Getting electricity has always been a problem for the 173 people living in Nuevo Saposoa, a small village in Peru, South America. However, things went from bad to worse in March 2015 after heavy rains damaged the only power cables in the area. The villagers were forced to use oil lamps, which are not only expensive but also dangerous because of the harmful gases they produce.

    Luckily, researchers at the University of Technology (UT) in Lima, Peru heard about their problem and found a wonderful solution. They made a lamp that can be powered by plants and soil, both of which can be easily found in the Amazonian rainforest where the village lies. The lamp takes energy from a plant growing in a wooden box and uses it to light up an LED light bulb.

While that may sound amazing and even impossible, the science behind the ides is quite simple. As plants create their food (using the sun's energy, water and chemicals from the soil), they also produce waste which they return to the soil. Tiny animals in the soil eat this waste and they produce electrons – the building blocks of electrical energy. The UT team put special sticks inside the soil to capture the energy and keep it in the lamp's batteries for later use. The researchers say a single charge can power a 50-watt Led light for two hours - enough time for local villagers to get their evening work done.

The university gave ten Plant Lamps to the villagers of Nuevo Saposoa in October 2015. So far, they have been a huge success! Elmer Ramirez, the UT professor who invented the lamp, believes the Plant Lamp could help improve the lives of many people, especially small rainforest communities, 42% of whom have no electricity.

   Do you want to live another 100 years or more? Some experts say that scientific advances will one day enable humans to last tens of years beyond what is now seen as the natural limit of the human life span.

    “I think we are knocking at the door of immortality(永生),” said Michael Zeya, a Montclair State University business professor and author of two books on the future. “I think by 2075 we will see it and that's a conservative estimate(保守的估计).”

    At the conference in San Francisco, Donald Luria, a professor at New Jersey Medical School in Newark said advances in using genes as well as nanotechnology(纳米技术) make it likely that humans will live in the future beyond what has been possible in the past. “There is a great push so that people can live from 120 to 180 years,” he said. “Some have suggested that there is no limit and that people could live to 200 or 300 or 500 years.”

    However, many scientists who study in ageing are doubtful about it and say the human body is just not designed to last past about 120 years. Even with healthier lifestyles and less disease, they say failure of the brain and organs will finally lead all humans to death.

    Scientists also differ on what kind of life the super aged might live. “It remains to be seen if you pass 120, you know; could you be healthy enough to have good quality of life?” said Leonard Pooh, director of the University of Georgia Gerontology Centre. “At present people who could get to that point are not in good health at all.”

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    Eat like a king in the morning, a prince at noon, and a farmer at night. This saying is all about the importance of breakfast. And now scientists can tell us just why it's so important. According to a study carried out at Imperial College London, UK, skipping (忽略)the first meal of the day not only means you eat more at lunch, but also that your brain wants to find more unhealthy foods.

    The study suggests that there is a special part of our brain called the orbitofrontal cortex (眶额皮层), which plays an important part in making choices about what we eat. It is used for identifying（识别） the taste of food, especially when skipping breakfast. It is more likely to target high-calorie foods when you're on an empty stomach.

    Scientists did an experiment on this. Dr Tony Goldstone from Imperial College London, scanned (扫描) the brains of 21 men and women, around the age of 25. On the first day, these people skipped breakfast before the scans. On the second day, they had cereal (谷物), bread and jam as breakfast. After the scan on both days, they had their lunch.

    When the volunteers had skipped breakfast, they ate around 20 percent more at lunch, compared with days when they had eaten breakfast. Their brain scans also showed the orbitofrontal cortex was especially responsive to high-calorie foods. "We believe that it identifies the value of foods – how pleasant, how delicious something is," Goldstone told The Guardian.

    There is a popular belief that goldfish only have a three-second memory. But a 15-year-old schoolboy from Adelaide has just finished an experiment to tell us that it is not true. He shows everybody that the goldfish is smarter than we think.

    "I don't believe that they had a three-second memory because animals need their memory, so they build up over time a knowledge of where the food is," said Rory Stokes, a student at the Australian Science and Mathematics School.

    He did the experiment in a small tank(鱼缸)of goldfish. "I decided to get a bit of red Logo and just feed them next to that. Every day I'd put it in and spread food around it." He said.

    "At first they were a bit scared of it, but by the end of the three weeks, they were actually almost coming before I put the food in."

    After leaving the fish alone for a week, Rory placed the red Logo block in the tank again.

    "They remembered perfectly well," he said.

    "They actually had a time faster than the average(平均)of the three feeds before I left."

    The goldfish showed that they not only could store information, but also had the ability to get it back at a later date.

    Culum Brown, a researcher at Sydney′s Macquarie University, has studied fish behavior for more than ten years.

    He says his studies of Australian native fish show fish are smart animals that know how to avoid enemies and catch food like any other animal.

    "The thing that I really liked about Rory′s experiment is that he not only got that classical conditioning going but the fact that he could get thorn next just to that specific coloured marker. I thought it was really good." He said.