1 . Researchers hope brain implants will one day help people with aphasia(失语症) to get their voice back—and maybe even to sing. Now, for the first time, scientists have demonstrated that the brain’s electrical activity can be decoded and used to reconstruct music.

A new study analyzed data from 29 people monitored for epileptic seizures(癫痫发作), using electrodes(电极) on the surface of their brain. As participants listened to a selected song, electrodes captured brain activity related to musical elements, such as tone, rhythm, and lyrics. Employing machine learning, Robert Knight from UC Berkeley and his colleagues reconstructed what the participants were hearing and published their study results. The paper is the first to suggest that scientists can “listen secretly to” the brain to synthesize(合成) music.

To turn brain activity data into musical sound, researchers trained an artificial intelligence (AI)model to decode data captured from thousands of electrodes that were attached to the participants as they listened to the song while undergoing surgery. Once the brain data were fed through the model, the music returned. The model also revealed some brain parts responding to different musical features of the song.

Although the findings focused on music, the researchers expect their results to be most useful for translating brain waves into human speech. Ludovic Bellier, the study’s lead author, explains that speech, regardless of language, has small melodic differences—tempo, stress, accents, and intonation—known as prosody(韵律). These elements carry meaning that we can’t communicate with words alone. He hopes the model will improve brain-computer interfaces (BCI), assistive devices that record speech-associated brain waves and use algorithms to reconstruct intended messages. This technology, still in its infancy, could help people who have lost the ability to speak because of aphasia.

Future research should investigate whether these models can be expanded from music that participants have heard to imagined internal speech. If a brain-computer interface could recreate someone’s speech with the prosody and emotional weight found in music, it could offer a richer communication experience beyond mere words.

Several barriers remain before we can put this technology in the hands—or brains— of patients. The current model relies on surgical implants. As recording techniques improve, the hope is to gather data non-invasively, possibly using ultrasensitive electrodes. However, under current technologies, this approach might result in a lower speed of decoding into natural speech. The researchers also hope to improve the playback clarity by packing the electrodes closer together on the brain’s surface, enabling an even more detailed look at the electrical symphony the brain produces.

We’ve all seen the little kids—losing temper in the toy store, screaming in restaurants and generally making a scene in public. For their parents, giving in to a kid’s monstrous behavior helps to end the mess and gain some peace and quiet, and this is where overindulgence begins.

According to Kathy Webb, a psychotherapist in Brunswick, overindulgence is the result of parents’ beliefs. A lot of overindulging parents believe their children should be happy all the time, which is the reason why the parents try to avoid conflict at all costs. They also hold that overindulgence equals love, but experts insist that being overly permissive and indulgent is not a healthy kind of love.

Overindulgence can create a myriad of wrong attitudes and behaviors in children. When overindulged, children develop unrealistic expectations which do not serve them as they grow. Healthy parenting, Webb said, means giving children unconditional love, quality time, healthy discipline and respect for what is appropriate. “Healthy parents promote good values and use everyday life experiences to teach their children,” she said.

Many parents don’t intentionally overindulge, but fail to follow through on consequences.   “Consequences help children develop their own self-guidance skills,” Webb said. “Without consequences, children never learn to discipline themselves.”

But parents who have overindulged shouldn’t just throw up their hands and walk away from the situation, feeling like failures. There are steps that can be taken to turn family life around. “All is not lost,” Webb said. “You just have to take it step by step.” Identifying problems and what can be done to correct them are the first steps. This is where parents might want to invest in some counseling or parent coaching and refer to some parenting books.

Such parents should also manage to regain proper parental power. In some families, overindulging parents are acting like peers, not parents. Consistency is also important—children often imitate the behavior they see from their parents. “Say what you mean and mean what you say,” Webb said. It seems that all it takes is one raised eyebrow and a very stern look to stop the misbehaviour. But Webb believes what really grounded her children is their inclusion in the family’s life, not just the fun stuff like vacations and outings. They should also be taught to clean house, cook, and do laundry.

5 .

Climate change influences how organisms live and function in their environment. Investigating how organisms adapt is essential for accurately predicting their survival, and tracking genomic(基因组的) changes helps researchers determine the lasting effects of the changing environment. Copepods, a dominant coastal species, are particularly useful for studying genetic changes in response to shifting marine environments. By studying copepods, researchers can get an idea of how the ocean food chain might react to changes in the Earth’s climate.

Tracking a copepod’s evolving genome in the wild, however, can be time-consuming and laborious. To circumvent this challenge, Pespeni and her team used an evolve-and-resequence approach in the lab. They exposed a copepod population to three stressors—water warming, acidification via high CO₂ levels, and combinations of the two ocean warming and acidification (OWA) conditions in the laboratory, and tracked their adaptations to these conditions over 25generations. Previously, they tracked reproductive fitness traits such as egg-hatching success under these conditions. They found that the fitness of the population exposed to OWA conditions initially decreased, but then adapted to the stressors over several generations.

In the current study, the researchers sequenced the genomes of animals in each experimental group at generation 0 and 25 to quantify how allele (等位基因) frequencies changed in response to experimental selective pressures. The researchers found adaptive alleles related to development were unique to the multiple stressor experiment, providing a possible explanation for the observed selection of hatching success.

“We showed that the warming alone was a much strong er selective pressure than CO₂. But when you combine them, you get a unique synergy. So, it’s not just one plus one equals two; it’s one plus one equals something totally different,” said Pespeni. Whereas previous studies observed the effects of single stressors on evolving organisms, Pespeni’s study demonstrated that multiple stressors result in a unique response to selection in a non-additive manner. This is important because human-induced environmental changes are multifaceted(多方面的), and additional stressors are still needed to further mimic natural environmental changes, and this study reveals the complexity of the genomic adaptive response.

According to Morgan Kelly, a professor who was not involved in the study, the insights presented by the researchers in this study call into question the previous single stressor studies and will influence future experimental design. “There’s this big question of the role that evolutionary change will play in response to climate change, and the way the researchers integrate genomic information is the best of its kind in the world of marine experimental evolution,” said Kelly.

According to Pespeni, there is reason to maintain hope in the face of climate change because her work revealed that the copepods eventually fully regained their ability to reproduce following the combined environmental changes.

7 . Which is healthier: a bag of crisps or a vegetable salad? That is easy. Now which is healthier: a pizza made from scratch or one made from the same basic ingredients, with the same number of calories, pulled out of a box in the freezer? Many people would instinctively(本能地) say the former, perhaps showing a vague concern with processed food. Such food can often be delicious. And there is much to cheer about calories being cheap and abundant.     1    

What’s the distinction between “ultra-processed food(upf)” and “processed food”? Almost everything people consume is processed in some form. Rice is harvested; animals are butchered. Upf is usually described as “formulations of ingredients, made by a series of industrial processes, many requiring advanced equipment and technology”.     2     The one in the freezer, with its extra, modified ingredients, is upf.

Upf harms people in ways both known and unknown. It seems to affect the trillions of bacteria that contribute to health in a range of ways. Calorie-rich but usually nutrient-poor, upf contributes to obesity(肥胖症).

Upf displaces healthier alternatives, particularly for poor people.     3     Extra weight was once a sign of wealth, but among British and American women today, obesity rates are higher at lower-income levels.

    4     Additives that may be safe in small quantities may be harmful in combination with other chemicals or when consumed regularly. If we are what we eat, considering the impact of upf is essential.

    5     People who live in so-called “food swamps”, where upf is everywhere but real food is harder to reach, could spend large amounts of time and money seeking out fresh food, but that is not how most people live. There is nothing wrong with the odd fast-food trip, but anyone who can afford to eat less upf probably should.

8 . Climate experts are having a debate: they are asking whether the UK should focus more on adapting to climate change or trying to prevent it.

David Frost holds that preventing climate change is no longer an option, given the extent to which the Earth now appears certain to heat up. Despite the many policies which attempt to stop climate change, it now seems unavoidable that the world will pass the 1.5℃ or 2℃ increases in average global temperature that are likely to induce large changes in the climate.

David Frost is right in that our economies are growing so much slower than we had anticipated. Our emissions can drop if we reduce emissions per unit of GDP we create—but they can also drop if the GDP is lower. Lower growth means it is more feasible (可行的) for us to achieve targets such as Net Zero, but it also makes it less environmentally urgent to achieve those targets so soon, because we are and have been emitting a lot less carbon than we had anticipated.

The UK authority finds the debate about adaptation difficult. Partly, it is because some activists claim that adaptation is not feasible. They say that climate change will end human civilization, potentially leading to the entire extinction of the human race.

However, the mainstream view of many scientists and economists, who work on climate change, is that global warming could lead to large changes in our environment. Significant parts of the world currently heavily populated could become effectively uninhabitable while other parts currently unsuitable for high-density human habitation would become more habitable. Meanwhile, at higher temperatures both climate and weather are likely to become more volatile—including increased frequency of storms, flooding and other weather events.

These would be significant changes, but it would be perfectly feasible for humans to adapt to them. The issue is not whether adapting would be technically feasible, but whether it would be desirable either in ethical or practical terms. Are we willing to accept a materially warmer world, with humans living in different parts of it? Are we willing to accept the possible extinctions of certain species and the greater flourishing of those currently less successful and of new species yet to evolve? Are we willing to accept the consequences of a large shift in the patterns of human habitation across the world?

It is by no means clear on what basis we ought to ethnically privilege the plants and animals that flourish under today’s climate over those that would flourish under a warmer, more volatile climate. However, adaptation will be feasible and is a necessity given the extent to which warming is now unavoidable. Slower GDP growth and thus slower climate change ought to make greater efforts at adaptation more attractive.

9 . Have you ever bought a new car and started noticing the exact color and model of car everywhere? Has that type of car just become popular in your city? Were they there before? Or are you just going crazy?

You’re not going crazy. The reason you are now just noticing them is what psychologists call “priming”. Basically, the cars were always there. You just didn’t recognize them consciously. However, when that certain model of car becomes part of your conscious thinking, you start “automatically” recognizing all of the other cars that are the same, because you are already “primed” to do so.

The priming effect takes many forms. In one study, students were asked to walk around a room for 5 minutes at a rate of 30 steps per minute, which was about one-third their normal pace. After this brief experience, the participants were much quicker to recognize words related to old age, such as forgetful, old, and lonely. Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you are primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age. This research shows that the way we think influences the way we act, and the way we act influences the way we think.

A similar conclusion was reached by the American psychologist William James a century ago, but he emphasized the effect on feeling. “Actions seem to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the path to cheerfulness, should our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”

So, that’s it. If you want to be happy, just sit up and act happy. Based on these scientific findings, we can adopt certain priming effects to help make ourselves consistently happier.

One thing we have in common is our ability to think, and thus feel. Pleasant thoughts have been proven to produce the chemicals that make us feel happy, particularly thoughts and feelings of gratitude. When we purposefully go through and think about the things we’re grateful for and deliberately feel as much gratitude as we can, we are flooding our mind with the “happy chemicals”. Furthermore, by consciously thinking, feeling and expressing gratitude, we will not only be happier in the moment, we will be “primed” to recognize the things in our life to appreciate. Each time this happens, the “happy chemicals” will be produced. Do this every day and we will become consistently happier. This makes up for the momentary happiness we gain from eating chocolate or buying new clothes. More than that, combining thoughts of gratitude with happy acts like smiling and laughing will have a supplementary positive effect on our state of mind.

10 . Every day, thousands of rangers patrol national parks and other protected areas in Africa. Their job is fraught with danger, both from hostile humans armed with automatic weapons and from the unappreciative and potentially aggressive wildlife, armed with tusks, teeth and claws, which they are helping to preserve.    1    

That is particularly true of data on poaching (偷猎), which remains, in both senses of the word, an elephantine problem. Since 2006 African elephant populations have declined by around 30%. In 2021, according to Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE), a conservation programme, around 40% of elephant deaths were a result of poaching.

    2     The MIKE data show a welcome fall in rates throughout the 2010s, but according to research published in 2020 by Scott Schlossberg of Elephants Without Borders, a charity, this can be attributed entirely to a decline in eastern Africa.

Elsewhere, there is great variation in the pressure on animals like elephants. Some parks, like Garamba in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), are badly hit — with more than 90% of the bodies found by rangers being victims of poachers.     3    To untangle the factors influencing poaching, Timothy Kuiper of the University of Cape Town, Eleanor Milner-Gulland at Oxford, and a team of collaborators have analysed data collected for MIKE by rangers from 64 sites in 30 African countries over the course of 19 years. They correlated these with potentially relevant factors, both natural and human, and have published their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Natural variables such as habitat type, they discovered, make little difference.     4     Unsurprisingly, low household wealth, poor health, poor law enforcement and poor national governance all contributed to higher rates of poaching. So did the price of ivory.

    5     For there did not seem to be much. The impact was a consequence of a few special cases in DRC, the Central African Republic and Ethiopia, rather than a general rule about young men with guns behaving badly.

One factor that was unquantifiable, and therefore untestable, according to Dr Kuiper, was local political will to preserve wildlife. But this study does nevertheless confirm observations made elsewhere, that the best form of conservation is a prosperous population.