“Plants were expected to get larger with increased carbon dioxide in atmosphere, but  changes in temperature, humidity and nutrient availability seem to trumped the benefits of  increased carbon dioxide，” said researchers from the National University of Singapore.

    45 percent of the species studied now reach smaller adult sizes than they did in the past. The  researchers pointed out that warmer temperatures and changing habitats, caused by climate  change, are possible reasons for shrinking creatures.

     “We do not yet know the mechanisms involved, or why some organism are getting smaller while others are unaffected，” the researchers said. “Until we understand more, we could be risking negative consequences that we can't yet quantify.”

    The change was big in cold­blooded animals. Only two decades of warmer temperatures were enough to make reptiles smaller. An increase of 1 degree centigrade caused nearly a 10 percent increase in metabolism (新陈代谢). Greater use of energy resulted in tiny tortoises and little lizards. Fish are smaller now too. Though overfishing has played a part in reducing numbers, experiments show that warmer temperatures also stop fish growth. There is a recent report on warmer temperatures' negative effects on plankton, the base of the marine ecosystem.

    Warm­blooded animals weren't immune from the size change caused by climate change. Many birds are now smaller. Mammals have been miniaturized too. Soay sheep are thinner. Red deer are weaker. And polar bears are smaller, compared with historical records.

    This is not the first time this has happened in Earth's history. 55 million years ago, a warming event similar to the current climate change caused bees, spiders and ants to shrink by 50 to 75 percent over several thousand years. That event happened over a long time than the current climate change.

    The speed of modern climate change could mean organisms may not respond or adapt quickly enough, especially those with long generation times. So, it is likely that more negative influences of climate change will be shown in future.

    Sunday is more like Monday than it used to be. Places of business that used to keep daytime“business hours” are now open late into the night. And on the Internet, the hour of the day and the day of the week have become irrelevant（不相关的）. A half century ago in the United States, most people experienced strong and precise dividing lines between days of rest and days of work, school time and summer time. Today the boundaries still exist, but they seem not clear.

    The law in almost all states used to require stores to close on Sunday; in most, it no longer does. It used to keep the schools open in all seasons except summer; in most, it still does. And whether the work week should strengthen its legal limits, or whether it should become more “flexible,” is often debated. How should we, as a society, organize our time? Should we go even further in relaxing the boundaries of time until we live in a world in which every minute is much like every other?

    These are not easy questions even to ask. Part of the difficulty is that we rarely recognize the “law of time” even when we meet it face to face. We know as children that we have to attend school a certain number of hours, a certain number of days, a certain number of years — but unless we meet the truant officer (学监), we may well think that we should go to school due to social custom and parents' demand rather than to the law. As adults we are familiar with “extra pay for overtime working,” but less familiar with the fact that what constitutes（构成）“overtime” is a matter of legal definition. When we turn the clock forward to start daylight-saving time, have we ever thought to ourselves: “Here is the law in action”? As we shall see, there is a lot of law that has great influence on how we organize and use time: compulsory education law, overtime law, and daylight-saving law — as well as law about Sunday closing, holidays, being late to work, time zones, and so on. Once we begin to look for it, we will have no trouble finding a law of time to examine and assess.

    In a cold winter, a couple had to move out from the luxury villa because of bankruptcy. The husband worked day and night to support the family but with no care of his wife. So she thought, “he doesn't love me anymore, he just cares his business… not me”.

    One day, she began to take a bath, he stopped her at the door, “Let me take it first, OK?” “Why not let me shower first?” she asked. “I was tired, sweetie, you take it later, OK?” She was totally depressed.

    On a morose(闷闷不乐的）day, she found nothing to do and turned on his computer, a few words blurred her eyes...It was his diary:

    Today, I was quite sad, she asked me why I was always taking the bath first, and I said to her, I was exhausted. She was unhappy, in her mind, I treated her not as well as usual, but how can I do? I wasn't as rich as before! We moved to the small apartment, there was only a shower in such a freezing winter. But I found that if one person took the shower first, the room could get a little warm, so every time I rushed to the bathroom first. I was thinking that, when she took the shower, the room would get warmer, at least1℃, 2℃ or 3℃.

    Now I can't give her comfortable life, bring her the luxury restaurant, buy expensive dresses for her, but at least, I can give her 1℃ love.

    Why Do People Blink Their Eyes?

    People blink(眨眼) their eyes tens of thousands of times every day. Scientists have long believed blinking was an involuntary movement and served mainly to keep the eyeballs wet. But a new study suggests it has a more important purpose.

    An international team of scientists from the University of California at Berkeley studied the blinking of human eyelids. The journal Current Biology published their findings. The team said they found that blinking “repositions our eyeballs so we can stay focused” on what we are seeing. They said that when we blink our eyelids, the eyes roll back into their sockets--the bony area that surrounds and protects the eyes. However, the researchers found the eyes don't always return to the same position. They said this causes the brain to tell the eye muscles to reorganize our eyesight.

    Gerrit Maus is the lead writer of the report. He serves as an assistant professor of psychology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Maus says: “Our eye muscles are quite sluggish(迟缓的) and imprecise, so the brain needs to constantly adapt its motor signals to make sure our eyes are pointing where they're supposed to. Our findings suggested that the brain measures the difference in what we see before and after a blink, and commands the eye muscles to make the needed corrections.” The researchers said that without such corrections our surroundings would appear unclear and even jumpy. They said the movement acts “like a Steadicam(摄影稳定器) of the mind.”

    The researchers said they asked volunteers to sit in a dark room while staring at a small dot on a flat surface. They used special cameras to follow the volunteer's blinks and eye movements. After each blink, the dot was moved one centimeter to the right. The volunteers did not notice this, but the brain did. It followed the movement and directed the eye muscles to refocus on the dot. After the dot was moved in this way 30 times, the volunteers' eyes changed their focus to the place where they predicted it would be.

    Professor Maus says “Even though participants did not consciously register that the dot had moved, their brains did, and adjusted with the corrective eye movement. These findings add to our understanding of how the brain constantly adapts to changes, commanding our eye muscles to correct for errors in our bodies' own hardware.”

    Billie Holiday was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed Lady Day by her loyal friend and musical partner, Lester Young, Holiday had a great influence on jazz and pop singing. Her voiced style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of controlling tempo (节奏). Above all, she was admired for her deeply personal and direct approach to singing.

    She co-wrote a few songs, and several of them have become jazz standards, notably God Bless the Child, Don't Explain, and Lady Sings the Blues. She also became famous for singing jazz standards written by others, including Easy Living and Strange Fruit.

    Her early career is hard to track down with accuracy. But she later gained work singing in local jazz clubs before being spotted by a talent scout (星探), John Hammond in 1933.

    Her voice and recordings were loved for the depth of emotion and intensity she could bring to classic standards. Her range of voice was not the greatest, but her extraordinary low rough voice was soon to become very famous and influential.

    She was an important icon (偶像) of the jazz era and influential in the development of jazz singing. In the late 1930s, she began singing a civil rights song called Strange Fruit, a song which told the tale of a lynching (用私刑处死) of a black man in the Deep South. It was very controversial for that period and it was not played on radios. It was recorded for Commodore Records and she performed it many times over the next 20 years.

    Billie Holiday had a difficult upbringing which influenced her attitude toward life. She experienced many violent relationships. She also became increasingly dependent on various drugs which contributed to her early death in 1959, aged just 44.

    People with an impulsive personality refer to those who tend to do things without considering the possible dangers or problems first. According to a new study by researchers at the University of Georgia, such people may be more likely to have food addiction. The study found that people exhibiting impulsive behavior weren't necessarily overweight, but impulsiveness was related to a direct relationship with food, and therefore, less healthy weight.

    Food addiction has been compared to addictive drug use. Studies have linked the dopamine (多巴胺) release that occurs after tasting delicious food to the dopamine release that happens when people consume other addictive substances.

    Impulsive behavior involves several personality traits (特点). Two of these traits, known as negative urgency and lack of perseverance, were particularly associated with food addiction and high BMI (身体质量指数) during the study.

    Negative urgency is characterized by the tendency to behave impulsively when experiencing negative emotions. Some people might drink alcohol or take drugs. For others, it could mean eating to feel better. Lack of perseverance is when a person has a hard time finishing hard or boring tasks. People with a lack of perseverance might have difficulty attempting to change addictive eating behavior, which could also cause obesity.

    “Impulsiveness might be one reason why some people eat in an addictive way despite motivation to lose weight,” said Dr. Ashley Gearhardt, a clinical psychologist. He was involved in developing the Yale Food Addiction Scale in aid of those people. “We are theorizing that if food addiction is really a thing, then our measure, the Yale Food Addiction Scale, should be related to helping control impulsive action,” said Gearhardt.

    Clinical psychologist Dr. James MacKillop, whose lab was conducting the study, believes that therapies used to treat addictive drug behavior could help people who suffer from addictive eating habits.

    “Most of the programs for weight loss at this point focus on the most obvious things, which are clearly diet and exercise,” MacKillop said. “It seems that managing strong desires to eat would naturally fit in with the skills a person would need to eat healthily.”