4 . My friend was recently alarmed when she was told that her two-year-old must wear a mask in preschool. Her little girl already struggles to make herself understood, and her mother worries that the mask will make it harder for her daughter to be understood and that she will have trouble telling what her masked peers and teachers are saying.

Now that the face mask has become the essential accoutrement of our lives, the COVID pandemic has laid bare our fundamental need to see whole faces. Babies and young children, who must learn the meaning of the communicative signals normally available in their social partners’ faces, could be puzzled by those only partially visible(可见的) faces.

Faces are a complex and rich source of social, emotional and linguistic signals. Babies and young children see and hear communicative signals and learn to attach meanings to them through their everyday interactions with their caregivers and social partners. Take, for example, a baby in a day care center where only masked people can be heard and seen talking. However, to understand what they are saying, that baby must look at the mouth, which is essential for figuring out whether a particular person’s face goes with a particular voice. So, seeing partially visible faces robs them of sufficient linguistic signals that are essential for communication.

The visible articulations(发声)that babies normally see when others are talking play a key role in their acquisition of communication skills. This suggests that masks probably hinder babies’ acquisition of speech and language.

Of course, the news is not all bad. Babies spend much of their time at home with their unmasked caregivers. It is only in day care or when out and about with their parents that they don’t see whole talking faces. Therefore, it may only be those situations that may have long-term negative consequences for babies.

5 . You’d be forgiven for thinking that running after young children each day would leave parents in the best shape of their lives. But a study has found that the mothers and fathers of young children are more unhealthy than their childless peers(同龄人).

Mothers with young children are heavier and eat more calories and fatty foods, and consume more sugary drinks than childless women, scientists said. And both sexes are less active than those in their age group without children.

Parents often choose quick, easily prepared foods that are high in fat and calories(卡路里), and by choosing these foods they may in turn serve them to their children, forming a cycle of unhealthy diet.

Dr.Berge, one of the study authors, said: “This isn’t a study about blame, this is about finding out a very high-risk time period for parents that doctors should be aware of, so they can offer solutions.”

According to the study, mothers ate more fatty foods and drank about seven sugary drinks weekly, equal to about four childless women. They also had an average of 2,360 calories daily, 368 calories more than women without children. With that many calories, women that age would need to be active to avoid gaining weight.

Fathers ate about the same amount of daily calories as childless men and both had an average body-mass index(指数), but fathers got less physical activity—about five hours weekly, compared to almost seven hours among childless men.

The study has several limitations—there’s no data on how many women recently had babies. There’s also no information on the number of single parents, who likely face diet and exercise challenges. Sarah Krieger, an American dietician(营养师) who works with new mothers said some of the mothers may have had postpartum(产后的)depression and suffered unpleasant feelings, which might affect their eating and exercise habits.

6 . Though the Tokyo Olympic Games drew to a close on August 8, 2021, the public is still watching the athletes. Their outfits and the technologies that helped them in the competition have aroused people’s interest.

Su Bingtian, the first Chinese sprinter to reach an Olympic 100m final, has ascribed his breakthrough to scientific training. “It takes Su 47 steps to run 100 meters. Each step counts,” Liang Dong, a member of Su’s training team, told Shenzhen Evening News. “Randy Huntington, Su’s American coach and a biomechanics expert in track and field, has collected a lot of data on outstanding sprinters and built a database. He put in all of Su’s data and got a near-optimal model. When Su is training, the team uses high-speed cameras to record his training and compares it with the model to find out his weaknesses.”

Technology has also brought a new boost to table tennis. On July 27, the semifinal match between China’s Sun Yingsha and Japan’s Mima Ito was in full swing at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. You wouldn’t have guessed that besides players, referees and audiences, a powerful AI platform was monitoring the match.

Every serve, swing and movement of Mima Ito was captured by this AI cloud platform deployed in Tokyo. At an average speed of 100 Mbps, the data was transmitted to the technical team of the Zhejiang University Table Tennis Intelligent Big Data Analysis Platform,2,442 kilometers away from the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, according to The Paper.

The Tokyo Olympic Games have seen not only scientific support in training, but many high-end technologies in athletes’ devices. For example, the Kenya women’s volleyball team’s GPS devices fed data on each player’s strength, heart rate and so on to coaches, who used the information to prevent injury and personalize training plans for each individual, South China Morning Post reported.

7 . For years, planet-hunters have been searching for a planet other than Earth that can support life. They may have found one.

The planet is the sixth found orbiting a star called Gliese 581. Steven Vogt, one of the scientists involved, expects the new planet to have water. On Earth, when we find water, we find life.     1    

A planet that can support life has to be just the right size for its system and just the right distance from its star. Some planets orbit so close to their stars that they’re much too hot for liquid water—or for life as we know it.     2    

But a right-sized planet that's neither too close nor too far might be just right for water. Gliese 581 is probably just right. It is about three times as huge as Earth.     3     Because it’s so close, one side of it always faces its star, and the other side is always dark.

The new planet is 20 light years away, which is as far as 250 million trips to the Moon and back.     4     Only light can go that fast. So even at the fastest speed we could manage, it would take a spaceship from Earth more than 200 years to go that far.     5     But that doesn’t mean we can’t study it. Thanks to powerful new telescopes and new techniques for searching the skies, scientists can learn a lot about distant planets without even leaving Earth.

Gliese 581 is an exciting discovery—and astronomers are likely to find more soon, thanks to new, powerful telescopes specifically designed to look for planets.

8 . Staying with family members or receiving professional care? Seniors in Harbin have a new choice to enrich their life in retirement(退休), as harbin.dbw.cn reported.

The seniors can take a bus to a day-care nursing home every day between 8 am and 5 pm, just like others go to work, and go back home to be with their families in the evening.

In the nursing home, they will receive professional care, have lunch, take part in activities such as calligraphy(书法) and singing, and take university courses designed for them.

According to a research, there were 1.75 million seniors by the end of 2015. Less than 10 percent choose to stay in the nursing home while most live at home. Loneliness and shortage of care are the major problems facing the stay-at-home seniors.

"After my mother passed away, I struggled to take good care of my father," said Zhou, an office worker.

Those who have retired parents agree that their parents spend a boring and lonely day at home, watching TV all day and filling their stomach with food. The situation becomes worse in winter when elders are unable to go out due to the cold.

However, the cost of such nursing homes is different from person to person but stands at around 2,000 yuan ($290). Another problem is the shortage of facilities (设施). Even if two seniors share a room in the nursing home, the city still lacks(缺少) at least 100,000 such rooms.

9 . Scientists and spiritual teachers alike agree that the simple act of smiling can transform you and the world around you. It can make us appear more attractive to others.     1     So before you read on, slap a nice, genuine smile on that face of yours.

The act of smiling activates neural messaging that benefits your health and happiness. For starters, smiling activates the release of neuropeptides (神经肽) that work toward fighting off stress. The feel-good neurotransmitters (神经介质) are all released when a smile flashes across your face as well.     2    

You’re actually better-looking when you smile. A study published in the journal Neuropsychologia reported that seeing an attractive, smiling face activates the region in your brain that processes sensory rewards.     3     It also explains the 2011 findings by researchers at the Face Research Laboratory. They found that both men and women were more attracted to images of people who made eye contact and smiled than those who did not.

Did you know that your smile is actually contagious (传染性的)? In a Swedish study, subjects were shown pictures of several emotions: joy, anger and surprise. When the picture of someone smiling was presented, the researchers asked the subjects to frown. Instead, they found that the facial expressions went directly to what subjects saw.    5     If they don’t, they’re making a conscious effort not to.

10 . The founder of Earth Day was Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin. During the late 1960s, Americans witnessed the uninvited side effects of high productivity. Factories and power plants were sending out smoke and industrial waste while Americans were using petrol for their massive(大量的) cars, making air pollution almost synonymous with the nation’s development.

What moved Senator Nelson to action was the 1969 massive oil spill in California, the largest in the United States at that time. The spill proved to be an environmental nightmare as it had a significant effect on marine life, killing about 3,500 sea birds, as well as marine animals such as dolphins, elephant seals and sea lions, fueling public anger. Inspired by the student antiwar movement at that period of time, Nelson found it an appropriate time to direct the energy of the students towards a fight for environmental protection. He decided that it was time to educate the Americans on the need to protect the environment. Thus Earth Day was born in 1970, and public environmental awareness took centre stage.

On 22^nd April 1970, millions of Americans took to the street and thousands of students marched to appeal for a healthy, sustainable environment. There was now a new synergy(协同作用) among different groups which had previously been fighting their causes related to the environment. Their fight for environmental conservation became so overwhelming that affected businesses were forced to follow environmental standards if they wanted to continue their operations.

As it became more apparent that environmental issues were not just localized ones but a global concern, the year 1990 saw Earth Day reach out to many more around the world. Earth Day 1990 helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, bringing together many nations for a united effort towards protecting the environment.