The health-care economy is filled with unusual and even unique economic relationships. One of the least understood involves the peculiar roles of producer or “provider” and purchaser or “consumer” in the typical doctor-patient relationship. In most sectors of the economy, it is the seller who attempts to attract a potential buyer with various appealing factors of price, quality, and use, and it is the buyer who makes the decision. Such condition, however, is not common in most of the health-care industry.

    In the health-care industry, the doctor-patient relationship is the mirror image of the ordinary relationship between producer and consumer. Once an individual has chosen to see a physician — and even then there may be no real choice — it is the physician who usually makes all significant purchasing decisions: whether the patient should return “next Wednesday”, whether X-rays are needed, whether drugs should be prescribed, etc. It is rare that a patient will challenge such professional decisions or raise in advance questions about price, especially when the disease is regarded as serious.

    This is particularly significant in relation to hospital care. The physician must certify the need for hospitalization, determine what procedures will be performed, and announce when the patient may be discharged. The patient may be consulted about some of the decisions, but in general it is the doctor's judgments that are final. Little wonder then that in the eye of the hospital it is the physician who is the real “consumer”. As a consequence, the medical staff represents the “power center” in hospital policy and decision-making, not the administration.

    Although usually there are in this situation four identifiable participants— the physician, the hospital, the patient, and the payer (generally an insurance carrier or government)— the physician makes the essential decisions for all of them. The hospital becomes an extension of the physician; the payer generally meets most of the bills generated by the physician/hospital, and for the most part the patient plays a passive role. We estimate that about 75-80 percent of health-care choices are determined by physicians, not patients. For this reason, the economy directed at patients or the general is relatively ineffective.

    Dining in a completely dark room, unaware what's on your plate while sitting next to a complete stranger may not sound like an ideal restaurant experience but it's certainly an intriguing way to spend a rainy night in London.

    Dans le Noir, close to London's financial district, is a restaurant full of blind waiters and waitresses who become your eyes around the restaurant, whose original Paris branch opened in 2004.

    In the bar with the light, you choose whether you want the fish, meat or vegetable, but the dishes themselves remain a secret, as do the ingredients of the “surprise” cocktails. Bags, coats and devices(设备) that light up, including watches and mobile phones, are kept in the bar. Placing your hand on the shoulder of your guide, you are led to a table in a black dining room that sets up to 60 people. And it is dark.

    The waiters tell you when the food is being placed down in front of you, then the fun begins, trying to get food into your mouth, then identifying just what it is that's on your plate, and finally whether you have missed any of it.

    It's also a great chance to break social convention and eat using your fingers. Those same fingers are also the only way you can tell how much wine you're pouring into your glass.

    The happy atmosphere in the dining room also made the night memorable. You can't really avoid talking to the person next to you at the long tables and guessing what the dishes are certainly provides adequate fuel for the conversations.

    All will be revealed at the end of the meal when you are led back out into the lit bar. Not only do you finally get to see what you've just been eating but also who you've been talking to for the last 90 minutes.

    Do you know that women's brains are smaller than men's? Normally the women's brain weighs 10% less than men's. Since research has shown that the bigger the brain, the cleverer the animal, men must be more intelligent than women. Right? Wrong. Men and women always score similarly on intelligence tests, despite the difference in brain size. Why? After years of study, researchers have concluded that it's what's inside that matters, not just the size of the brain. The brain is made up of "grey matter" and "white matter". While men have more of the white matter, the amount of "thinking" brain is almost the same in both men and women.

    It has been suggested that smaller brain appears to work faster, perhaps because the two sides of the brain are better connected in women. This means that little girls may learn to speak earlier, and that women can understand sorts of different information at the same time. When it comes to talking to the boss on the phone, cooking dinner and keeping an eye on the baby all at the same time, it's women who come out on top every time.

    There are other important differences between two sexes. As white matter is the key to spatial(空间的) tasks, men know better where things are in relation to other things. "A great footballer always knows where he is in relation to the other players, and he knows where to go," says one researcher. That may explain one of life's great mysteries: why men refuse to ask for directions … and women often need to!

    The differences begin when fetuses（胎儿）are about nine weeks old, which can be seen in the action of children when they are very young. A boy would try to climb a barrier before him or push it down while a girl would ask for help from others. These brain differences also explain the fact that more men take up jobs that require good spatial skills, while more women speech skills. It may all go back to our ancestors, among whom women needed speech skills to take care of their babies and men needed spatial skills to hunt, according to one research.

    The popular wisdom for years has been that drinking in moderation (适度)—that's one “standard” drink a day for women and two for men-is linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular (心血管的) disease. But recent studies are casting some doubt on that long-held learning. Science now says it depends on your age and drinking habits.

    A 2017 study of nearly 2 million British with no cardiovascular risk found that there was still a modest benefit in moderate drinking, especially for women over 55 who drank five drinks a week. Why that age? Alcohol can influence the substance in the blood in positive ways, experts say, and that's about the age when heart problems begin to occur.

    Also, a 2018 study found that drinking more than 100 grams of alcohol per week—equal to roughly seven standard drinks in the United States or five to six glasses of wine in the UK—increases your risk of death from all causes and in turn lowers your life expectancy. Links were found with different forms of cardiovascular disease, with people who drank more than 100 grams per week having a higher risk of stroke, heart failure.

    Another 2018 study found that consistently drinking a moderate amount of alcohol, within recommended guidelines, had a protective effect on the heart over time. Unstable drinking habits were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, which the authors reflected might indicate broader lifestyle changes, such as poor health or stress. Former drinkers were also at greater risk.

    Overall, however, the latest thinking is that any heart benefit may be outweighed by other health risks, such as high blood pressure, certain cancers and liver damage.

Women who drink are at a higher risk for breast cancer; alcohol contributes about 6% of the overall risk, possibly because it raises certain dangerous hormones in the blood. Drinking can also increase the chance you might develop liver, mouth and oral cancers. One potential reason: Alcohol weakens our immune systems, making us more likely to inflame (发炎)—a driving force behind cancer.

    Crossing your legs is an extremely common habit; most people don't even notice that they're doing it when they sit down. While you may find it comfortable to sit with one knee crossed over the other, it might be causing health problems that you are not aware of.

    A study published in Blood Pressure Monitoring stated that sitting with your legs crossed can increase your blood pressure. The reason for this is that the blood in your legs has to work against gravity to be pumped back to your heart and that crossing one leg over the other increases resistance(阻力), making it even harder for the blood to circulate. This causes your body to increase your blood pressure to push the blood back to the heart. You won't feel any immediate effects, but repeated, drawn-out increases in blood pressure can cause long-term health problems. So, planning to sit for a long period of time? Don't keep your legs crossed.

    Crossing your legs at the knee can also cause pressure on the major nerve in your leg that passes just below your knee and along the outside of your leg, explains Richard Graves, a medical expert. This pressure can cause numbness and temporary paralysis (麻痹) of some of the muscles in your foot and leg, preventing you from being able to raise your ankle—what we know as that “pins and needles” sensation. While the feeling of discomfort may only last a minute or two, repeatedly crossing your legs until they feel numb can cause permanent nerve damage.

    So next time you sit down, try to get yourself in the habit of sitting with both of your feet on the floor. Not only will it help your posture and stability, but it will also save your health in the long run.

    Science is finaly beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens.

    As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of separation. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choose to give up an immediate food reward for a slightly later (and better) one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when those friend die.

    Pigs respond meaningful to human symbols. When a research team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignored the X carriers in favor of the O's. Then the team switched from real-life objects to T-shirts printed with X or O symbols. Still, the pigs walked only toward the O-shirted people: they had transferred their knowledge to a two-dimensional format, a not inconsiderable feat of reasoning.

    I've been guilty of prejudiced expectations, myself. At the start of my career almost four decades ago, I was firmly convinced that monkeys and apes out-think and out-feel other animals. They're other primates(灵长目动物), after all, animals from our own mammalian(哺乳动物的) class. Fairly soon, I came to see that along with our closest living relatives, whales too are masters of cultural learning, and elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies in the wild on these mammals helped to fuel a viewpoint shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedure kin laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks.

    Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chickens, pigs, goats, and cows, I started to wonder: Will the new science of "food animals" bring an ethical (伦理的) revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will our ethics start to catch up with the development of our science?

    Animal activists are already there, of course, committed to not eating these animals. But what about the rest of us? Can paying attention to the thinking and feeling of these animals lead us to make changes in who we eat?