2 . Though researchers have long known that adults build unconscious (无意识的) preferences over a lifetime of making choices between things that are essentially the same, the new finding that even babies engage in this phenomenon demonstrates that this way of justifying choice is intuitive (凭直觉的) and somehow fundamental to the human experience.

“The act of making a choice changes how we feel about our options,” said Alex Silver, a Johns Hopkins researcher. “Even infants who are really just at the start of making choices for themselves have this preference.”

The findings are published today in the journal Psychological Science. People assume they choose things that they like. But research suggests that’s sometimes backwards: we like things because we choose them. And, we dislike things that we don’t choose. “Adults make these inferences unconsciously,” said co-author Lisa Feigenson, a Johns Hopkins scientist in child development. “We justify our choice after the fact.”

This makes sense for adults in a consumer culture who must make random choices every day, between everything from toothpaste brands to styles of jeans. The question was when exactly people start doing this. So they turned to babies, who don’t get many choices so, as Feigenson puts it, are “a perfect window into the origin of this tendency.”

The team brought 10-to 20-month-old babies into the lab and gave them a choice of objects to play with; two equally bright and colorful soft blocks. They set them far apart, so the babies had to crawl to one or the other — a random choice. After the baby chose one of the toys, the researchers took it away and came back with a new option. The babies could then pick from the toy they didn’t play with the first time, or a brand new toy. Their choices showed they “dis-prefer the unchosen object.”

To continue studying the evolution of choice in babies, the lab will next look at the idea of “choice overload.” For adults, choice is good, but too many choices can be a problem, so the lab will try to determine if that is also true for babies.

3 . Honeybees rely heavily on flower patterns not just colors when searching for food, new research shows.

A team led by the University of Exeter tested bee behaviour and built bee’s-eye-view simulations (模拟装置) to work out how they see flowers.

Honeybees have low resolution vision, so they can only see a flower’s pattern clearly when they are within few centimeters. However, the new’ study shows bees can very effectively distinguish between different flowers by using a combination of colour and pattern.

In a series of tests, bees rarely ignored pattern, suggesting colour alone does not lead them to flowers. This may help to explain why some colours that are visible to bees are rarely produced by flowers in nature.

“We studied a large amount of data on plants and bee behaviour,” said Professor Natalie Hempel, from Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour. “By training and testing bees using man-made patterns of shape and colour, we found they relied flexibly on their ability to see both of these elements. Showing how insects see colour and learn colour patterns is important to understand how pollinators (传粉者) may, or may not, create evolutionary ‘pressures’ on the colours and patterns that flowers have evolved (进化). Our findings suggest that flowers don’t need to evolve too many different flower colours, because they can use patterns to vary their displays so bees can tell them apart from other flowers.”

One typical feature identified in the study is that the outside edges of flowers usually contrast strongly with the plant’s leaves while the centre of the flower does not have such a strong contrast with the leaf colour. This could help bees quickly identify colour differences and find their way to flowers.

While flowers may be beautiful to humans, Professor Hempel stressed that understanding more about bees and the threats they face meant we need to see the world “through the eyes of a bee and the mind of a bee.”

4 . Rene Campbell has devoted most of her life to shaping her figure into one completely against what society thinks a woman should look like.

“I was always very insecure about my body image, as everyone seemed to know for sure that women needed to look a certain way,” she says when reflecting on her motivation to transform herself.     1     For quite some time, she struggled with eating disorders because she was trying to keep her weight really low and appear skinny, like the women on magazine covers.     2     It was then that she became attracted by the way these seemingly confident women held themselves.

However, building her dream body—gaining over 85 pounds, going from a size 8 to 14—has had its challenges, too. “    3     When I tell them that I am a female bodybuilder, the first reaction is, ‘Muscles for women are just not attractive,’” Campbell says. Though she loves the way she now looks, she is sometimes treated with cruelty.

    4    Even though there is a huge market encouraging women to build muscles and tighten their figures, the ideal still stands for smaller waists, and thin legs, the so-called perfect figure. For women to build up strong muscles, it takes a strong heart.

“I gradually learn to ignore others’ voices and become committed to the training. It is a very big shift for me, and it has won me plenty of awards.     5     My bodybuilding journey makes me realize that I need to do things for myself.” Campbell says.

6 . In Iceland, these green houses melt into the natural landscape, a technique that first appeared with the arrival of British settlers during the 9th through 11th centuries. Unlike their previous warm and wet climate, wood was rare and slow to regenerate. Turf (草皮) became their first pick to make shelters.

Across Europe, turf bricks — widely available — were cut from local bogs (沼泽) and transported for use at higher lands. The turf was then laid over a wooden structure to form walls and a thick roof — to keep cold out from tough northern climates. Turf walls were replaced as frequently as every 20 years, and even up to 70 years.

It is difficult to find out its precise origins in the archaeological record. However, evidence of similar constructions can be found in many countries throughout the ages. Historic records suggest that up to 50 percent of Icelandic houses were partly comprised of turf until the late 19th century. As populations began to gather in cities like Reykjavik, wood buildings replaced stones and earth architecture. After fires burned up the city in 1915, concrete became the material of choice. In 1918 Iceland gained independence from Denmark, setting in motion a wave of nationalism that threatened the survival of turf houses. Advocates of modernization argued that Reykjavik paled in comparison to the grand architecture that graced the skylines of Paris, Berlin, and London. Traditional techniques were criticized as “rotten Danish wood” from a troubled era, and there was a campaign to clear them in favor of modern buildings — a move later criticized by many as destruction of cultural heritage.

A tourism boom in the latter half of the 20th century encouraged Iceland to reexamine the value of traditional architecture. Do Icelanders still live in turf houses? The quickest way to answer this question would be no. You might still see an occasional grass roof but that has everything to do with architecture and Icelanders wanting to hold on to their beloved heritage rather than any need for turf as insulation (隔热) material.

7 . When he was 7, Diebedo Francis Kere left his native village Gando at the insistence of his father so that he might learn to read and write. Gando had neither a school nor electricity nor running water. Kere returned home on holidays, and at the end of every visit, the women villagers would reveal a penny tucked in their waistbands — often their last penny — that they’d give him as a parting gift. The pennies were their way of contributing to the boy’s education.

It was a worthwhile investment: Kere is now an architect, and in 2001, he did return to Gando to build his first education building, Gando Primary School. Kere settled on a method of fortifying (加固) locally made clay bricks with concrete and created a floating, double-roof system that allows hot air to rise out of the building and cool air to come in. Colorful shutters (百叶窗) allow teachers to direct sunlight into the room depending on the hour of the day. Most significantly, the school was built by village members — who helped produce the bricks, build the walls and polish the mud floors. This not only allowed the village to build a new school in a timely and economical fashion but it also taught marketable construction techniques to untrained laborers.

For this work and other high-profile projects, Kere became the first African architect to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. “Francis Kere’s work shows us the power of materiality rooted in place. It is sustainable to the earth and its residents — in lands of extreme scarcity (缺乏),” announced Tom Pritzker, chairman of the award.

Of his work, Kere said in a statement, “It is not because you are rich that you should waste material. It is not because you are poor that you should not try to create quality.”

8 . Thirty-five years ago, with just one acre of land, a couple of seeds and a bucket of hope, one Nigerian-born scientist began his mission to defeat famine (饥荒) on his continent.

News of the drought across Africa in the early 1980s troubled Nzamujo. Equipped with a microbiology PhD and his faith, he travelled back to Africa. There, he found a continent ecologically rich, diverse and capable of producing food. He believes drought wasn’t the only reason for widespread hunger, and that sustainability had been left out.

Nzamujo began designing a “zero waste” agriculture system that would not only increase food security, but also help the environment and create jobs. In 1985, he started his sustainable farm “Songhai” in the West African country of Benin.

Nzamajo lives on the farm and constantly updates his techniques. He credits his degrees in science and engineering for Songhai’s success. But he also thanks his spiritual and cultural roots, and his father — a driving force in his life who encouraged him to pursue his studies to the highest degree and to use Songhai to share his knowledge.

Songhai has several “eco-literacy” development programs. They range from 18-month training courses for farmer-enterprisers, to shorter stays to learn techniques like weeding. People come from all over the world to study Nzamujo’s methods.

After seeing success on his first zero waste farm, he expanded throughout Benin and western Africa. Today, the Songhai model is applied across the continent, including Nigena. Uganda, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Nzamujo says they've trained more than 7.000 farmer-enterprisers and more than 30, 000 people in total since it began.

Nzamujo believes zero waste agriculture is now steadily tackling the issues he set out to defeat, hunger, unemployment and environmental declines. And he wants to see it go further.

9 . Eric Moussambani is the first swimmer from Equatorial Guinea to compete in the Olympics. He found his passion for swimming shortly after high school. At the time, he didn’t know how to swim, but he knew it was a sport he wanted to pursue.

Unfortunately, there were no standard swimming pools in his country. Eventually, he found a hotel pool where he could only swim three hours a week. When he couldn’t use the pool, he trained in rivers and the sea, with the local fishermen guiding him on how to use his legs and arms.

After about eight months of swimming, Eric gained entry into the 2000 Summer Olympics through a program designed to encourage sports development in developing countries.

In Sydney, Eric saw an Olympic-size swimming pool for the first time. It was so big that Eric said he was so frightened to compete in it. In preparing for his event, Eric trained at the same time as the US team and took the opportunity to study their techniques closely. A South African coach gave him a pair of competition trunks (泳裤) and some goggles (护目镜), which were what he needed badly.

On September 19, 2000, Eric stepped out for the men’s 100m freestyle competition. With his two fellow competitors stopped from taking part for making false starts, Eric suddenly found himself racing on his own. “I swam the first 50m really well,” said Eric after the competition. “I focused all my energy on telling myself to keep going.” After turning for the second length, however, Eric began to pay for spending so much energy on the first. As his legs stiffened (变僵硬), he felt he was going nowhere. “It was then that I heard the crowd shouting, encouraging me to ‘Go, go, go’. It gave me the strength to make it to the end.”

Eric finished the race with a time of 1:52.72, the slowest recorded time in Olympic history. But the audience did not care. They cheered him as if he had broken the world record. To this day, Eric is still an Olympic hero.

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