Oh, the places you'll go!

    When it comes to habitat, human beings are creatures of habit. It has been known for a long time that, whether his habitat is a village, a city or, for real globe-trotters (周游世界者), the planet itself, an individual person generally visits the same places regularly. The details, though, have been surprisingly obscure. Now, thanks to an analysis of data collected from 40,000 smartphone users around the world, a new property of humanity's locomotive (移动的) habits has been revealed.

    It turns out that someone's "location capacity", the number of places which he or she visits regularly, remains constant over periods of months and years. What constitutes a "place" depends on what distance between two places makes them separate. But analyzing movement patterns helps illuminate the distinction and the researchers found that the average location capacity was 25. If a new location does make its way into the set of places an individual tends to visit, an old one drops out in response. People do not, in other words, gather places like collector cards. Rather, they cycle through them. Their geographical behavior is limited and predictable, not fancy-free.

    The study demonstrating this, just published in Nature Human Behavior, does not offer any explanation for the limited location capacity it measures. But a statistical analysis carried out by the authors shows that it cannot be explained solely by constraints on time. Some other factor is at work. One of the researchers draws an analogy. He suggests that people's cognitive capacity limits the number of places they can visit routinely, just as it limits the number of other people an individual can routinely socialize with. That socialization figure, about 150 for most people, is known as the Dunbar number, after its discoverer, Robin Dunbar.

    Lehmann says his group is now in search of similar data from other primates (灵长目动物), in an attempt to work out where human patterns of mobility have their roots. For those, though, they will have to rely on old-fashioned methods of zoological observation unless they can work out a way to get chimpanzees to carry smartphones.

    Does your local high school have a student newspaper? Only 1 in 8 of New York's public high schools has student newspapers – and many of those are published just a few times a year. A few more are online, which can leave out poorer schools.

    Rebecca Dwarka, an 18-year-old senior who works for her student paper said, “Facebook is the new way of finding out what happened. Nobody wants to actually sit down and read a whole article about it. This makes a 'whole article' sound a little like a long sentence in lonely places.”

    I am not nostalgic about high school student newspapers and never worked for mine. I put out what was then called a personal magazine with a group of friends because we wanted to write about peace, war and rock 'n' roll without school officials warning us not to make jokes about the local officials.

    School newspapers are in decline because students now find out what happened on social networking websites. This is a little discouraging because it proves that for millions of Americans, journalism is becoming a do-it-yourself thing. Every citizen can be a reporter.

    When something happens, we look for social media messages. Facebook posts and Tweets have become the means by which citizens and reporters can prove, deny, pass on stories and express opinions without the press' challenging, researching or slowing the message.

    But truly good journalism is a craft, not just a blog post. It requires seeing something carefully and it uses an eye for details to help prove a larger view. And even journalism that conveys an opinion tries to be fair. If school newspapers begin to disappear, I hope there are other ways for students to learn that.

    I don't think I can recall a time when I wasn't aware of the beauty of the ocean. Growing up in Australia, I had the good fortune of having the sea at my side. The first time I went to Halfmoon Bay, I suddenly had the feeling of not being able to feel the ground with my feet anymore.

    For my 10th birthday, my sister and I were taken out to the Great Barrier Reef. There were fish in different colors, caves and layers of coral. They made such an impression on me. When I learned that only 1 percent of Australian's Coral Sea was protected, I was shocked. Australian marine life is particularly important because the reefs have more marine species than any other country on earth. But sadly, only 45 percent of the world's reefs are considered healthy.

    This statistic is depressing, so it's important for us to do everything to protect them. The hope that the Coral Sea remains a complete eco-system has led me to take action. I've become involved with the Protect Our Coral Sea activity, which aims to create the largest marine park in the world. It would serve as a place where the ocean's species will all have a safe place forever.

    Together, Angus and I created a little video and we hope it will inspire people to be a part of the movement. Angus also shares many beautiful childhood memories of the ocean as a young boy, who grew up sailing, admiring the beauty of the ocean, and trying to find the secrets of ocean species.

    How a few members of the animal kingdom handle the transition to adulthood?

    African elephants

These beautiful beasts come close to imitate teen rebellion. Calves spend a decade with their mothers in female-dominated groups —- and ladies stay there —- but adolescent boys leave mom for noisy crews of bros. In their 20s, they often downsize to smaller male groups.

    Orangutans (猩猩)

Slow metabolism allows these primates to survive food shortages —- times when weather makes ripe fruit scarce. But energy efficiency comes at a cost; growth and maturation take time. Orangutan mamas nurse their young longer than any other wild creature does.

    Orcas(逆戟鲸)

    Killer whales join their mother's familial group for life. This lasting-relationship seems to increase a pup's chance of survival; if mom dies  a young male (under 30) is three times more likely to die than a peer whose mother is alive. Risk of death post-mom-mortem rises as kids get older.

Harp seals

A harp seal's "childhood" lasts just 12 days. A pup's sole purpose during that brief period of coddling(宠爱) is to constantly nurse, gaining a fifth of its birth weight in blubber(鲸脂) every day. Once it's fat —- they become greater from 25 to 80 pounds —- it slides off the ice and takes on the sea.

    Wolf spiders

    Every parent knows that tired toddlers love to hitch a piggyback ride. The wolf spider straps all her babies (40 or 50, on average) onto her back at once, carrying the brood until they are capable of fully functional spider-hood. But luckily she only has to pull them for a few days.

    Japanese technology giant Toshiba has built a huge "clean" factory farm where it is growing various types of lettuce (莴苣) leaves without sunlight or soil for sale in its new healthcare business.

    Located in a disused 21,000­square­foot electronics factory in Yokosuka, Toshiba announces to have created a perfect "bacteria­free" environment where it will grow three million bags of lettuce a year.

    Completely cut off from conditions outside the temperature controlled tank, lettuce inspectors wear full body suits while making notes on the quality and growth of the leaves on their iPads in order to prevent the air around the plants becoming contaminated.

    Each plant is given man­made lighting to trick it into believing it is exposed to sunlight, while vitamin and nutrients are put directly into its roots, meaning the lettuce does not need soil.

    Toshiba's new high­tech farm may produce the world's highest quality lettuce. The final product will be free of any form of bacteria or insect life before being placed into sealed (密封的) bags, which should ensure the product has a longer shelf life than other lettuces.

    The gardening technique aims to have a bacteria amount of no more than 1/1000th­much lower than that found in normal gardening soil.

    Toshiba aims to harvest three million bags of leaf lettuce, baby leaf greens, cabbages and other kinds of vegetables every year­with each bag likely to cost people £1.

    The most important thing in organic vegetables, the lettuce requires no pesticides (杀虫剂) but is expected to have a similar shelf to plants that have been heavily treated with chemicals.

    The lettuce factory is no marketing trick by Toshiba, however. Instead it represents the company's latest attempt to expand its technology­led business.

    There are already plans for the technology giant to build similar factories around the world over the coming years and it will also be selling the high tech equipment that allows factories to produce similar products of exceptionally high quality.

Biologists from the John Innes Centre in England discovered that plants have a biological process which divides their amount of stored energy by the length of the night. This solves the problem of how to portion out (分配) energy reserves during the night so that the plant can keep growing, yet not risk burning off all its stored energy.

While the sun shines, plants perform photosynthesis (光合作用). In this process, the plants change sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into stored energy in the form of long chains of sugar, called starch (淀粉). At night, the plants burn this stored starch to fuel continued growth.

"The calculations are precise so that plants prevent starvation but also make the most efficient use of their food," said study co-author Alison Smith. "If the starch store is used too fast, plants will starve and stop growing during the night. If the store is used too slowly, some of it will be wasted. "

The scientists studied the plant Arabidopsis, which is regarded as a model plant for experiments. To give the plants some math tests, the biologists let night arrive unexpectedly early or late for them.

During one of the exams, they shut off the lights early on them that had been grown with twelve-hour days and nights. Putting them into darkness after only an eight-hour day means they didn't have time to store as much starch as usual. And this forced the plants to adjust their normal nightly rhythm.

Amazingly, even after this day length trick, the plants did very well in their exams and ended up with just five percent of starch left over at the end of the night. They had neither starved, nor stored starch that could have been used to fuel more growth.

The authors suggested that similar biological calculators may explain how a migratory bird, the little stint, can make a five-thousand-kilometer journey to their summer habitat in the Arctic and arrive with enough fat reserves to survive only approximately half a day more, on average.

The results of the study were published in e Life.