Your New Year's plan to move more is one of the toughest to stick to, and a group of scientists working with obese(过度肥胖的) mice think they're starting to understand why

    Rather than our sedentary(久坐的) lives causing weight gain, says Alexxai Kraviz, the National Institutes of Health neuroscientist who led the study, changes in brain chemistry after we start gaining weight affect our capacity to move.

    “Obses mice can move just fine,” says Kravitz, who published the work with his team in Cell Metabolism “They just don't.”

    What Kravitz's team found is that the activity of a particular dopamine(多巴胺) receptor linked to movement goes down as mice gain weight on a high-fat diet. So the nice slow down and they move less. And when the researchers restored the activity of that dopamine receptor—DR2—the mice started moving more, even though they were still obese. The team also saw that lean mice missing the DR2 receptor acted like obese mice. This is the target, says Kravitz—restoring that dopamine receptor function. “Maybe 20 or 30 years down the road, we could do that in people,” he says.

    And there is one more thing: The scientists fed normal mice and the mice lacking DR2 the same high-fat diet. Both sets of mice gained weight at the same rate.

    Kravitz says this is important because mice lacking DR2 move less from the get-go, whereas a normal mouse takes a little time to start seeing that dopamine receptor-related loss of exercise. The ability to exercise seems to be disconnected from weight gain, he says.

    “Exercise is a healthy thing to do, but its impact on weight loss has been exaggerated,” he says. “We have to be realistic about the size of the effect of exercise on weight, as opposed to health benefits.”

    Still, before you abandon your New Year's exercise plan, keep in mind that this study was done using a high-fat diet, and not the normal calorie restriction that people maintain when they diet.

    That's a big drawback to the work, says Vicki Vieira-Potter, a University of Missouri physiologist not involved in the study.

    “They feed the mice with high-fat diet, it damages the receptor, and that decreases activity. Those who plan to lost weight should remember high-fat diet is a nice way to cause obesity in the lab, but it's not the same as the normal situation of obesity,” she says.

    Sine also says that a lot of the weight gain in the mice came after they stopped moving around, which indicates that the loss of movement did impact obesity.

    Have you ever lost your temper? Did you yell and scream or want to hit someone? If so, you are angry.

    Everyone gets angry. Maybe you “lose your cool” or “hit the roof.” Anger can even be a good thing. When kids are treated unfairly, anger can help them stand up for themselves. The hard part is learning what to do with these strong feelings.

    Don't lose control if you get angry. Taking it out on others never solves anything. Instead, admit to yourself that you are angry and try to figure out why. What can you do to keep the situation from happening again?

    It helps to talk about your anger with an adult, such as a parent, teacher, or relative. Once you talk about anger, those bad feelings usually start to go away.

Here are some other things you can do when you start to feel angry.

Talk to a friend you can trust

    Count to 10

    Get or give a hug

    Do jumping jacks or another exercise

    Draw a picture of your anger

    Play a video game

    Run around the outside of the house five times as fast as you can

Sing along with the stereo

    Pull weeds in the garden

    Think good thoughts (maybe about a fun vacation or your favorite sport)

    Take a bike ride, go skateboarding, play basketball —do something active!

    Never getting angry is impossible. Instead, remember that how you act when you are angry can make the situation better or worse. Don't let anger be the boss of you. Take charge of it!

    City people usually think they are a lot smarter than country people. They often laugh at simple country ways. But people do not laugh at country music. It is one of the most popular kinds of music in the United States today.

    Perhaps it is so popular because it is about simple but strong human feelings and events—love, sadness, good times and bad times, it tells real life stories and sounds the way people really talk. As life becomes more and more complicated(复杂的), it is good to hear music about ordinary people.

    Country music, sometimes called country western, comes from two kinds of music. One is the traditional music of the people in the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. The other is traditional cowboy music from the West. The singers usually play the guitars, and in the 1920s they started using electric guitars.

    At first city people said country music was low-class. It was popular mostly in the South. But during World War Ⅱ, thousands of Southerners went to the Northeast and Midwest to work in the factories. They took their music with them. Soldiers from the rest of the country went to army camps in the South. They learned to like country music. Slowly it became popular all over the country.

    Today country music is popular everywhere in the United States and Canada, in small towns and in New York City, among black and white, and among educated and uneducated people. About 1,200 radio stations broadcast country music twenty-four hours a day. People sing it in their languages. The music that started with cowboys and poor farmers is now popular all over the world.

    Feelings often run high where insects are concerned, with many people even sick when seeing them, let alone touch or swallow them. And yet insects present a huge nutritional opportunity as an increasing global population seeks more sources of food and feed.

    Insects have generally high levels of animal protein and key micronutrients with lower environmental footprints than traditional alternatives, and they can be raised on leftovers. But cultural, social and economic problems remain, reports an article published today in Nutrition Bulletin.

    “Insects present a nutritional opportunity, but it is unclear how their nutritional quality is influenced by what they are fed,” says Darja Dobermann, a researcher at the University of Nottingham. “In ideal conditions, insects have a smaller environmental impact than most traditional western forms of animal protein; less known is how to raise insect production while maintaining these environmental benefits.”

    “Studies overall show that insects could make valuable economic and nutritional contributions to the food or fed systems, but there are no clear regulations in place to bring insects into such supply systems without them turning into a more expensive version of poultry（家禽）for food,” says Dobermann.

    The article highlights how insects have been a source of food for hundreds of years in more than 100 countries with over 2,000 species that can be eaten; in central Africa, up to 50% of dietary protein has come from insects, with their market value higher than many alternative sources of animal protein.

    Insects need to be large enough to make the effort of catching them worthwhile and easy to locate, preferably in predictably large quantities. They are consumed at various life stages, as raw, fried, boiled, roasted or ground food.

    Google's new camera, called Clips, is a small, smart device. It comes with a case that has a clip (夹子), but it's not designed to be worn on your clothing. Most interestingly, it uses artificial intelligence to take photography out of your hands so it can capture moments on its own.

    This roughly 2-inch by 2-inch camera, with a three-hour battery life and Gorilla Glass for toughness, is intended for candid moments, like when a child does something cute that may happen too quickly for you to pull out your smartphone.

    Onboard the Clips device, it uses machine learning algorithms ( 计 算 程 序 ) to help capture scenes. Those algorithms include face recognition. "Once it learns that there's a face you see frequently, it'll try to get nice photos of those faces," said Juston Payne, the device's product manager. And they also want it to recognize facial expressions, which involved "training it to know what happiness looks like". The Google team also trained it to recognize what not to shoot—like when a child's hand is over the lens, or if it is tossed in a dark purse.

    The only way to see the images is by connecting the camera with your phone, as it has no screen for viewing or editing.

    Were people concerned it could seem strange? Yes, Payne admitted. But they said they addressed that by making it obvious what it is. A green light on the front signals that it is on. Besides, unlike a camera meant to monitor your home, it is not connected to the Internet.

    "This product is only possible because of the way that silicon has advanced," Payne said, noting that it was only in the past year or so that they could squeeze the technology down into a device this size. Going forward, we're likely to get more assistance from the artificial intelligence packed into our apps and gadgets.

    In a recent series of experiments at the University of California, researchers studied toddlers' thinking about winners and losers, bullies (欺凌) and victims.

    In the first experiment, toddlers (学步儿童) watched a scene in which two puppets (木偶) had conflicting goals: One was crossing a stage from right to left, and the other from left to right. The puppets met in the middle and stopped. Eventually one puppet bowed down and moved aside, letting the other one pass by. Then researchers asked the toddlers which puppet they liked. The result: 20 out of 23 toddlers picked the higher-status puppet — the one that did not bow or move aside. It seems that individuals can gain status for being dominant (占优势的) and toddlers like winners better than losers.

    But then researchers had another question: Do toddlers like winners no matter how they win? So, researchers did another experiment very similar to the one described above. But this time, the conflict ended because one puppet knocked the other down and out of the way. Now when the toddlers were asked who they liked, the results were different: Only 4 out of 23 children liked the winner.

    These data suggest that children already love a winner by the age of 21-31 months. This does not necessarily mean that the preference is inborn: 21 months is enough time to learn a lot of things. But if a preference for winners is something we learn, we appear to learn it quite early.

    Even more interesting, the preference for winners is not absolute. Children in our study did not like a winner who knocked a competitor down. This suggests that already by the age of 21-31 months, children's liking for winners is balanced with other social concerns, including perhaps a general preference for nice or helpful people over aggressive ones.

    In a time when the news is full of stories of public figures who celebrate winning at all costs, these results give us much confidence. Humans understand dominance, but we also expect strong individuals to guide, protect and help others. This feels like good news.