1 . Tiredness May Lead to Snacking

Staying up late doing homework is always tiring. Perhaps when we are tired, we feel the need to eat unhealthy snack food. Recently scientists have been investigating tiredness and snack food.

According to a study in the Journal of Neuroscience, people are more likely to crave snacks when they don’t get enough sleep.

For the study, researchers from University of Cologne in Germany gave the same dinner to 32 healthy men aged between 19 and 33. Half of the men were then sent home to bed, and the other half were kept aware in the laboratory all night.

The next morning, the participants were asked to consider how much they would be willing to pay for snack food items shown to them in pictures.

According to the researchers, all were similarly hungry in the morning, and had similar levels of most hormones and blood sugar.

However, brain scans showed that when the sleep-deprived participants looked at the pictures of junk food, they released more of the “hunger hormone”. This is the hormone responsible for increasing the appetite, and making us consume more.

Asked about how much they would pay for snacks, “participants with sleep deprivation were more willing to overspend on food items than those with a good night’s sleep,” researchers said.

Researchers also observed that among the people who hadn’t slept, there was greater activity in the part of the brain where food rewards are processed.

Scientists think that sleep-deprived people experience changes to the hunger hormone and the brain’s reward system that leads to a stronger desire to eat snacks with high fat and calories.

“This brings us a little closer to understanding the mechanism behind how sleep deprivation changes food valuation,” Professor Jan Peters, a co-author of the study from the University of Cologne, told The Independent.

Listen to some soft music to relieve your tiredness.

Do some slight exercise for a short time when you’re tired.

Eat yogurt or fruits to replace snacks with high fat and calories.

Distance yourself from the craving.

3 . I used to think my little comer of urban England was somewhere I could get away from the stress and strain of modern-day life — until they moved in next door. There are two of them. They are white, woolly and probably have sharp teeth as well as loud bark. But every time their constant barking interrupts my sleep, I remind myself that, in many respects, I am lucky. The neighbors don’t hold all-night parties, nor do they shout or throw crockery at each other, and though their dogs may bark, they don’t bite.

According to a recent consumer magazine report on “nightmare neighbors”, dogs are the fifth most common source of bad relations between neighbors. Noise of any description heads the list of complaints, followed by DIY enthusiasts, parking quarrelling, and arguments over house extensions.

So what alternatives are there? One is to take legal action. But this can be time-consuming and expensive and does nothing to improve already difficult relationships. The other alternatives are to sell up and go, or to try to reach a solution with the help of someone neutral. Mediation UK — the United Nations equivalent of garden fence conflicts — was set in 1984 to help resolve community disagreements.

In most cases, the lack of communication is found the main cause of conflict. David Nation of Plymouth Mediation points to poor public housing and widespread unemployment as additional factors. He also reports more cases of complaints from people who live in flats. Large houses built in the nineteenth century and designed as single-occupation family homes have, he says, been changed into flats with little or no attention to sound insulation. Dividing walls are paper thin and hardly block out sound at all.

Buyers can also be put off by the external appearance of neighboring houses. Anything from wild, uncared for gardens to unusual external color schemes can put off buyers — even though the offending property is next door. But it could be worse. John Gladden, of Norbury in Surrey upset his neighbors in St Oswald’s Road by mounting a huge fish in fiberglass (玻璃纤维) and putting it on the roof of his house. The local council argued that he should have got planning permission; residents thought the fish did nothing to improve the appearance of the neighborhood, and war broke out. Sightseers poured in and homes near the suburban property can now be hard to sell.

4 . Open data-sharers are still in the minority in many fields. Although many researchers broadly agree that public access to raw data would accelerate science, most are reluctant to post the results of their own labours online.

Some communities have agreed to share online - geneticists, for example, post DNA sequences at the GenBank repository (库), and astronomers are accustomed to accessing images of galaxies and stars from, say, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a telescope that has observed some 500 million objects- but these remain the exception, not the rule. Historically, scientists have objected to sharing for many reasons: it is a lot of work; until recently, good databases did not exist; grant funders were not pushing for sharing; it has been difficult to agree on standards for formatting data and there is no agreed way to assign credit for data.

But the barriers are disappearing in part because journals and funding agencies worldwide are encouraging scientists to make their data public. Last year, the Roval Society in London said in its report Science as an Open Enterprise that scientists need to shift away from a research culture where data is viewed as private preserve. Funding agencies note that data paid for with public money should be public information, and the scientific community is recognizing that data can now be shared digitally in ways that were not possible before. To match the growing demand, services are springing up to make it easier to publish research products online and enable other researchers to discover and cite them.

Although calls to share data often concentrate on the moral advantages of sharing, the practice is not purely altruistic (利他主义的). Researchers who share get plenty of personal benefits, including more connections with colleagues, improved visibility and increased citations. I he most successful sharers-those whose data are downloaded and cited the most often-get noticed, and their work gets used. For example, one of the most popular data sets on multidisciplinary repository Dryad is about wood density around the world; it has been downloaded 5, 700 times. Co-author Amy Zanne thinks that users probably range from climate- change researchers wanting to estimate how much carbon is stored in biomass, to foresters looking for information on different grades of timber. “I would much prefer to have my data used by the maximum number of people to ask their own questions, ” she says. “It’s important to allow readers and reviewers to see exactly how you arrive at your results. Publishing data and code allows your science to be reproducible”

Even people whose data are less popular can benefit. By making the effort to organize and label files so others can understand them, scientists become more organized and better disciplined themselves, thus avoiding confusion later on.

5 . Organizations and societies rely on fines and rewards to harness people’s self-interest in the service of the common good. The threat of a ticket keeps drivers in line, and the promise of a bonus inspires high performance. But incentives can also backfire, diminishing the very behavior they’re meant to encourage.

A generation ago, Richard Titmuss claimed that paying people to donate blood reduced the supply. Economists were skeptical, citing a lack of evidence. But since then, new data and models have prompted a sea of changes in how economists think about incentives — showing, among other things, that Titmuss was right often enough that businesses should take note.

Experimental economists have found that offering to pay women for donating blood decreases the number willing to donate by almost half, and that letting them contribute the payment to charity reverses the effect. Dozens of recent experiments show that rewarding self-interest with economic incentives can backfire when they undermine what Adam Smith called “the moral sentiments”. The psychology here has confused blackboard economists, but it will be no surprise to people in business: when we take a job or buy a car, we are not only trying to get stuff — we are also trying to be a certain kind of person. People desire to be esteemed by others and to be seen as ethical and dignified. And they don’t want to be taken for suckers. Rewarding blood donations may backfire because it suggests that the donor is less interested in being selfless than in making a buck. Incentives also run into trouble when they signal that the employer mistrusts the employee or is greedy. Close supervision of workers coupled with pay for performance is textbook economics — and a prescription for gloomy employees.

Perhaps most important, incentives affect what our actions signal, whether we’re being self-interested or civic-minded, manipulated or trusted, and they can imply — sometimes wrongly — what motivates us. Fines or public criticism that appeal to our moral sentiments by signaling social disapproval (think of littering) can be highly effective. But incentives go wrong when they offend or diminish our ethical sensibilities.

This does not mean it’s impossible to appeal to self-interested and ethical motivations at the same time — just that efforts to do so often fail. Ideally, policies support socially valued ends not only by harnessing self-interest but also by encouraging public-spiritedness. The small tax on plastic grocery bags enacted in Ireland in 2002 that resulted in their virtual elimination appears to have had such an effect. It punished offenders monetarily while conveying a moral message. Carrying a plastic bag joined wearing a fur coat in the gallery of antisocial conduct.

10 . Here’s the deal: you’re as hungry as a horse and you want a delicious meal from a fine restaurant, but you’re a little low on funds.

So what do you do? If you happen to live in Europe, the answer is as easy as pie: you pull out your smart phone or tablet, and tap Too Good To Go, Europe’s most popular app. Approximately 23,000 restaurants and food sellers post their leftover offerings on the app for half their usual cost.

Why all this incredible generosity? Unbelievably, one-third of the world’s food is thrown away, and nearly one billion people don’t have enough to eat. Besides, burning wasted food releases harmful carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, which contributes to climate change. That’s why environment-minded companies around the world are creating apps for phones, tablets, and other smart devices that connect uneaten food with people who want or need it.

After a long day at work, Anne, a 34-year-old student, pulls out her smart phone and chooses a noodle dish —pasta with mushrooms. Then she heads to a restaurant on the banks of the Spree River, where the owner packs her dinner and also offers her a spoon of free icecream, which is a reward for bringing her own container.

Indeed, there are many programmes serving the same mission around the world. In America, people are using an app called Food for All. One hour before a restaurant closes, its staff can post leftover meals to the app for up to 80 percent off menu prices. The app also allows customers to donate leftover meals to others.

In the Netherlands, 77,000 people have downloaded an app called No Food Wasted. This programme allows grocery store workers to share products that are approaching their expiration dates with customers who might need them.

Some countries are taking their commitment to reducing food waste a step further. France and the Czech Republic, for example, have laws that prohibit restaurants and grocery stores from throwing away food. Instead, workers are required to donate that food to charity.

So think about if there might be a better use for your uneaten vegetables. The planet will thank you.