The Enigma (谜）of Beauty

    The search for beauty spans centuries and continents. Paintings of Egyptians dating back over 4,000 years show both men and women painting their nails and wearing makeup. In 18th-century France, wealthy noblemen wore large wigs (假发）of long, white hair to make themselves attractive. Today, people continue to devote a lot of time and money to their appearance.

    There is at least one good reason for the desire to be attractive：beauty is power. Studies suggest that good-looking people make more money, get called on more often in class, and are regarded as friendlier.

    But what exactly is beauty? It's difficult to describe it clearly, and yet we know it when we see it. And our awareness of it may start at a very early age. In one set of studies, six-month-old babies were shown a series of photographs. The faces on the pictures had been rated for attractiveness by a group of college students. In the studies, the babies spent more time looking at the attractive faces than the unattractive ones.

    The idea that even babies can judge appearance makes perfect sense to many researchers. In studies by psychologists, men consistently showed a preference for women with larger eyes, fuller lips, and a smaller nose and chin while women prefer men with large shoulders and a narrow waist. According to scientists, the mind unconsciously tells men and women that these traits —the full lips, clear skin, strong shoulders —equal health and genetic well-being.

    Not everyone thinks the same way, however. " Our hardwiredness can be changed by all sorts of expectations —mostly cultural, " says C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. What is considered attractive in one culture might not be in another. Look at most Western fashion magazines：the women on the pages are thin. But is this "perfect" body type for women worldwide? Scientists' answer is no; what is considered beautiful is subjective and varies around the world. They found native peoples in southeast Peru preferred shapes regarded overweight in Western cultures.

    For better or worse, beauty plays a role in our lives. But it is extremely difficult to describe exactly what makes one person attractive to another. Although there do seem to be certain physical traits considered universally appealing, it is also true that beauty does not always keep to a single, uniform standard. Beauty really is, as the saying goes, in the eye of the beholder.

    As I stood in the return line and watched people, I became extremely impatient. My daughter had got four Barbie dolls and two identical Cabbage Patch Kids on Christmas, so I was eager to return toys that she didn't need. Suddenly a strong idea came to me. I eyed the lady in front of me with three small girls on her leg. The family looked poor. The children were without coats, and they had dirty faces and hair. “You are ready to get out of here, aren't you? Give her the things you want to return,” the still voice spoke. “Give them to her? These are mine. I'm not giving her my stuff,” I argued. I swallowed the urge that threatened to escape my lips when the voice spoke again. “Give her the toys.” I was familiar with the voice. I know I couldn't argue with that voice.

    I sighed and tapped the lady on the shoulder. “Ma'am,” I cleared my throat. She looked at me with kind, tired eyes surrounded by wrinkles. “Yes?” she asked. “Would your little girls like to have these toys?” I pointed to my basket full of returns. “Would your children like to have them?” She was speechless, and I swore that tears were about to well up in her eyes. “You'd be doing me a favor. I can't stand in this line in a moment longer.” “You have no idea,” she shook her head. “You have no idea what that means to me.”

    I started loading her basket as the excited girls watched. “Merry Christmas,” I said, “God bless you.” She replied as I nodded and exited the line. I didn't want to go the Walmart that day, but I went. I didn't want to give the lady my kid's toys, but I did. Sometimes doing what we don't want to do is exactly what we're supposed to do.

    Rosie Dutton, a teacher from Relax Kids in Tamworth, UK, used two apples to show her students the often unseen but harmful effects of school bullying(校园欺凌). She posted the lesson on Facebook, where it's been shared more than 160,000 times.

    Rosie Dutton explained that during one of her classes she presented the children with two red apples. What the kids didn't know was that before the lesson, she had repeatedly dropped one of the apples on the floor. And yet, on the outside at least, both apples looked perfect.

    “I picked up the apple I'd dropped on the floor and started to tell the children how I disliked this apple,” Dutton wrote. “I told them that because I didn't like it, I didn't want them to like it either, so they should call it names too.”Some of the children looked at her as if she were “crazy”, but the students passed the apple around the circle, calling it names.

    Continuing the exercise, the teacher then passed the second apple around the circle. This apple, however, was showered with words like: “Your skin is beautiful,” and “ what a beautiful colour you have.”

    Dutton then showed the students both apples once again, stressing that “there was no change, and both apples still looked the same.”

    Finally, Dutton cut both apples open. The apple that the class treated kindly looked fresh inside. But the other apple—the one they'd treated poorly —was bruised（瘀伤的) beneath its skin.

    “I think there was a light bulb moment for the children immediately,” Dutton said. “When people are bullied, especially children, they feel horrible inside and sometimes don't show or tell others how they are feeling. If we hadn't have cut that apple open, we would never have known how much pain we had caused it.”

    Dutton explained how important it is to teach children to stand up for one another, and to stop any form of bullying.

    “Let's create a generation of kind caring children,” the teacher wrote. “The tongue has no bones, but is strong enough to break a heart. So be careful with your words.”

    When my brother and I were young, my mom would take us on Transportation Days.

    It goes like this: You can't take any means of transportation more than once. We would start from home, walking two blocks to the rail station. We'd take the train into the city center, then a bus, switching to the tram, then maybe a taxi. We always considered taking a horse carriage in the historic district, but we didn't like the way the horses were treated, so we never did. At the end of the day, we took the subway to our closest station, where Mom's friend was waiting to give us a ride home—our first car ride of the day.

    The good thing about Transportation Days is not only that Mom taught us how to get around. She was born to be multimodal (多方式的). She understood that depending on cars only was a failure of imagination and, above all, a failure of confidence—the product of a childhood not spent exploring subway tunnels.

    Once you learn the route map and step with certainty over the gap between the train and the platform, nothing is frightening anymore. New cities are just light-rail lines to be explored. And your personal car, if you have one, becomes just one more tool in the toolbox—and often an inadequate one, limiting both your mobility and your wallet.

    On Transportation Days, we might stop for lunch on Chestnut Street or buy a new book or toy, but the transportation was the point. First, it was exciting enough to watch the world speed by from the train window. As I got older, my mom helped me unlock the mysteries that would otherwise have paralyzed my first attempts to do it myself: How do I know where to get off? How do I know how much it costs? How do I know when I need tickets, and where to get them? What track, what line, which direction, where's the stop, and will I get wet when we go under the river?

    I'm writing this right now on an airplane, a means we didn't try on our Transportation Days and, we now know, the dirtiest and most polluting of them all. My flight routed me through Philadelphia. My multimodal mom met me for dinner in the airport. She took a train to meet me.

New App Helps People Remember Faces

    Large gatherings such as weddings and conferences can be socially overwhelming. Pressure to learn people's names only adds to the stress. A new facial-recognition app could come to the rescue, but privacy experts recommend proceeding with caution.

    The app, called SocialRecall, connects names with faces via smartphone cameras and facial recognition, potentially avoiding the need for formal introductions. "It breaks down these social barriers we all have when meeting somebody," says Barry Sandrew, who created the app and tested it at an event attended by about 1,000 people.

    After receiving an invitation to download SocialRecall from an event organizer, the user is asked to take two selfies and sign in via social media. At the event, the app is active within a previously defined geographical area. When a user points his or her phone camera at an attendee's face, the app identifies the individual, displays the person's name, and links to his or her social media profile. To protect privacy, it recognizes only those who have agreed to participate. And the app's creators say it automatically deletes users' data after an event.

    Ann Cavoukian, a privacy expert who runs the Privacy by Design Center of Excellence praises the app's creators for these protective measures. She cautions, however, that when people choose to share their personal information with the app, they should know that "there may be unintended consequences down the road with that information being used in another context that might come back to bite you."

    The start-up has also developed a version of the app for individuals who suffer from prosopagnosia, or "face blindness," a condition that prevents people from recognizing individuals they have met. To use this app, a person first acquires an image of someone's face, from either the smartphone's camera or a photograph, and then tags it with a name. When the camera spots that same face in real life, the previously entered information is displayed. The collected data are stored only on a user's phone, according to the team behind the app.

German cities are redrawing road markings to create new cycle paths for the duration of the Covid-19 lockdown, as cyclists demand more space to physically distance on their way to work.

Local authorities in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin trialled (试行) temporary widening of two cycle paths on 27 March, arguing it would help cyclists keep the required 1.5-metre distance apart while car traffic was down owing to Germans' coronavirus (冠状病毒) restrictions.

On Friday, the council declared the plan a success because it had improved cycling safety while not blocking traffic.

The council said it had used removable tape and mobile signs to mark out the widened paths, which can be removed when the current restrictions on movement are lifted.

Residents in 133 other German cities have formally submitted applications for similar pop-up bike paths to their local authorities on the back of a campaign by Environmental Action Germany (DUH), an environmental NGO.

The campaign group cites new research linking air pollution to higher coronavirus death rates as an argument for redrawing road signs across the country. "The coronavirus is showing us that clean air is necessary," said DUH's chair, Jurgen Resch. "It is now especially important to temporarily make it more important for people to move safely on their bikes. This will help improve air quality, enable exercise in fresh air while keeping a safe distance and avoid unnecessary accidents."

In Germany, bike repair shops are allowed to work because of the Covid-19 going on. Three federal states, Berlin, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, have allowed bike shops to stay open.