2 . While every dog owner knows their dogs can read their moods perfectly,scientists have always been a little doubtful. Now thanks to some researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, we finally have some convincing evidence.

For their study. biologist Corson Miller and his team exposes eleven selected dogs to digital images of women that were either angry or happy. Half the dogs were rewarded for touching the screen when shown a happy face, while the other half got their treat for selecting those that appeared angry.

Interestingly,the dogs were not provided with the entire face. Some dogs were shown only upper halves while the others observed lower halves. That's because the scientists believe humans show their emotions on their entire face.

After some training like how to recognize small differences like the wrinkles between the eyes or the changes in their shape that accompany the happy or angry expressions, the dogs were mostly able to identify the correct expression not only on a familiar face but on a strange face. The researchers concluded the dogs were smart enough to read human emotions.

They also found those being trained to read angry expressions took a longer time to learn. They guess it may be because dogs find angry faces disgusting, causing them to withdraw quickly. However, once the smart dogs realized they were getting rewarded, the trepidation seemed to disappear. In fact, the dogs had such a good time playing the computer "game". That scientists had a hard time keeping them away from the touch screens after the study was completed.

The researchers also noticed only dogs with a male owner had a harder time understanding the expressions correctly. Since the touch-screen models were all females, this confirmed what has been observed in previous studies dogs are more efficient at reading facial expressions of people that are the same gender as their owner.

3 . Runners who encounter visual and auditory (听觉的) distractions (分心) may be more likely to suffer leg injuries, according to a research by the Association of Academic Physiatrists in Las Vegas. Runners often seek distractions from the task at hand. Whether it is music, texting, daydreaming, taking in the sights, or propping a book up on the treadmill (跑步机), more often than not a distraction is welcome. But, researchers from the University of Florida have recently discovered that those distractions may lead to injury.

Daniel Herman, MD, PhD, assistant professor at University of Florida, and his team conducted a research on the effect of visual and auditory distractions on 14 runners to determine what effect, if any, these distractions would have on things such as heart rate, how much a runner breathes per minute, how much oxygen is consumed by the body, the speed in which runners apply force to their bodies, and the force the ground applies to the runners’ bodies when they come in contact with it.

The runners were all injury free at the time of the study and ran 31 miles each week. Dr. Herman’s team had each participant run on a treadmill three separate times. The first time was without any distractions. The second time added a visual distraction, during which the runners concatenated on a screen displaying different letters in different colors with the runners having to note when a specific letter-color combination appeared. The third time added an auditory distraction similar to the visual distraction, with the runners having to note when a particular word was spoken by a particular voice.

When compared to running without distractions, the participants had faster application of force to their left and right legs, called loading rate, with auditory and visual distractions. They also experienced a increased amount of force from the ground on both legs, called ground reaction force, with auditory distractions. Finally, the runners tended to breathe heavier and have higher heart rates with visual and auditory distractions than without any distractions at all.

“Running in environments with different distractions may unfavorably affect running performance and injury risk.” explains Dr. Herman. “Sometimes these things cannot be avoided, but you may be able to minimize potentially cumulative (累积的) effects. For example, when running a new route in a chaotic environment such as during a destination marathon, you may want to skip listening to something which may require more attention-like a new song playlist.”

Dr Herman’s team will continue to investigate the potential relationship between distracted running and leg injuries, and any effect this relationship has on different training techniques that use auditory or visual clues.

4 . Habits are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. "Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting creatures," William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the everchanging 21st century, even the word "habit" carries a negative meaning.

So it seems contradictory to talk about habits in the same context as innovation （创新）. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try, the more creative we become.

But don't bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the brain, they're there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately press into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.

"The first thing needed for innovation is attraction to wonder, "says Dawna Markova, author of The Open Mind. "But we are taught instead to 'decide', just as our president calls himself "the Decider'.” She adds, however, that "to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational   thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities."

“All of us work through problems in ways of which we're unaware, “she says. Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the ability to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, collaboratively （合作地）and innovatively. At the end of adolescence, however, the brain shuts down half of that ability, preserving only those ways of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.

The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us use our innovative and collaborative ways of thought "This breaks the major rule in the American belief system-that anyone can do anything, " explains M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book This Year I Will... and Ms. Markova's business partner. “That's a lie that we have preserved, and it fosters commonness. Knowing what you're good at and doing even more of it creates excellence." This is where developing new habits comes in.

6 . The damage that aging does to a body extends all the way down to the cellular level. But the damage increased by cells in older muscles is especially severe, because the cells do not reproduce easily and they become weaker as their mitochondria (线粒体), which produce energy, reduce in energy and number. A study, however, suggests that certain sorts of exercise may remove some of what time can do to our mitochondria.

Exercise is good for people, as everyone knows. But scientists have surprisingly little understanding of its cellular impacts and how those might vary by activity and the age of the exerciser. So researchers recently conducted an experiment on the cells of 72 healthy but sedentary (久坐的) men and women who were 30 or younger or older than 64. After baseline measures were established for their aerobic (有氧的) fitness, their blood-sugar levels and the gene activity and mitochondrial health in their muscle cells, the volunteers were randomly assigned to a particular exercise program.

Some of them did weight training several times a week; some did interval training three times a week on exercise bicycles; some rode exercise bikes at a appropriate pace for 30 minutes a few times a week and lifted weights lightly on other days. A fourth group, the control, did not exercise. After 12 weeks, the lab tests were repeated. In general, everyone experienced improvements in fitness and an ability io regulate blood sugar.

But more unexpected results were found in the biopsies (活组织检查) muscle cells. Among the younger subjects who went through interval training, the activity levels had changed in 274 genes, compared with 170 genes for those who exercised more appropriately and 74 for the weight lifters. Among the older group, almost 400 genes were working differently now, compared with 33 for the weight lifters and only 19 for the appropriate exercisers.

It seems exercise could help contain the decline in the cellular health of muscles associated with aging, especially if it was intense, says Dr. Sreekumaran Nair, the study's senior author. In fact, older people's cells responded in some ways more strongly to intense exercise than the cells of the young did - suggesting, he says, that it is never too late to benefit from exercise.

7 . Imagine taking to the skies, spreading your arms out and soaring（翱翔）through the clouds. Flying is indeed possible-in your dreams. But no one can control what happens in dreams, right? Wrong.

Dreams in which you are aware that you are dreaming and can control what happens are called lucid dreams（清醒梦）. These dreams are most common during the stage of sleep known as rapid eye movement（REM）sleep.

Lucid dreaming has been referenced throughout history. It’s mentioned in Greek philosopher Aristotle’s writing, as well as in Egyptian hieroglyphics（象形文字）and in the oral traditions of Australian aborigines. However, it wasn’t until 1975 that British psychologist Keith Hearne was credited as the first person to produce scientific proof that lucid dreams occur. Since then, we have learned much more about this phenomenon.

According to a study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, 55 percent of people have had a lucid dream at least once in their lifetime, while 23 percent experience lucid dreams once a month or more. Though these numbers show that the majority of people don’t have lucid dreams regularly, scientists are developing new technology for those who want to have this experience. For example, Curzio Vasapollo invented a device called ZMax, a headband that can monitor eye movements, body movements and heart rate to help people have a lucid dream.

But why would someone want to have lucid dreams? As it turns out, lucid dreaming can have many benefits. Alix Generous, a young woman suffering from autism（自闭症）, said in her TED talk：“I love lucid dreaming because it allows me to be free，without judgment of social and physical consequences.” Also, learning how to have lucid dreams may help those who suffer from nightmares. Through being able to control their actions, they may be able to overcome the cause of their fear.

Lucid dreams may encourage creativity as well. According to the website Notes Read, those who experience this dream state will find access to “an unbelievable fund of knowledge and inspiration”. For example, British American filmmaker Christopher Nolan took inspiration from his own lucid dreams when he wrote the 2010 sci-fi movie Inception. Maybe one day, everyone can indulge in（沉浸在）lucid dreams.

8 . Biologists from the John Innes Centre in England discovered that plants have a biological process which divides their amount of stored energy by the length of the night. This solves the problem of how to portion out（分配） energy reserves during the night so that the plant can keep growing, yet not risk burning off all its stored energy.

While the sun shines, plants perform photosynthesis（光合作用）. In this process, the plants change sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into stored energy in the form of long chains of sugar, called starch（淀粉）. At night, the plants burn this stored starch to fuel continued growth.

“The calculations are precise so that plants prevent starvation but also make the most efficient use of their food,” said study co-author Alison Smith. “If the starch store is used too fast, plants will starve and stop growing during the night. If the store is used too slowly, some of it will be wasted.”

The scientists studied the plant Arabidopsis, which is regarded as a model plant for experiments. To give the plants some math tests, the biologists let night arrive unexpectedly early or late for them.

During one of the exams, they shut off the lights early on them that had been grown with twelve-hour days and nights. Putting them into darkness after only an eight-hour day means they didn’t have time to store as much starch as usual. And this forced the plants to adjust their normal nightly rhythm.

Amazingly, even after this day length trick, the plants did very well in their exams and ended up with just five percent of starch left over at the end of the night. They had neither starved, nor stored starch that could have been used to fuel more growth.

The authors suggested that similar biological calculators may explain how a migratory bird, the little stint, can make a five-thousand-kilometer journey to their summer habitat in the Arctic and arrive with enough fat reserves to survive only approximately half a day more, on average.

The results of the study were published in e Life.

9 . Ask any readers who their favorite fictional character in a novel is and you'll likely get a detailed explanation about the beloved character that they admire. It might even sound like they're talking about a person they know.

In a study, researchers looked at the brains of a group of people over nine days. Half of the group read the novel Pompeii, and half didn't. After examining, researchers found the readers' brains showed heightened connectivity in some areas. This is likely because the brain imagines the movement and emotions of the character they read about in the book. Even though the participants were then asked not to read the novel, they kept this heightened connectivity. We call that a "shadow activity", almost like a muscle memory. So even after you've finished a book, your brain keeps those benefits for some time afterwards.

It has been suggested that people who read a lot of fiction become more empathic (移情的),because fiction is a simulation (模仿)of social experiences, in which people practice and improve their interpersonal skills. The people who not only read fiction, but felt a high level of "emotion transportation" while reading as compared to people who weren't taken by the story or who read non-fiction displayed higher levels of empathy when tested. Increase of empathy is important for people because empathy is positively related to creativity, performance at work and cooperative behaviors.

Besides, reading improves "Theory of Mind". It is “the ability to understand that others have mental states that are different from one' s own.” Of various activities, reading novels has been found to improve this ability, while watching television programs or movies has been found to do just the opposite a reduced understanding of others and weaker cognitive (认知的)development overall.

Maybe we should put more of a priority on novel-reading. And many readers believe that reading a novel is far better and more meaningful than watching any movie. As David Kidd of the New School study said, “Fiction is not just a simulator of a social experience; it is a social experience."