1 . Last weekend was terrible for awards ceremonies. The BAFTAS,defined by a painful monologue（独角戏）from Joanna Lumley, was watched by 500,000 fewer people than last year. Meanwhile,the number of 18﹣to 49-year-olds watching the Grammys has reached an all-time low.

Don't expect the Oscars to fare any better；they have lost millions of viewers since 2014. Add to the fact that comparatively few people have watched most of the nominated films and you have got a ratings time bomb.

Viewers are deserting awards shows in groups and something needs to be done. But what？Reorganize them to celebrate really popular work？That's what the Oscars put forward last year when it suggested a best popular film category﹣and it was swiftly booed（喝倒彩）out of town.

Another option would be to shorten the length of the ceremonies, but this won't work either. The Oscars recently announced plans to hide several categories in ad breaks,and the anger in some quarters（the cinematographers, makeup artists and editors who this year won't get their moment on the small screen）has been obvious.

What else can they do？ Fewer songs？ Shorter speeches？ An In Memoriam section that consists of the words： "People die： get over it"？

Fortunately, I have the perfect solution： don't televise awards shows. Just don't do it. Awards shows are the opposite of good television. They're too long and too boring because of regular and repeated patterns and too self﹣important. And by God, we should have learned by now not to give celebrities any more attention than they already have. It just makes them think that we want to hear them giving out half﹣baked opinions about Donald Trump and Brexit.

I'm not suggesting that the awards shows shouldn't happen. I'm just saying that the awards should be announced in the form of a press release at the end of the ceremony, followed by a handful of You Tube clips showing some nice outfits and a couple of speeches. That's how most of us consume them now anyway.

2 . Just as a hungry brain craves (渴望) food, a lonely brain craves people. A new brain study demonstrates this. After being left alone, it shows people's brains would be activated at the sight of other people. The action was in the same brain region that speeds up when a hungry person sees food.

Livia Tomova, a neuroscientist, who studies how the brain produces mental activities, and her colleagues began this study. They recruited (招募) 40 people. On one day, the participants had to fast—not eat anything at all—for 10 hours. On another day, the same people were placed in a room for 10 hours. They couldn't see anyone. No friends, no family and no social media. They weren't even allowed to check their email. After both days, Tomova and her colleagues put the people in a MRI machine. It shows activity in the brain by tracking how much blood is flowing to each region.

At the end of each day, the participants showed high activity in a brain area called the midbrain. The scientists were interested in two, small areas within it. Both areas produce dopamine, a chemical that is important in craving and rewards. The two areas activated when hungry participants saw pictures of tasty pizza or juicy hamburgers. After the volunteers had been isolated, those brain areas became active when they saw social activities they missed. It might be playing sports or chatting with friends.

The midbrain plays an important part in people's motivation to seek food or friends. In fact, it responds to food and social signals even when people aren't hungry or lonely. But hunger and loneliness increased the reactions and made people's responses specific to the thing they were missing. And the more hunger or isolation the volunteers said they were experiencing, the stronger the activity in this part of the brain. Tomova and her colleagues published their results November 23 in Nature Neuroscience.

3 . Most of our everyday plastic items end up in landfill, left to rot away for many years. But some of it blows away, spoiling the countryside and causing damage to the natural environment and harming wildlife. The problem is most severe in our oceans. Research has found a deserted island in the South Pacific is littered with the highest density (密度) of plastic waste anywhere in the world.

The study described how remote islands act as a ‘sink’ for the world’s rubbish. They become collecting points for fishing items and everyday things including toothbrushes, cigarette lighters and razors-things that we throw away. Dr Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania says “Almost every island in the world and almost every species in the ocean is now being impacted one way or another by our waste.”

This highlights the potentially deadly effect of our disposable (用后即丢弃) culture. When we throw something away, it doesn’t just disappear, it goes somewhere and because of the nature of plastic, it takes a long time to rot away and stays there causing great damage to the ocean’s ecology (生态). And worse still, plastic is broken down into tiny particles over a long period by the wind and the waves, then sea creatures at the bottom of the food chain swallow them. These creatures are eaten by the fish that we eventually consume.

The solution to this problem would be to use less plastic. Several countries now charge for using plastic carrier bags which reduces the amount used and some products now use natural and recyclable materials.

4 . An 85-year-old primary school constructed in 1935 in Shanghai has been lifted off the ground in its entirety and relocated using new technology called the “walking machine.” The project marks the first time this “walking machine” method has been used in Shanghai to relocate a historical building.

Urbanization（都市化）has continued to significantly threaten architectural heritage. In the capital Beijing, for instance, more than 1,000 acres of its historic hutongs and traditional courtyard homes were destroyed between 1990 and 2010.

In the early 2000s, cities including Nanjing and Bejjing-due to the critics’ protest about the loss of old neighborhoods-drew up long-term plans to preserve what was left of their historic sites, with protections introduced to safeguard buildings and restrict developers.

These conservation efforts have taken different forms. In Beijing, a near-ruined temple was transformed into a restaurant and gallery, while in Nanjing, a cinema from the 1930s was restored to its original form, with some additions providing it for modern use. In 2019, Shanghai welcomed Tank Shanghai, an arts center built in renovated（重修的）oil tanks.

“Relocation is not the first choice, but better than destroying,” said Lan, the Shanghai primary school’s project supervisor. “I’d rather not touch the historical buildings at all.” Building relocations he said however, are “a workable option.” “The central government is putting more emphasis on the protection of historical buildings. I’m happy to see that progress in recent years.”

Shanghai has arguably been China’s most progressive city when it comes to heritage preservation. The survival of a number of 1930s buildings and 19th-century “shikumen” （or “stone gate”） house have offered examples of how to give old buildings new life.

“We have to preserve the historical building no matter what, ” Lan said. “The relocation has challenges, but in general, it is cheaper than destroying and then rebuilding something in a new location.”

6 . On a scale of 0 to 10, I’d say my happiness ranks at about 6. I’m glad to know I’m a 6, because, as a famous management saying puts it, “You can't manage what you don’t measure.” If you want to improve an aspect of your life, you need to be able to assess progress toward your goal-and that means measuring it.

The goal of this column is to help you manage and improve your happiness. A number of people have asked me whether quantitative happiness measures are really accurate and reliable-and it’s a reasonable question. So let’s take a look behind the curtain. But not just for intellectual curiosity; as you will see, understanding the measurement of happiness can itself make you better at improving your own well-being-and avoid some critical errors.

The best method scientists have to understand with confidence how something affects something else is a randomized, controlled trial. Think of the tests currently under way to find a vaccine for COvID-19. They take a long time because the drug companies with trial vaccines are conducting experiments that randomly assign people to a treatment group they get the vaccine and a control group (they get a placebo), and then waiting to seif the drug is effective and safe by comparing the two groups after enough time has passed.

In the research on happiness, this usually isn’t possible. Want to know if people are truly happiest in Denmark, as some studies suggest, and test it with a randomized experiment? You would need to randomly take two groups out of their homes, move one group to Copenhagen, and the other to, say, Dayton, Ohio- but make sure they think it might be Copenhagen and never get the truth. Follow up a few years later to see who is happiest. Obviously, that’s ridiculous. So with randomized controlled trials largely not available to them, happiness researchers instead rely on self-reported happiness surveys, where large groups of people anonymously report their levels of life satisfaction. Then, the researchers use fairly complex statistical techniques to mimic（模拟）a controlled experiment in order to show how different aspects of people’s lives affect-or at least are associated with-their happiness.