1 . If you ask most people whether they like having more choices, the answer will be yes. But when it comes to sales, a large selection can actually hurt the sellers’ income.

Although people like choice, they become overwhelmed (不知所措) by it. Hick’s Law perfectly proves this. It states that there is a measurable increase in how long it takes somebody to make a decision as the number of options that are available goes up.

That delay in decision-making can prove damaging on an online shopping site because it tends to result in users giving up. They are paralyzed by the decision, and so, they decide to go away and think about it. That will significantly reduce the number of people who eventually make a purchase.

I know it can be hard to convince sellers to limit the variety of products or complex options they offer on their sites, but there is some strong evidence to support your cause. Researchers in California ran an experiment in a local grocery store. They set up a stall (货摊) in the store selling jam. Some days the stall would sell six flavors of jams, while on other days it offered 24 varieties. The results were significant. On days when they sold 24 varieties, they saw a mere four percent sales rate. However, when they offered only six choices, that figure rose to a surprising 31 percent. Limiting choice works.

That experiment perfectly shows both the problem and the solution. Despite the evidence, you will not always be able to persuade sellers to reduce choice. The next best option is to hide some of those choices.

Unlike a stall in a grocery store, we have more flexibility online regarding how products are displayed. We can highlight some options and hide others. For example, you could display the best-selling categories of products, while hiding other groupings under something like a “more” option. If you are unable to remove options, you can at least focus clients on the most popular choices.

2 . The San Diego County Water Authority has an unusual plan to use the city’s scenic San Vicente Reservoir (水库) to store solar power so it’s available after sunset. The project could help unlock America’s clean energy future.

Perhaps ten years from now, if all goes smoothly, large underground pipes will connect this lake to a new reservoir, a much smaller one, built in a nearby valley about 1100 feet higher. When the sun is high in the sky, California’s abundant solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir. It’s a way to store the electricity. When the sun goes down and solar power disappears, operators would open a valve (阀门) and the force of 8 million tons of water, falling back downhill through those same pipes, would drive machines capable of producing 500 megawatts of electricity for up to eight hours. That’s enough to power 130, 000 typical homes.

“It’s a water battery!” says Neena Kuzmich, Deputy Director of Engineering for the water authority. She says energy storage facilities like these will be increasingly important as California starts to rely more on energy from wind and solar, which produce electricity on their own schedules, without considering the demands of consumers.

Californians learned this during a heat wave this past summer. “Everybody in the state of California got a text message at 5:30 in the evening to turn off their appliances,” Kuzmich says. The sun was going down, solar generation was disappearing, and the remaining power plants, many of them burning gas, couldn’t keep up with demand. The reminder worked:People stopped using so much power, and the grid (电网) survived.

Yet earlier on that same day, there was so much solar power available that the grid couldn’t take it all. Grid operators turned away more than 2000 megawatt hours of electricity that solar generators could have delivered, enough to power a small city. That electricity was wasted. There was no way to store it for later, when operators desperately needed it.

4 . 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.

5 . Open-air jazz, locally-grown vegetables, Focaccia bread, goat cheese, and Narcan training all competed against a rainstorm last Tuesday at Westside Farmers Market’s annual College Night.

And the vendors (商贩) held out pretty well. Even as the raindrops intensified, folks kept exploring the tables stationed in the parking lot of St. Monica Church. Among the crowd were a number of college students, mostly from the University of Rochester, likely brought in by the College Night awards being offered — a five-dollar token (购物券), a handbag, and a prize raffle entry, all free of charge.

Now in its 15th year, Westside volunteer Jackie Farrell said the market partners merely with local farms, businesses, and community groups to populate its tables. “Our mission really is to serve the people in the community, getting them health and nutrition information, and connecting them to the farmers who grow the produce,” Farrell said, “Everything has to be local. It’s a producer-only market, so you have to grow or produce whatever you’re going to sell here.” Those producers had diverse offerings. Vegetables, of course, were abundant but sellers also pushed cheeses, spreads, bread, prepared pasta dishes, and much more.

The community groups offering information were diverse too. Recovery All Ways, a local nonprofit with a stated “mission to support anyone affected by substance use disorder” handed out Narcan and trained people in its use. Their station was next to a Moms Demand Action tent, where staffers provided information on physical safety. SNAP-Ed nutrition and benefits educators also ran a table.

The activities of the stations were scored by live music. The University’s Midnight Ramblers performed, and a local jazz band played away as the rain showers started rolling in.

Farrell hoped that the College Night promotion would help make students more comfortable crossing the bridge into the Rochester community. “We love college students, and we keep encouraging them that all they have to do is go across the bridge.”

6 . 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.”

8 . There have been many studies that show being in nature is good for your health. Walking in the woods is good for your well-being. Living near trees can help you live longer. But when you go for a walk in the woods, what is it particularly about being in nature or being outdoors that makes you feel good? Is it the sights or smells or sounds? A new study finds it might have something to do with the birds you hear while you have a walk.

Researchers from California Polytechnic State University analyzed how much the natural sounds people hear when they’re outdoors influence well-being. They found that the “chorus (合唱)” of birds singing increased well-being in protected natural areas.

For the study, researchers placed 10 hidden, evenly spaced speakers(扬声器) on two parts of trails(小路) in the Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks in Colorado. They played recorded songs from 11 kinds of birds. The researchers take turns to play the birdsong for a few hours a day for a week, and then turned off the speakers for a week at a time. They interviewed hikers after they passed through the areas with the speakers.

“The main result is that hikers that heard the birdsong responded to questions that showed a higher level of well-being compared to those that did not hear the birdsong,” Biology Professor Clinton Francis, who led the research, says.

Hikers who heard more birdsong on the first part of the trail said they felt better. Those who heard more birdsong on the second part reported that they thought more birds lived along that part of the trail. This feeling of more birds helps make the hikers feel better. “With the chorus, we were able to show that natural sounds have a clear effect on the quality of hikers’ experiences,” says Francis.