ofBrazil. Out of 350 members, 100 have no contact with the outside world. They left their villages and adopted a nomadic lifestyle around 1850 to escape attacks by Europeans. In the following years, farmers in nearby communities started cutting the trees to expand their farmland. The Awa lost most of their hunting land. The few Amazon tribes that still exist are fighting to keep their traditional way of life.

Survival, an organization that fights for the rights of tribal people, says that uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable(弱势的)humans on the planet and that’s why their environment should be unavailable to the rest of us. After years of pressure, the organization got Brazil’s government to clear non-natives from the Awa land. All non-Awa people are leaving so the tribe can get their forest back.

But some think it's impossible for tribes to stay isolated forever in a connected world. Contact will be made one day. So the question is：Whose choice should it be, ours or theirs?