2 . Catherine Garland, a physics professor, started seeing “the problem” in 2019. She’d laid out the assignment clearly during an engineering course, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.

Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they had saved their project. “Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the Documents folder?” But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Gradually, Garland came to the realization: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations, understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

Garland’s mental model is commonly known as “directory structure”, the hierarchical system (层级体系) of folders used to arrange files. What have caused the mental model to change? It is possible that many students spent their high school years storing documents in the cloud storage like OneDrive and Dropbox rather than in physical spaces. It could also have to do with the other apps they’re accustomed to. “When I want to scroll (滚屏) over to Snapchat, Twitter, they’re not in any particular order, but I know exactly where they are,” says Vogel, who is a devoted iPhone user. Some of it boils down to muscle memory.

It may also be that in an age where every user interface includes a search function, young people have never needed folders or directories. The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search are products of the early 2000s. While many of today’s professors grew up without search functions, today’s students increasingly don’t remember a world without them.

Some may blame the generational incompetence. An international study claimed that only 2 percent of Generation Z (born from 1997 onwards) had achieved the “digital native” level of computer literacy. But the issue is likely not that modern students are learning fewer digital skills, but rather that they’re learning different ones. Garland, for all her knowledge of directory structure, doesn’t understand Instagram nearly as well as her students do. “They use computers one way, and we use computers another way,” Garland emphasizes. “That’s where the problem lies.”

Helping Eighth Graders Discover a Wider World of Science

Salina Morales, an eighth-grade student, wants to work with animals when she gets older. She was excited and full of    1     at the prospect of a class visit to the American Museum of Natural History. Salina is among thousands of eighth graders in New York public schools whose science education will be given a(n)     2     by a new partnership between the schools and seven of the city’s science-oriented institutions.

The program, called Urban Advantage, aims to provide professional development and resources to teachers,     3     class and individual museum visits, and ultimately help eighth graders complete science projects required for graduation. The Museum of Natural History is leading the     4    .

“The real push behind this project is the crisis in science education, which is a(n)     5     part of a student’s learning and growth,” Ellen V. Futter, the president of the Museum of National History, said. According to a report, 43 percent of American eighth graders do not have a basic understanding of science. Among the most frequently    6     reasons are the inadequacy of teacher education programs and the lack of teaching resources. Too often, the science class is about memorizing facts and does not    7     the truly exciting process of using scientific methods and tools to observe and analyze natural phenomena. As a result, too few of our children are     8     to pursue study or careers in key scientific fields.

Over the course of three years, Urban Advantage will reach the city’s entire eighth-grade population. The City Council was     9     in developing Urban Advantage, providing more than $1 million funding. “This is a big deal for New York,” the Councilwoman said. It’s very hard to get a new initiative going, but we made it happen because everyone believed in the importance of    10     science education.

Winter may be seen as the time to fill up with food, but in fact, sunny summer months are when men eat more calories—unlike women.

The effect seems to occur because sunlight makes the skin release an appetite-stimulating hormone (激素), says Carmit Levy at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Levy and her colleagues noticed the effect in experiments in mice, in which male animals exposed to UV light (紫外线) ate more food.

To see if humans do the same, the team used data on about 3000 people who had filled in questionnaires as part of the Israeli government’s national health and nutrition survey. Between March and September, the men consumed about 17 per cent more calories per day than they did during the rest of the year, while the women’s food intake stayed about the same.

Human appetite is influenced by many complex systems, but a substance called ghrelin, a hormone produced in the body that stimulates appetite, seems to be the only hormone that directly stimulates eating. It was thought to be mainly produced by the stomach when empty. “It tells the brain to eat more,” says Caroline Gorvin at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Further investigation revealed that exposing male mice to UVB (紫外线 B 段波) radiation, which is present in sunlight, raised levels of ghrelin production by fat cells in their skin. This was blocked by the female sex hormone, which may explain why the effect wasn’t seen in the female mice or the women. Boosted ghrelin production was also seen in men’s skin samples that were exposed to UV light in the lab.

Skin hasn’t previously been thought to play a role in appetite, says Gorvin. The reason for the effect is unclear, but it may be an adaptive response to fuel greater physical activity in summer, says Levy.

7 . In the film Inside Out, 11-year-old Riley’s emotions are personified as brightly colored internal figures that drive her behaviors. The same five emotions—anger, fear, disgust (憎恶), sadness, and joy—appear in every other character’s head as well, functioning in much the same way in each individual. In Western cultures, this is the case, argues psychologist Batja Mesquita in Between Us. Emotions in such contexts, she writes, are considered “MINE,” or “Mental, INside the person, and Essentialist,” the latter defined in the book as always having the same properties.

This conception of emotion is not universal, however. Emotions elsewhere, she argues, are thought of as “OURS”—“OUtside   the   person,   Relational,   and   Situated.”   Using   this   distinction,   Mesquita   sets   about contrasting emotions in “the West,” where the individual is the top concern, with “the Rest,” where community is prioritized.

Mesquita describes amae as a central emotion in Japanese culture, where it builds interdependence by encouraging tolerance in parenting process. She describes hasham—which includes shame, embarrassment, and   social   respectability—as   a   fundamental   emotion   for   Egyptian Bedouins   (游牧人).   Such   observations provide a background for her to explore a range of issues, including childhood socialization, the nature of friendship, the role of language in shaping emotions, and cross-cultural communication in a globalized world.

Despite   Mesquita’s   emphasis   on   cross-cultural   emotions,   there   is   little   discussion   of whether   the MINE-OURS dichotomy (二分法) accurately explains global cultural variation. Other scholars have noted, for example, that hunter-gatherer societies at the same time emphasize both individual self-government and social cooperation. And in an apparent contradiction to her earlier arguments, Mesquita herself ultimately concludes that Westerners have OURS emotions.

Taken as a whole, however, the book contributes much to the discussion of the origins of emotions, presenting a remarkable collection of cross-cultural studies intermixed with personal stories about foreign residents’ struggles to reunite   diverse   emotional   and   social worlds.   In   chapter   8,   for   example,   Mesquita describes   an   incident   where   she—a   Dutch   native   living   in   the   United   States—bumped   into   the   famous American   psychologist   Hazel   Markus   at   a   conference   Markus   helped   organize.   Wishing   to   express understanding of Markus’s workload, Mesquita declared “You look a little tired.” The remark appeared to make Markus nervous and confused but was intended as an expression of sympathy—to sympathize in Dutch is to acknowledge suffering, not offer comfort as in the US.

The book’s take-home message is fundamental: There are no natural emotions, no inborn emotions, no universal emotions. Mesquita argues that emotions are “meaning making” and “a preparation for action” and that the idea of “emotions as inner states” is a Western construct. Instead, she suggests that emotions are a “dance” cocreated between people who live in a specific cultural context at a particular historical moment.

8 .

Danger in the desert

That day we were deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert. There the     1       could often be compared to Mars. Our team of four female microbiologists watched as a car full of curious men pulled up beside us. Because we were strangers in a(n)       2     place, our minds immediately jumped to ways we could protect ourselves. So,     3     , our Chilean fellow guide lifted the strong tool she’d been using to dig up plant roots. The rest of us tried to look braver than we felt.

We had come to this desert to conduct DNA studies on giant horsetails that somehow grow well in one of Earth’s driest places. We were searching for plants in the most remote locations, where they would be     4     by human activities such as mining and agriculture.

We’d been warned that the trip could be dangerous. Because we were traveling so far from fuel sources, we were told to take along a can of gas. Our destination was at the end of a(n)     5       single-lane dirt road lined with burned-out vehicles that had not successfully negotiated the steep downslope. Our sample site was near a village, and the people might not, we were told,     6     positively to us. We were instructed to report our travel plans at the nearest police station so that search parties would know where to look for us if we disappeared.

We had found the amazing plants and their bright green stocks       7       over our heads. They aroused the     8       of ancient wetland plants. The men approached as we finished collecting our samples. We waited tensely as a man     9       the car and walked toward us. To our surprise and relief, he politely invited us to visit their village—they wanted to show us a lovely church of which they were proud. That day, we learned about more than the microbiomes that help desert plants grow well. We also met a(n)       10       community who had likewise beautifully adapted to their challenging home.

10 . Touching Emoji(表情符号)

Distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic has made both physical and social connections a touch more difficult to maintain. For Stanford University graduate student Millie Salvato, being apart from her mother on the opposite coast has proved challenging.

    1     In a new study, she and her colleagues demonstrated a wearable sleeve that can simulate (模拟) human touch and convey abstract social messages sent electronically. Salvato and her team measured how 37 participants expressed social information in different situations. In each test, one person wore a pressure-sensing device on an arm, and another touched it to respond to situations involving six intended meanings: attention seeking, gratitude, happiness, calming, love and sadness

After collecting 661 touch movements-squeezes, strokes, shakes, pokes, and the like-Salvato and her colleagues mapped the location and pressure of each.     2     Finally, they programmed a wearable sleeve to simulate these movements using eight embedded disks that shake when electronically signaled.

“It doesn’t feel like an actual human hand ... but it doesn’t feel like these separate motions either,” Salvato says, as one might expect from large moving disks. “It feels nice, honestly.”     3     For comparison, a previous study from Gerling’s laboratory found participants could match situations for touches from real human hands 57 percent of the time.

In the new study, “I think it’s interesting that participants can reliably understand what touch has been delivered to them at a pretty high rate, given the scarce amount of information that they have available to them,” Gerling says.

Previous research has found that social touch is important for physical and mental health.     4