1 . Kids and teens are often dismissive of praise from their parents. I am sure that parents out there can relate to this, as we all have been told at one time or another by one or several of our kids, “Stop it, Mom.” or even, “You’re just saying that because you are my parents, and you have to say that.” I can assure you, though, that they are listening. They will probably not thank you for this praise until they are in their twenties, but don’t let that stop you from praising them during their childhood and teen years. Just be careful how you praise them. A little praise may go a long way-especially if it is the right kind of praise.

It appears that the way to go is to praise their efforts according to a study by Brummelman of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues. These researchers concluded that kids should be praised primarily for their efforts, rather than for their personal characteristics, because if they are praised for their efforts, then a poor performance is more likely to be seen as a glitch (小故障), rather than a valid reflection of who they are as individuals.

Let’s think about this together. If you are a teenager or a child of any age and are constantly told how brilliant you are, then when you do poorly on a test or a few tests, you may feel like you have suddenly lost your status as brilliant and may now feel ashamed that you are merely average or even dumb. If you are a girl who is constantly being told how beautiful you are, then on a day when you don’t look or feel so good, you may decide that you are unattractive. This is the problem that develops when we are praising our kids for global personality characteristics that they can’t always live up to.

2 . Fire ants are famous for their construction projects (as well as their burning bites). When they need to, colonies of these insects turn themselves into ladders, chains and walls. And when flood water rises, a colony can float to safety by making an unusual boat. The ants hold tightly to each other, forming a floating disk atop the water. The antraft may float for months seeking safe harbor. The ants on the bottom don’t drown, and the ants on the top stay dry. Working together, the ants float to safety — even though a single ant alone in the water will struggle to survive.

“They have to stay together as a colony to survive.” Nathan Mlot said.

Fire ants and water don’t mix. The ant’s hard outer shell, naturally repels water. A drop of water can sit on top of the ant like a backpack. When an ant does end up underwater, tiny hairs on its body can trap bubbles of air that give the bug a boost up.

To investigate the science behind the antraft, the scientists placed hundreds or thousands of ants at a time in the water. A group of ants took about 100 seconds, on average, to build a raft. The researchers repeated the experiment multiple times. Each time, the ants organized themselves the same way, creating a raft about the size and the thickness of a thin pancake. The rafts were flexible and strong, staying together even when the researchers pushed the rafts underwater.

The scientists then froze the rafts in liquid nitrogen and studied them under powerful microscopes to figure out how the ants kept everyone safe and the water out.

The team found that some ants used their jaws to bite other ants’ legs. Other ants joined their legs together. Thanks to these tight bonds, say the scientists, the ants did a better job at keeping the water away than any one ant could do on its own. By working together, thousands of ants can stay alive in the face of a crisis like a flood by using their own bodies to build a boat.

3 . Some of Earth’s plants have fallen in love with metal. With roots that act practically like magnets (磁铁), these organisms—about 700 are known—flourish in metal-rich soils that make hundreds of thousands of other plant species flee or die.

Slicing open one of these trees or running the leaves of its bush cousin through a peanut press produces a blue-green “juice”. This “juice” is netually one-quarter nickel (镍), far more concentrated than the one feeding the world’s nickel smelters (熔炉).

The plants not only collect the soil’s minerals into their bodies but seem to store them to “ridiculous” levels, said Alan Baker, a visiting botany professor at the University of Melbourne who has researched the relationship between plants and their soils since the 1970s. This vegetation could be the world’s most efficient, solar-powered mineral smelters. What if, as a partial replacement to traditional, energy-intensive and environmentally costly mining and smelting, the world harvested nickel plants?

Dr. Baker and an international team of colleagues have set their sights on convincing the world the idea is more than just a fun thought experiment. On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, the group has proved it at small scale. Every six to 12 months, a farmer shaves off one foot of growth from these nickel-hyper-accumulating plants and either burns or squeezes the metal out. After a short purification (提纯), farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate (硝酸镍), potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets.

Now, as the team scales up to the world’s largest trial at nearly 50 acres, their target audience is industry. In a decade, the researchers hope that a greater consumer demand for base metals and rate minerals could be filled by the same kind of farming that produces the world’s coconuts and coffee.