Animal Communication

Many pet owners long to talk with their animals. After all, if pets were able to talk, people could take care of them more easily and have closer emotional     11     to them, so a number of companies are working on devices and apps that could translate what animals say.

One such app is called MeowTalk. Using voice recognition software, this app recognizes different sounds a cat makes and offers English translations of them. For example, one type of sound might mean “feed me” while another could be translated “let me outside.” The app can use machine learning to assess its translations and improve at recognizing one particular cat’s voice. In other words, it can     12     in understanding your cat in particular. This is important because cats do not all have a(n)     13     language, but individual cats frequently use particular sounds to mean certain things.

In the future, MeowTalk could connect to a smart collar that would hear the cat meow and play the translation out loud. Perhaps if the cat is outside and needs to be let in, it could even send     14     to the owner’s phone.

For dogs, a Japanese company called Inupathy has developed a harness (保护带) with a heart rate monitor and an app. The heart rate monitor is used to assess a dog’s     15    . This is possible because, like humans, dogs’ heart rates go up when they are excited or     16    . The harness also has a light that turns red when the dog is excited, but when the dog is relaxed, the light is blue.

The most obvious use of this technology is to help pet owners     17     with and provide for their pets better. The more owners know about their pets, the easier it is to meet their needs.

There are other     18     of technology that help us understand animals. For example, some sheep farmers are using artificial intelligence to scan and determine if they are in pain, which helps them find out sick animals. As a result, they can     19     more quickly to treat the animal.

Anyone who interacts regularly with animals could benefit from understanding their animals better. Thus these     20     developments might transform the way we interact with the creatures around us.

It’s long been known that sugary drinks help people pack on unwanted kilograms. But new research suggests that ______ drinks and even 100% fruit juice might raise your risk for some cancers. The study couldn’t prove cause and effect, but it found that drinking as little as 90-120ml of sugary drinks each day was ______ to an 18% rise in overall risk for cancer.

The new study was led by Mathilde Touvier, research director at the University of Paris. Her team collected data on more than 100,000 French men and women, average age 42, who took part in a national ______.

The participants answered questions about how much of 3,300 different foods and drinks they consumed each day, and were ______ for up to nine years.

The study uncovered links between the consumption of sugary drinks and the risk of cancer______, and for breast cancer specifically. The investigators found no association between sugary drinks and prostate or colon cancers (前列腺或结肠癌), but the authors stressed that too few people in the study developed these cancers to make this finding ______. The research ______ no links between diet sodas (无糖汽水) and cancer, although more study is needed to confirm that, the authors noted.

The connection between sugary drinks and cancer remained the same even after the team ______for age, sex, educational level, family history of cancer, smoking and physical activity, the researchers said.

So, why the ______? According to Touvier’s team, high-calorie drinks may raise cancer risk because sugar helps build body fat, in addition to raising blood sugar levels and inflammation (发炎) — all of which are risk ______ for cancer. It’s also possible that chemicals found in these drinks might play a part in ______ cancer risk, the researchers theorized.

A group representing the drinks industry said sugary drinks can still be a part of the ______ diet, however. In a statement, the American Beverage Association said: “It’s important for people to know that all drinks — either with sugar or without — are ______ to consume as part of a balanced diet. America’s leading drinks companies are working together to support consumers’ efforts to ______ the sugar they consume from our drinks by providing more choices with less sugar or zero sugar, smaller package sizes and clear calorie information right up front.”

Samantha Heller is a senior clinical nutritionist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. She said she wasn’t ______ by the findings. She noted that, for decades, these drinks have been linked with diseases such as heart disease. On the other hand, “most of us should be drinking more water than we do,” Heller said.

I was putting on my boots just now in what the novelists call “a brown study.” There was no urgent reason for putting on my boots. I was not going out, and my slippers were much more comfortable. But something had to be done. I wanted a subject for an article. Now if you are accustomed to writing articles for a living, you will know that sometimes the difficulty is not writing the article, but choosing a subject. It is not poverty you suffer from, but an embarrassment of riches.

But what has this to do with putting on my boots? It is a reasonable question and I will tell you. For an hour I had paced my room in my slippers in search of a subject. I had looked out of the window over the sunlit valley, and watched the smoke of a distant train disappearing towards the west. I had sharpened every pencil I had on me with great care. But the more I sharpened my pencils, the more anxious I grew about the theme for an article.

It was at this moment that I remembered my boots. The act of bending my body changed the current of the blood. You saw things in a new light. So I fetched my boots and sat down to put them on.

The thing worked like a charm. For in my preoccupied condition I picked up my right boot first. Then mechanically I put it down and seized the left boot. And then the fact flashed on me that all my life I had been putting on my left boot first. If you had asked me five minutes before which boot I put on first, I should have said that there was no first about it; yet now I found I was in a habit so fixed that the attempt to put on my right boot first affected me. The thing couldn’t be done. And then came into my mind that fascinating book of Samuel Butler’s on Life and Habit. Yes, certainly, here was a subject that would “go.” I took out a pencil, seized some writing paper, and sat down to write on “The Force of Habit.”

Gentle sound stimulation, also known as pink noise, may significantly enhance deep sleep in older adults and improve their ability to recall words, a new study has found.

Deep sleep is critical for memory consolidation. However, beginning in middle age, deep sleep decreases substantially, which scientists believe contributes to memory loss in aging. The sound stimulation significantly enhanced deep sleep in participants and their scores on a memory test. “This is an innovative, simple and safe non-medication approach that may help improve brain health,” said Phyllis Zee, professor at Northwestern University in the US. “This is a potential tool for enhancing memory in older populations and attenuating normal age-related memory decline,” said Zee.

Zee and a team of researchers gathered 13 adults, 60 and older, and monitored their sleep in a lab for two nights. On both nights, the participants took a memory test, went to bed while wearing headphones and a special cap, and took another memory test in the morning. But without the participants’ awareness, researchers only played pink noise into the headphones on one night. More specifically, they timed the sounds to match the participants’ slow-wave oscillations. During deep sleep, brain waves slow to about one oscillation per second, compared to about ten oscillations per second during wakefulness. The system they employed in the study allowed the team to deliver a low burst of pink noise at the “precise moment” when the participants’ slow waves rose — a pattern that is unique to each person.

The study found that participants’ slow waves increased after the night of sound stimulation, suggesting that they were getting more deep sleep. And on the morning after hearing pink noise, they performed three times better on memory tests than they did after sleeping without any sound stimulation.

Previous research showed pink noise during deep sleep could improve memory consolidation in young people. But it has not been tested in older adults. The new study targeted older individuals and used a novel sound system that increased the effectiveness of the sound stimulation in older populations.

The study was a relatively small one, so further research is needed to confirm its findings and to study how longer-term use of pink noise affects sleep. But Northwestern has taken steps to patent the researchers’ technology, which seems to have hit upon a way to stimulate slow waves at the right moment. The team hopes to develop an affordable device that people can use at home, from the comfort of their beds.