As any plane passenger will confirm, a crying baby is almost impossible to ignore, no matter how hard you try. Now scientists believe they may have worked out why. A baby's cry pulls at the heartstrings(扣人心弦) in a way while other cries don't, researchers found.

    Researchers found that a baby's cry can trigger unique emotional responses in the brain, making it impossible for us to ignore them—whether we are parents or not. Other types of cries, including calls of animals in great pain, fail to get the same response—suggesting the brain is programmed to respond specifically to a baby' cry.

    A team of Oxford University scientists scanned the brains of 28 men and women as they listened to a variety of calls and cries. After 100 milliseconds—roughly the time to blink(眨眼)—two parts of the brain that respond to emotion lit up. Their response to a baby's cry was particularly strong. The response was seen in both men and women—even if they had no children.

    Researcher Dr Christine Parsons said, “You might read that men should just notice a baby and step over it and not see it, but it's not true. There is a special processing in men and women, which makes sense from an evolutionary view that both men and women would be responding to these cries.” The study was in people who were not parents, yet they are all responding at 100ms to these particular cries, so this might be a fundamental response present in all of us regardless of parental status.

    Fellow researcher Katie Young said it may take a bit longer for someone to recognize their own child's cries because they need to do more “fine-grained analysis”. The team had previously found that our reactions speed up when we hear a baby crying. Adults performed better on computer games when they heard the sound of a baby crying than after they heard recordings of adults crying.

    Many of us have reached in our pockets, feeling a vibration (振动), wrongly believing our mobile phones have just rung. The phenomenon even has a name: phantom (幻觉的) vibration syndrome—and found it is surprisingly common.

    Now scientists believe that we are so alert (警觉) for phone calls and messages we are misinterpreting slight muscle spasms (痉挛)as proof of a call. Robert Rosenberger, an assistant professor at the Georgia Tech Institute of Technology has studied the delusional calls. He said sufferers describe a vague tingling feeling which they think is their mobile phone indicating it has received a text message or call while on 'silent'. But when the device is retrieved, there was no one on the other end.

    Dr. Rosenberger said he found so many people say, "This happens to me, but I thought I was the only one. I thought I was odd." It seems that the syndrome particularly affects people at the beck and call of mobile phones or pagers. A 2010 study by Michael Rothberg and colleagues found that nearly 70 per cent of doctors at a hospital in Massachusetts suffered phantom vibrations. A more recent study of US college students found the figure was as high as 90 per cent.

    While the odd feeling is widespread, it does not seem to be considered a grave problem. Dr. Rosenberger said: "It's not actually a syndrome in a technical sense. That's just the name that's got stuck to it." He added," Only 2 per cent of people consider it a problem."

    While this phenomenon is widespread, the scientific community has not yet invested much effort in getting to the bottom of why we suffer phantom calls.

    Dr. Rosenberger said: "People are guessing it has something to do with nervous energy. The cognitive(认知的)scientists are talking about brain chemistry, cognitive pathways changing. But it's not like they have brain scans to go on." He said: "We have a phone call in our pocket all the time and it becomes sort of an extension of ourselves. We have this sort of readiness to experience a call. We feel something and we think, OK, that could be a call."

    Living in the wild can be hard. Finding food and staying safe aren't easy. Each day, animals try to survive in their habitats. Not all animals get by on their own. Some animals form a close partnership with other kinds of animals. These pairings are called symbiotic(共生的)relationships.

    In a symbiotic relationship, the animals depend on each other. One animal helps the other meet its needs. Sounds good, right? Not always. Some animals are not very kind to their partners. In some cases, one animal meets its needs but hurts its partner. Take ticks(扁虱), for example. These insects suck blood to live. To get blood, they attach themselves to other kinds of animals. Ticks can pass germs(细菌)that cause disease instead of helping their hosts.

    In other relationships, animals don't treat their partners so poorly. Both animals benefit from living with the other animal.

    Small animals called cleaner shrimps(清洁虾)have found a way of helping fish. As their name suggests, the shrimps clean the fish. They hang out at what scientists call a cleaning station. A fish stops by. Then a shrimp climbs onto the fish and even steps into the fish's mouth. The shrimp uses its tiny claws to pick stuff off the fish's body. That can include dead skin and tiny pieces of food that can hurt the fish. The fish gets a nice cleaning. The shrimp enjoys a tasty meal of fish trash.

    Small birds called plovers(灰斑)are also in the cleaning business. They have big customers-crocodiles. Crocodiles have long noses filled with sharp teeth. Cleaning them is funny. When a crocodile opens its mouth, the plover hops right in. It lets the plover eat small, harmful animals attached to the crocodile's teeth. The plover gets an easy meal while the crocodile gets clean teeth.

    We all know that water is tasteless. But it happens from time to time: you pick up the bottle of water you didn't finish yesterday, and it tastes strange. Most often, you tend to drop the bottle in the trash bin, believing that the water has gone bad. But is it true?

    According to Time, of course not, taste has little to do with quality of water.

    According to Time, when water is exposed to the air for 12 hours, carbon dioxide interacts with the H2O in the water, and the pH value lowers slightly. As a result, the water has a different taste.

    "But it's most likely safe to drink," Norwegian expert Truls Krogh told Science Nordic. "If the water is covered and of good quality to start with, in principle it can last a thousand years. That's because when water is fresh, it contains little organic matter. As long as water is held in clean glasses or bottles, no pollutants will enter it to harm our health."

    People in countries like the US, the UK and Australia usually drink tap water. According to Time, if tap water is drunk within six months, the chlorine (氯气) in the water will be enough to kill any bacteria and keep it safe to drink.

    However, there are also some exceptions. If you accidentally put your fingers into water or store water in unclean containers day after day, microorganism (微生物) will enter the water.

    With the help of surrounding temperature, and sunlight streaming through windows, these microorganisms multiply quickly. Sooner or later, the water will be in the charge of the unfriendly bacteria. And if you drink the water too often, then you're more likely to be ill.

    And what about water in plastic bottles? Heat and plastic are a bad combination, US researcher Kellogg Schwab stresses. When plastic bottles are used at high temperatures, they produce a chemical called BPA. BPA is something that affects hormones (荷尔蒙) and research has tentatively linked it to "several health damage, including heart disease and cancer", Time reported.

    Schwab suggests replacing disposable (一次性的) plastic bottles with the refillable containers made of metal or glass to deal with BPA.

    I came to the United States ten years ago. I would always say that I was trying to study, but there were always things like work and my kids that would not allow me to start.

    Now I realized that those were only excuses. What stopped me was that I was afraid to start studying again. I always believed I would learn by myself.

    One day, however, my son told me that he was sad because his friends would come over and I didn't understand them because I didn't speak English. He was also sad because I could never help him with his homework. That same day, I told myself, "Rocio, you have to start believing in yourself and you will see you can make it."

    The next day, I went downtown to look for a big banner (横幅) in front of the school which said that they offered classes for adults. I came in to see if I could join, but the classes were closed already. That night I took the kids to the movies, and on the way back, I told them we would take a new route. I ended up getting lost. That's the way I found Chaffey College. The following Monday, I went to ask for information. They told me that summer school was starting that week.

    That's how I started studying English last summer. It is difficult, but I have had great rewards. My daughter had written a story for school. It was about the female they most admired and why. She wrote that I was the person she most admired because I had started going to college. I will never forget this.

Reading a book and watching a film are two very different experiences, but expectations can be high when a film of a favourite book is made. There are very many times I have been disappointed by a film of a book I love. So maybe highly regarded books do not always make good films. It is safe to say that great movies may be made from not particularly good books.

The source material may be anything from classic novels, short stones, comic books and stage plays, as well as non­fiction such as biography and autobiography, even those written by ghostwriters. All can work well, but why do many adaptations and indeed remakes fail with both cinema audiences and critics?

A key question is obviously how close to the original the film is. Since a typical film is only around two hours long, it becomes a question of what to leave out, and how to script the dialogue. Sometimes there may be changes to the plot, additions and even different endings to please producers, directors and test audiences. I, like many people, have often left the cinema feeling "the film is not like the book".

Another problem area is the cast. Whether suitable actors are found or not can mean the difference between success and failure. Readers of the book use their imaginations to visualize characters and have very definite ideas about how characters look and sound. This is where I think many film adaptations fall down.

Some books are just too difficult to film for technical reasons, although movies like The Life of Pi are changing this perception. The impact of CGI technology has had a huge impact on the movie industry and allowed the previously unfilmable to become a reality.

 Sometimes authors are very involved in the process and many may even be the screenwriters. This can actually be a bad thing because they may be too close to the material and find it difficult to adapt. At other times they are not the screenwriters, and there are instances where writers have been very unhappy with the film versions of their work. Roald Dahl and Stephen King are examples of this. Even more extreme was novelist J. D. Salinger who made sure no film versions of his popular novels could ever be made. In this situation, it is clear viewers will not be disappointed.