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    In the famous fairy tale, Snow White eats the Queen's apple and falls victim to a curse（诅咒）;in Shakespeare's novel, Romeo drinks the poison and dies; some ancient Chinese emperors took pellets（药丸）that contained mercury（水银）, believing that it would make them immortal, but they died afterward.

    Poison has long been an important ingredient in literature and history, and it seems to always be associated with evil, danger and death. But how much do you really know about poison?

    An exhibition, The Power of Poison, opened last month at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, intended to give the audience a more vivid understanding of poison.

    The museum tour starts in a rainforest setting, where you can see live examples of some of the most poisonous animals: caterpillars（毛毛虫）, frogs and spiders. Golden poison frogs, for instance, aren't much bigger than a coin, but their skin is covered with a poison that can cut off the signaling power of your nerves, and a single frog has enough venom to kill 10 grown humans.

    "Poisons can be bad for some things," Michael Novacek, senior vice president of the museum, told NBC News. "Yet they can also be good for others."

    A poisonous chemical found in the yew tree is effective against cancer, which is what led to the invention of a cancer-fighting drug called Taxol.

    The benefits from natural poisons are not limited to just medicine. Believe it or not, many substances（物质）that we regularly ingest（摄入）-chili, coffee and chocolate-owe their special flavors or stimulating（提神的）effects to chemicals that plants make to poison insects.

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    New research, attempting to throw light upon how male and female brains differ, has found that timing is everything. American Vanderbilt University researchers Stephen Camarata and Richard Woodcock discovered that females have a significant advantage over males in timed tests and tasks. The study involved more than 8,000 males and females ranging in age from 2 to 90 from across the US.

    “We found hardly any differences in overall intelligence. But we discovered that females performed better than men in time limited situations,” Camarata said, “It is very important for teachers to understand this difference in males and females when it comes to assigning work and tests.”

    Many males can do a better job without strict time limits, added Camarata.

    “Consider that many classroom activities, including testing, are directly or indirectly related to processing speed,” the researchers wrote in their report. “The higher performance in females may contribute to a classroom culture that favors females, not because of teacher bias(偏见)but because of inherent(与生俱来的)differences in gender processing speeds.”

    The researchers found that males scored lower than females in all age groups in tests measuring processing speed. However, the study also found that males consistently outperformed females in some language abilities, such as identifying objects and knowing antonyms(反义词)and synonyms(同义词). The research contradicts the popular belief that girls develop all communication skills earlier than boys.

    The researchers found no significant overall intelligence differences between males and females in any age groups.

    “We believe there are fundamental differences in how male and female brains end up getting organized,” Camarata said, “Our next studies will give us some insight into where these processing differences are occurring.”

    Modern festival-goers who worry about ending up with a dead mobile phone battery after days stuck in a muddy field with no electric plug power points may now have a solution—power boots.

    Mobile phone company European Telco Orange has introduced a phone charging prototype(原型)— a set of thermoelectric gumboots or Wellington boots with a “power generating sole” that changes heat from the wearer's feet into electrical power to charge battery-powered hand-helds.

    The boot was designed by Dave Pain, managing director at GotWind, a renewable energy company. Pain said the boot uses the Seebeck effect, in which a circuit made of two dissimilar metals conducts electricity if the two places where they connect are held at different temperatures. “In the sole（鞋底）of the Wellington boot there's a thermocouple and if you apply heat to one side of the thermocouple and cold to the other side it produces an electrical charge,” Pain said. “That electrical charge we then pass through to a battery which you'll find in the heel of the boot for storage of the electrical power for later use to charge your mobile phone.” These thermocouples are connected electrically, forming an array of multiple thermocouples (thermopile). They are then sandwiched between two thin ceramic wafers(薄片). When the heat from the foot is applied on the top side of the ceramic wafer and cold is applied on the opposite side, from the cold of the ground, electricity is made.

    But the prototype boot does have one shortcoming. You have to walk for 12 hours in the boots to make one hour's worth of charge.

    In the classic marriage vow (誓约), couples promise to stay together in sickness and in health. But a new study finds that the risk of divorce among older couples rises when the wife－not the husband－becomes seriously ill.

    "Married women diagnosed with a serious health condition may find themselves struggling with the impact of their disease while also experiencing the stress of divorce." said researched Amelia Karraker.

    Karraker and co-author Kenzie Latham analyzed 20 years of data on 2,717 marriages from a study conducted by Indiana University since 1992. At the time of the first interview, at least one of the partners was over the age of 50.

    The researchers examined how the onset (发生) of four serious physical illnesses affected marriages. They found that, overall, 31% of marriages ended in divorce over the period studied. The incidence of new chronic (慢性的) illness onset increased over time as well, with more husbands than wives developing serious health problems.

    "We found that women are doubly weak when their marriage breaks up in the face of illness," Karraker said. "They're more likely to be widowed, and if they're the ones who become ill, they're more likely to get divorced."

    While the study didn't assess why divorce is more likely when wives but not husbands become seriously ill, Karraker offers a few possible reasons. "Gender roles and social expectations about caregiving may make it more difficult for men to provide care to sick spouses." Karraker said. "And because of the imbalance in marriage markets, especially in older ages, divorced men have more choices among potential partners than divorced women."

    Given the increasing concern about health care costs for the aging population, Karraker believes policymakers should be aware of the relationship between disease and risk of divorce.

    "Offering support services to spouses caring for their other halves may reduce martial stress and prevent divorce at older ages." she said. "But it's also important to recognize that the pressure to divorce may be health-related and that sick ex-wives may need additional care and services to prevent worsening health and increased health costs."

    When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes(定式)keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, kind, cautious and emotionally enthusiastic. Men tend to be more competitive, confident, rude and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.

    What's not clear is the origin of these differences. Evolutionary psychologists think that these are natural features from ancient hunters and gatherers. Another school of psychologists argues that both sexes' personalities have been shaped by traditional social roles, and that personality differences will shrink as women spend less time taking care of children and more time in jobs outside the home.

    To test these hypotheses(假设), a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the change is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India's or Zimbabwe's than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal(男权的)Botswanan clan(部族)seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to separate.

    These findings are so unbelievable that some researchers have argued they must be due to cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But according to new data from 40.000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level(使平等)the barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being developed.

    The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women.

    Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less confident and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.

    To explain these differences, Dr. Schmitt and his partners from Austria and Estonia point to the hardships of life in poorer countries. They note that in some other species, environmental stress tends to extremely affect the larger sex. And, they say, there are examples of stress decreasing biological sex differences in humans.

Fifteen-year-old Sansa has been writing for eight years and has been working on a book for the past four. Feeling stuck and unable to write, she started searching for writing groups in Los Angeles, looking for guidance. When she found WriteGirl, she was inspired.

Keren Taylor started WriteGirl in 2001 as a way to help teen girls who did not have access to creative writing programs. "Teen girls are incredibly vulnerable(脆弱的) and invisible," Taylor said. "They really need to be lifted up and inspired."

At WriteGirl, 400 women writers volunteer to mentor(指导) 700 teenagers a year. Every girl who has gone through the mentorship program has gone to college and several have pursued careers as professional writers. Through the program, girls dive into poetry, fiction, songwriting, play and so on, learning techniques from professional women writers. This leads to well-rounded training and sets WriteGirl apart from other organizations.

A typical exercise at WriteGirl is mic and rant, a 30-second session before writing for each girl. As a vehicle for teens to get their ideas out, it empowers girls to explore anything meaningful to them. "Not the flowery language, or rather, complicated expressions that sound skillful, but more of the natural, this is what I'm thinking and what I'm feeling." Taylor said.

Sansa's mentor Danyella Wilder is attracted by the long-term nature of mentoring at WriteGirl. Wilder wishes she had a program like this herself when she was 15. "To just have an organization where people are spending their time just to tell you, ‘Hey, good job,' or ‘That was amazing.' You're at the age where you need to hear that."