Welcome to our third newsletter of the year!

    Our major activity for March is our Walk for the Woods fundraising event on Saturday, 17^th March, starting any time between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. We will be walking the distance between Warley Woods and Tipperary. It is indeed a long way—80 miles. The more people that you can get to sponsor you, the more money we can raise to help look after our beautiful woodland. More information is available on our website.

    The Sunday volunteers planted two beeches and an oak last week. This was thanks to the money from the Big Tree Plant and to Lisa and Gordon Whitaker, whose friends gave money for the big trees instead of for their wedding presents. Thanks to everyone who took part.

    There were 15 volunteers at the Oral History Training Day which was led very ably by Julia Letts. The group will be meeting again and will start to interview the local people who have offered to tell their stories. We are happy to hear from others who would like to be interviewed about their memories of the Woods for the project. If you or anyone you know is interested, please call Viv Cole at the office. This project is financed by Heritage Lottery Fund.

    There was a huge response to the Forest Schools activities held at half term. These will be held again during the Easter holidays on the following dates: 4^th April from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. for over 8s. On 12^th April from 10 a. m. to 12 noon, there will be a Teddy Bears' Picnic for the under 8s. All these must be booked in advance.

    Finally, don't forget the Easter Egg Roll on Bank Holiday, 9^th April, starting at 11 a.m. Bring your own hard-boiled and decorated egg to roll down the hill in the woods. The first past the finishing line will win a large chocolate egg! This year, due to popular demand, there will also be an Adults' Easter Egg Roll following the children's competition.

    We look forward to seeing you all soon, at one of our many events!

    Google, one of the world's outstanding tech companies, was attacked. It wasn't its search engine that was attacked or its advertising platform or even its social network, Google+. Instead, it was a building.

    Two web security experts hacked (侵入) into its Wharf 7 office in Sydney, Australia, through Google's building management system (BMS). One of them, Billy Rios, says, “My colleague and I have a lot of experience in web security, but it is not something that people couldn't learn. Once you understand how the system works, it is very simple.”

    They found the system on Shodan, a search engine that lists devices connected to the Internet, and then ran it through their own software to identify who owned the building. In the case of the Google hacking, the researchers had no immoral purpose and just informed Google about what they found.

    According to Mr. Rios, Who runs security company Whitescope, there are 50,000 buildings currently connected to the Internet, including research institutes, churches and hospitals, and 2,000 of those are online with no password protection. Martyn Thomas, a professor of IT at Gresham College in the UK, says, “It is beyond doubt that attempts to attack building management systems arc happening all the time.”

    Making a building smart generally means connecting the systems that control heating, Hating and security to the Internet and the wider corporate network. There was a strong reason for doing this, said Andrew Kelly, principal security consultant at defence company Qinetiq.

    “Energy savings are the biggest factor in connecting building management systems to the corporate network,” he says. “It gives those who run the building better control and offers between 20% to 50% in energy savings,” he adds.

    But it also makes them less secure. And if any of these feels like a Hollywood film, think again.

    You may find yourself wondering: do blind people dream? Dream sleep is generated deep within the brain. As it is a function of the brain, and not the eyes, blind people dream as much as a sighted person would. It is interesting that the timing of the blindness in life may in fact influence the content of the dreams, however.

    Research has evaluated the sensory experiences of blind people while dreaming for decades. These findings have been interpreted (解释) within the context of sighted people's experience of dreams. It is useful to consider the content of all dreams to better understand where it differs among the blind.

    Most dreams contain features that are both visual and kinesthetic (related to movement, such as falling). More than half of dreams contain a sound. It is rare for people to describe other sensory experiences, such as those related to smell, taste, and pain. It is estimated that these latter three elements occur in less than 1 percent of dream reports. Interestingly, women more often experience smell and taste in their dreams while men more often report sound and pain.

    Blind people are more likely to report feelings of touch, taste, and smell in their dreams compared to sighted people. This likely corresponds to their waking experience which relies more on these senses. They do not have dramatic differences in dream content, except that they seem to have less aggression in their dreams.

    Despite these subtle differences in dream content, can blind people see when they dream? Some blind people actually can see in dreams, but it depends on when they lost their vision. Individuals who are born blind or those who become blind at a young age (typically by the age of 4 or 5 years) do not have visual imagery in their dreams. On the other hand, those who become blind after 5 or 6 years of age are able to see in their dreams. Therefore, there seems to be a window in the development of the brain in which the capacity to have visual dreams is established.

    People from Britain and Ireland first came to live in Australia in 1788. They brought different dialects （方言）of English with them. These different kinds of English began to mix and change. The newcomers soon began to speak with their own typical accent（口音） and vocabulary. More and more people came to Australia during the Gold Rush in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some came from Britain and Ireland; others came from non-English speaking countries. Australian English continued to grow and change.

    Australian English has also been influenced by American English. During the Second World War, there were many American soldiers staying in Australia. More importantly, American television shows and music have been popular in Australia since the 1950s.

    Australians use many words that other English speakers do not use. The famous Australian greeting, for example, is G'day! A native forest is called the bush and central Australia is called the outback. Many words were brought to Australia from Britain and Ireland. For example, mate means "friend", and it is still used in Britain. Some of these words have changed in meaning. Some words have come from Australian original languages, many of which are names for animals, plants and places, like dingo and kangaroo.

    Australian spelling comes from British spelling. In words like organise and realise, -ise is the expected and taught spelling method. In words like colour, favourite, -our is the normal, but nouns such as the Labor Party and Victor Harbor are spelled with -or. Program, on the other hand, is more common than programme.

    There are also differences in the definition （定义）of words Australians use in different parts of the country. For example, football means "rugby" in New South Wales and Queensland, but "Australian rules football" in everywhere else in Australia. In New South Wales, a swimming costume is called a cossie or swimmers, while in Queensland it is called togs and bathers in Victoria.

    By analyzing the fossilized teeth of some of our most ancient ancestors, a team of scientists led by the universities of Bristol (UK) and Lyon (France) have discovered that the first humans significantly breastfed their infants (婴儿) for longer periods than their contemporary relatives.

    The results, published in the journal Science Advances, provide a first insight into the practice of weaning (断奶)that remain otherwise unseen in the fossil record.

    The team sampled minute amounts from nearly 40 fossilized teeth of our South African fossil relatives, early Homo, Paranthropus robustus and Australopithecus africanus. They measured the proportions of their stable calcium isotopes (同位素）in the tooth enamel(牙釉质), which are a function of the mother milk intake by infants. They show that early Homo offspring(后代) was breastfed in significant proportions until the age of around three to four years, which likely played a role in the apparition of traits that are specific to human lineage(血统), such as the brain development.

    In contrast, infants of Paranthropus robustus, that became extinct around one million years ago and were a more robust species in terms of dental anatomy, as well as infants of Australopithecus africanus, stopped drinking sizeable proportions of mother milk in the course of the first months of life.

    These differences in nursing behaviors likely come with major changes in the social structures of groups as well as the time between the birth of one child and the birth of the next.

    One of the study's lead authors, Dr Theo Tacail said: "The practice of weaning -- the duration of breastfeeding, age at non-milk food introduction and the age at cessation of suckling -- differs among the modern members of the hominid family which includes humans and modern great apes: orangutan, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.

    The development of such behavioral differences likely played major roles in the evolution of the members of human lineage, being associated for instance with size and structure of social groups, brain development.

    However, getting insights into these behavioral changes from fossils that are millions of years old is a challenge and, so far, little evidence allow discussing nursing practices in these fossil species.

    The findings stress the need for further exploration of calcium stables isotopes compositions in the fossil record in order to understand the co-evolution of weaning practices with other traits such as brain size or social behaviors."

http://www.dentaldailynews.com/first-human-ancestors-breastfed-for-longer-than-contemporary-relatives/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190829115427.htm

    For several decades, there has been an organized campaign intended to produce distrust in science, funded by those whose interests are threatened by the findings of modern science. In response, scientists have tended to stress the success of science. After all, scientists have been right about most things, from the structure of the universe to the relativity of time and space.

    Stressing successes isn't wrong, but for many people it's not persuasive. An alternative answer to the question "Why trust science?" is that scientists use the so-called scientific method. But what is called the scientific method isn't what scientists actually do. Science is dynamic: new methods get invented; old ones get abandoned; and at any particular point, scientists can be found doing many different things. False theories sometimes lead to true results, so even if an experiment works, it doesn't prove that the theory it was designed to test is true.

    If there is no specific scientific method, then what is the basis for trust in science? The answer is the methods by which those claims are evaluated. A scientific claim is never accepted as true until it has gone through a long process of examination by fellow scientists. Scientists draft the initial version of a paper and then send it to colleagues for suggestions. Until this point, scientific feedback is typically fairly friendly. But the next step is different: the revised paper is submitted to a scientific journal, where things get a whole lot tougher. Editors deliberately send scientific papers to people who are not friends or colleagues of the authors, and the job of the reviewer is to find errors or other faults. We call this process "peer review" because the reviewers are scientific peers—experts in the same field—but they act in the role of a superior who has both the right and the responsibility to find fault. It is only after the reviewers and the editor are satisfied that any problems have been fixed that the paper will be printed in the journal and enters the body of "science."

    Some people argue that we should not trust science because scientists are "always changing their minds." While examples of truly settled science being overturned are far fewer than is sometimes claimed, they do exist. But the beauty of this scientific process is that science produces both creativity and stability. New observations, ideas, explanations and attempts to combine competing claims introduce creativity; transformative questioning leads to collective decisions and the stability of scientific knowledge. Scientists do change their minds in the face of new evidence, but this is a strength of science, not a weakness.