“Our aim is to take our art to the world and make people understand what it is to move,” said David Belle, the founder of parkour ( also called free running－a kind of extreme sport).

    Do you love running? It is a good exercise, yet many people find it boring. But what if making your morning jog a creative one? Like jumping from walls and over gaps, and ground rolls? Just like the James Bond in the movie Casino Royale? Bond jumps down from a roof to a windowsill and then runs several blocks over obstacles on the way. It is just because of Bond's wonderful performances that the sport has become popular worldwide.

    Yes, that's parkour, an extreme street sport aimed at moving from one point to another as quickly as possible, getting over all the obstacles in the path using only the abilities of the human body. Parkour is considered an extreme sport. As its participants dash around a city, they may jump over fences, run up walls and even move from rooftop to rooftop.

    Parkour can be just as exciting and charming as it sounds, but its participants see parkour much more than that.Overcoming all the obstacles on the course and in life is part of the philosophy(理念) behind parkour. This is the same as life. You must determine your destination, go straight, jump over all the barriers as if in parkour and never fall back from them in your life, to reach the destination successfully. A parkour lover said, “I love parkour because its philosophy has become my life, my way to do everything.”

    Another philosophy we've learnt from parkour is freedom. It can be done by anyone, at any time, anywhere in the world. It is a kind of expression of trust in yourself that you earn energy and confidence.

    American researchers found females are the more talkative sex because of a special “language protein” in the brain.

    The study, conducted by neuroscientists (神经学家) and psychologist from the University of Maryland, concluded that women talked more because they had more of the Foxp2 protein. The research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that higher levels were found among humans that were women but in rats that were males. Their findings came after it was previously claimed that ladies speak about 20,000 words a day — over 13,000 more than men. “This study is one of the first to report a sex difference in the expression of a language-associated protein in humans or animals,” said Prof Margaret McCarthy, who led the study. In their study, the researchers attempted to determine what might make male rats more vocal than their female friends.

    They separated four-day-old rats from their mothers and then counted the number of times they cried out in the “ultrasonic (超声波的) range”, the frequencies higher than humans can hear, over five minutes. While both sexes called out hundreds of cries, the males called out twice as often, they found. But when the pups were returned to their mother's cage, she fussed over her sons first. Tests conducted on the parts of the brain known to be associated with vocal calls showed the male pups have up to twice as much Foxp2 protein as the females. The researchers then increased the production in the brains of female pups and reduced it in males. This led to the female rats crying out more often and their mothers showing more interest in them. In contrast, males became less “talkative”.

    The researchers then tested samples from ten children, aged between three and five, which showed that females had up to 30 per cent more of the Foxp2 protein than males, in a brain area key to language in humans.

    “Based on our observations, we assume higher levels of Foxp2 in girls and higher levels of Foxp2 in male rats is an indication that Foxp2 protein levels are associated with the more communicative sex,” said Prof McCarthy.

    “Our results imply Foxp2 as a component (成分) of the neurobiological basis of sex differences in vocal communication in mammals.”

    There might be as many as 10 million species of complex life on this planet today —— a huge number. But add up all of the complex species that ever lived and some biologists think the grand total would be about five billion. The estimate leads to an astonishing conclusion: a staggering 99% of species are not around any more. They have been driven to extinction.

    More species are joining the ranks of the extinct every year. Many scientists believe we are living through an episode of remarkably rapid extinction, on a scale that has been seen only five times in the last half a billion years.

    They call this current episode the sixth mass extinction —— a large, global decline in a wide variety of species over a relatively short period of time. And they tend to agree that humans are the main cause.

    Over-hunting, overfishing, and human-driven habitat loss are pushing many species to the brink. In fact, we have changed the planet so much that some geologists are now suggesting that we have entered a new phase in Earth's history; an epoch they call the ＂Anthropocene＂. By 2100, it is expected that humans will have caused the extinction of up to half of the world's current species.

    Because we are living through this extinction, it is relatively easy for us to study the driving forces behind it. But how do we determine what caused other mass die-offs that happened long ago? To do so we have to look at what archaeologists, palaeontologists, geologists and other scientists have concluded from the evidence they have gathered.

    The trouble is, those scientists do not always agree with one another —— even about the most recent extinction event. As well as the five-or six- mass extinctions, there have also been many smaller extinctions.

    One of these mini extinction events happened towards the end of the Pleistocene, a few tens of thousands of years ago. It is sometimes called the ＂megafaunal＂ extinction because many of the species it claimed were particularly large animals, weighing more than 97lb (44kg). However, its cause remains a debate amongst scientists.

    Donald was not very good at math. He could not understand the teacher's explanations. Even when the teacher explained something a second time, Donald still could not understand it. "Never mind," Donald told himself, "I'm quite good at other subjects. I'll cheat in the math exam, and then I won't be in trouble."

    "I will sit next to the boy who's good at math,'' he thought, "and copy down his answers." The day of the exam came, and Donald sat next to Brian Smith, who was always at the top of the class in math. Donald carefully copied Brian's answers onto his own exam paper. At the end of the exam, the teacher collected the papers and graded them. Then she said, "Well, boys and girls. I've decided to give a prize to the student who got the highest grade. However, it's difficult for me to decide who to give the prize to, because two students, Donald and Brian, got the same grade."

    "Let them share it,'' one of the other students said.

    "I have thought about that,'' the teacher said, "but I have decided to give the prize to Brian." Donald was angry when he heard this. He stood up and said, "That is not fair. I got the same grade as Brian." "That is true," the teacher said. "However, Brian's answer to Question 18 was 'I don't know', while yours was 'Neither do I'."

    What are two things that make humans different from animals? One is language, and the other is music. It is true that some animals can sing (and many birds sing. better than a lot of people). However, the songs of animals, such as birds and whales, are very limited. It is also true that humans, not animals, have developed musical instruments.

    Music is strange stuff. It is clearly different from language. However, people can use music to communicate things—especially their emotions. When music is combined with speech in a song, it is a very powerful form of communication.

    If music is truly different from speech, then we should process music and language in different parts of the brain. The scientific evidence suggests that this is true. Sometimes people who suffer brain damage lose their ability to process language. However, they don't automatically lose their musical abilities. For example, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, had a stroke in 1953. It injured the left side of his brain. He could no longer speak or understand speech. He could, however, still compose music until his death ten years later. On the other hand, sometimes strokes cause people to lose their musical ability, but they can still speak and understand speech.

    Why does music have such a strong effect on us? That is a harder question to answer. Geoffrey Miller, a researcher at University College, London, thinks that music and love have a strong connection. Music requires special talent, practice, and physical ability. That's why it may be a way of showing your fitness to be someone's mate. For example, singing in tune or playing a musical instrument requires fine muscular control. You also need a good memory to remember the notes. And playing or singing those notes correctly suggests that your hearing is in excellent condition. Finally, when a man sings to the woman he loves, it may be a way of showing off.

    However, Miller's theory still doesn't explain why certain combinations of sounds influence our emotions so deeply. For scientists, this is clearly an area that needs further research of sounds influence our emotions so deeply. For scientists, this is clearly an area that needs further research.