Men may eat more in summer
Winter may be seen as the time to fill up with food, but in fact, sunny summer months are when men eat more calories—unlike women.
The effect seems to occur because sunlight makes the skin release an appetite-stimulating hormone (激素), says Carmit Levy at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Levy and her colleagues noticed the effect in experiments in mice, in which male animals exposed to UV light (紫外线) ate more food.
To see if humans do the same, the team used data on about 3000 people who had filled in questionnaires as part of the Israeli government’s national health and nutrition survey. Between March and September, the men consumed about 17 per cent more calories per day than they did during the rest of the year, while the women’s food intake stayed about the same.
Human appetite is influenced by many complex systems, but a substance called ghrelin, a hormone produced in the body that stimulates appetite, seems to be the only hormone that directly stimulates eating. It was thought to be mainly produced by the stomach when empty. “It tells the brain to eat more,” says Caroline Gorvin at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Further investigation revealed that exposing male mice to UVB (紫外线 B 段波) radiation, which is present in sunlight, raised levels of ghrelin production by fat cells in their skin. This was blocked by the female sex hormone, which may explain why the effect wasn’t seen in the female mice or the women. Boosted ghrelin production was also seen in men’s skin samples that were exposed to UV light in the lab.
Skin hasn’t previously been thought to play a role in appetite, says Gorvin. The reason for the effect is unclear, but it may be an adaptive response to fuel greater physical activity in summer, says Levy.
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2 . You may have heard of a Japanese TV show called PUI PUI MOLCAR. The show features cute guinea pig cars getting into all sorts of crazy situations. In addition to the charming characters, people love the show’s quirky style of animation, which is known as stop motion, and it’s a technique with a long and interesting history.
In a stop-motion film, the characters are represented by models, puppets, or toys. The animator arranges them in the desired position, takes a photograph, adjusts each object’s position slightly, takes another photo, and repeats the process. When all these photos are arranged in sequence, the objects appear to be moving. The first use of this technique was in a short film called The Humpty Dumpty Circus in 1898.
In early Hollywood, film directors began to blend stop-motion with live action to create (at the time) jaw-dropping special effects. For example, the 1925 fantasy film The Lost World featured scary stop-motion dinosaurs chasing real actors. Indeed, the brains behind those revolutionary techniques, the animator Willis O’Brien, would go on to create perhaps the world’s most famous stop-motion monster—the giant gorilla in 1933’s King Kong.
By the 1990s, stop-motion was being used in everything, including movies, TV advertisements, and music videos. Programs like the Swiss claymation series Pingu charmed audiences with their endearing characters and style. Then suddenly, everything changed. Computer-generated images (CGI) with special effects began to really take off. Directors were eager to explore the possibilities of this cutting-edge technology and quickly gave stop motion the boot. And although several outstanding stop-motion movies were released in the ‘90s (The Nightmare before Christmas, for example), it was Pixar’s 3-D animated hit Toy Story that would become the decade’s defining animated movie.
For more than 10 years, stop-motion mostly fell out of fashion. By the late 2000s, however, audiences were becoming tired of the look and feel of CGI. Today, stop-motion movies are once again making waves. TV series like Shaun the Sheep are popular all over the world. Films like The Lego Movie even use CGI to imitate stop-motion animation. One studio in particular, Laika, has created five stop-motion pictures since 2009, all of which were nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars.
1. A stop-motion film is made by______.| A．creating stop-motion effects based on video clips of real humans |
| B．arranging photos of slightly different positions in order |
| C．taking photographs of various characters randomly |
| D．using computer techniques to create moving objects |
| A．The special effects created in the 1925 film “The Lost World” was poorly-received. |
| B．The performance of a real gorilla in 1933’s King Kong caused great excitement. |
| C．Stop-motion films began to lose its popularity in the 1990s, giving way to CGI. |
| D．Toy Story was not as successful as the stop-motion movie The Nightmare before Christmas. |
| A．dismissed | B．praised | C．released | D．recalled |
| A．some film companies intend to further improve the stop-motion filmmaking by cooperating with the Oscars. |
| B．though CGI films are not as popular as they used to be, they are still favored by the Oscars. |
| C．audiences across the world are ready to appreciate the impressive art of stop-motion films once again. |
| D．stop-motion films are regaining popularity because of the declining computer-generated special effects. |
