The Enigma (谜）of Beauty

    The search for beauty spans centuries and continents. Paintings of Egyptians dating back over 4,000 years show both men and women painting their nails and wearing makeup. In 18th-century France, wealthy noblemen wore large wigs (假发）of long, white hair to make themselves attractive. Today, people continue to devote a lot of time and money to their appearance.

    There is at least one good reason for the desire to be attractive：beauty is power. Studies suggest that good-looking people make more money, get called on more often in class, and are regarded as friendlier.

    But what exactly is beauty? It's difficult to describe it clearly, and yet we know it when we see it. And our awareness of it may start at a very early age. In one set of studies, six-month-old babies were shown a series of photographs. The faces on the pictures had been rated for attractiveness by a group of college students. In the studies, the babies spent more time looking at the attractive faces than the unattractive ones.

    The idea that even babies can judge appearance makes perfect sense to many researchers. In studies by psychologists, men consistently showed a preference for women with larger eyes, fuller lips, and a smaller nose and chin while women prefer men with large shoulders and a narrow waist. According to scientists, the mind unconsciously tells men and women that these traits —the full lips, clear skin, strong shoulders —equal health and genetic well-being.

    Not everyone thinks the same way, however. " Our hardwiredness can be changed by all sorts of expectations —mostly cultural, " says C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. What is considered attractive in one culture might not be in another. Look at most Western fashion magazines：the women on the pages are thin. But is this "perfect" body type for women worldwide? Scientists' answer is no; what is considered beautiful is subjective and varies around the world. They found native peoples in southeast Peru preferred shapes regarded overweight in Western cultures.

    For better or worse, beauty plays a role in our lives. But it is extremely difficult to describe exactly what makes one person attractive to another. Although there do seem to be certain physical traits considered universally appealing, it is also true that beauty does not always keep to a single, uniform standard. Beauty really is, as the saying goes, in the eye of the beholder.

    London's newest skyscraper (摩天大楼)is called the Shard and it cost about 430 million pounds to build. At a height of almost 310 metres, it is the tallest building in Europe. The Shard has completely changed the appearance of London. However, not everyone thinks that it is a change for the better.

    The Shard was designed by the famous Italian architect Renzo Piano. When he began designing the Shard for London, Piano wanted a very tall building that looked like a spire (尖顶)• He wanted the glass surfaces to reflect the sky and the city. The sides of the building aren't regular. So the building has an unusual shape. It looks like a very thin，sharp piece of broken glass. And that is how the building got the name: the Shard. Piano says that the spire shape of the Shard is part of a great London tradition. The shape reminds him of the spires of the churches of London or the tall masts (桅杆）of the ships that were once on the river Thames.

    The Shard has 87 floors. At the top, there is an observatory. At the moment the building is empty, but eventually there will be a five-star hotel. There will also be top quality restaurants, apartments and offices.

    Before building work began, a lot of people didn't want the Shard though the plans were approved. Now they are still unhappy about the Shard. Some critics say that such a tall skyscraper might be good in a city like New York, but not in London. They say that the best thing about the Shard is its spire shape. But that is the only thing. There is no decoration, only flat surfaces. The Egyptians did that 4,500 years ago. They also think the Shard is too big for London. It destroys the beauty of the city.

    Other critics don't like what the Shard seems to represent. They say that the Shard shows how London is becoming more unequal. Only very rich people can afford to buy the expensive private apartments and stay in the hotel. But the people who live near the Shard are among the poorest in London. So the Shard seems a symbol of the division in society between the very rich and the poor.

    The Shard now dominates the London skyline. It is not certain, however, that ordinary London citizens will ever accept it as a valuable addition to the city.

    People often ask which is the most difficult language to learn, and it is not easy to answer because there are many factors to take into consideration. Firstly, in a first language the differences are unimportant as people learn their mother tongue naturally, so the question of how hard a language is to learn is only relevant when learning a second language.

    A native speaker of Spanish, for example, will find Portuguese much easier to learn than a native speaker of Chinese, for example, because Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, while Chinese is very different, so first language can affect learning a second language. The greater the differences between the second language and our first, the harder it will be for most people to learn.

    Many people answer that Chinese is the hardest language to learn, possibly influenced by the thought of learning the Chinese writing system, and the pronunciation of Chinese does appear to be very difficult for many foreign learners. However, for Japanese speakers, who already use Chinese characters in their own language, learning writing will be less difficult than for speakers of languages using the Roman alphabet.

    Different cultures and individuals will find different languages more difficult. In the case of Hungarian for British learners, it is not a question of the writing system, which uses a similar alphabet, but the grammatical complexity, though native speakers may find it easier, struggling with languages that the British find relatively hard.

    No language is easy to learn well, though languages which are related to our first language are easier. Learning a completely different writing system is a huge challenge, but that does not necessarily make a language more difficult than another. In the end, it is impossible to say that one language that is the most difficult language in the world.

    How much weight a baby gains during its first month could determine its IQ, new research found. The study found that children who gain more weight, and whose heads grow quickly during the first month of life, tend to have a higher IQ when they start school.

    Researchers at the University of Adelaide, in Australia studied 13, 800 children who were born at full-term. They found that those who put on 40% of their birth weight in the first four weeks had an IQ 1.5 points higher than those who only put on 15% of their birth weight. Those who experienced the biggest growth in head circumference(头围) also had the highest IQs by the age of six.

    "Head circumference is an indicator of brain volume, so a greater increase in head circumference in a newly-born baby suggests more rapid brain growth, "says the author of the study, Dr. Lisa Smithers. She added, "Overall, newly-born children who grew faster in the first four weeks had higher IQ scores later in life. Those children who gained the most weight scored especially high on the verbal IQ at age 6. This may be because neural (神经的) structures for the verbal IQ develop earlier in life, which means the rapid weight gain during the first month could be having a direct cognitive benefit for the children."

    Previous studies have shown the association between early postnatal (产后的) diet and the IQ, but this is the first study of its kind to focus on the IQ benefits of rapid weight gain in the first month of life. Dr. Lisa Smithers says the study further highlights the need for successful feeding of newly-born babies." We know that many mothers have difficulty establishing breastfeeding in the first week of their babies' life,” Dr. Lisa Smithers said.

    "The findings of our study suggest that if babies are having feeding problems, there needs to be early intervention(干预) in the management of that feeding."

    When a driver slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian crossing the road illegally, she is making a moral decision that shifts risk from the pedestrian to the people in the car. Self-driving cars might soon have to make such ethical (道德的)judgments on their own — but settling on a universal moral code for the vehicles could be a tough task, suggests a survey.

    The largest ever survey of machine ethics, called the Moral Machine, laid out 13 possible situations in which someone's death was unavoidable. Respondents were asked to choose who to spare in situations that involved a mix of variables: young or old, rich or poor, more people or fewer. Within 18 months, the online quiz had recorded 40 million decisions made by people from 233 countries and territories.

    When the researchers analyzed these answers, they found that the nations could be divided into three groups. One contains North America and several European nations where Christianity has been the dominant (占支配地位的)religion; another includes countries such as Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan, with strong Confucian or Islamic traditions. A third group consists of countries in Central and South America, such as Colombia and Brazil. The first group showed a stronger preference for sacrificing older lives to save younger ones than did the second group, for example.

    The researchers also identified relationships between social and economic factors in a country. They found that people from relatively wealthy countries with strong institutions, such as Finland and Japan, more often chose to hit people who stepped into traffic illegally than did respondents in nations with weaker institutions, such as Nigeria or Pakistan.

    People rarely face such moral dilemmas, and some cities question whether the possible situations posed in the online quiz are relevant to the ethical and practical questions surrounding driverless cars. But the researchers argue that the findings reveal cultural differences that governments and makers of self-driving cars must take into account if they want the vehicles to gain public acceptance.

    At least Barbara Wage, who heads a group working on autonomous-vehicle ethics at Audi in Ingolstadt, Germany, says such studies are valuable. Wage argues that self-driving cars would cause fewer accidents, proportionally, than human drivers do each year—but that people might focus more on events involving robots.

    Surveys such as the Moral Machine can help to begin public discussions about these unavoidable accidents that might develop trust. "We need to come up with a social consensus," she says, "about which risks we are willing to take."

    Cli-Fi refers to "climate fiction"; it is a term invented by journalist Dan Bloom. These are fictional books that somehow or someway bring real climate change science to the reader. What is really interesting is that Cli-Fi books often present real science in a believable way. They become fun teaching tools. There are some really well known authors such as Paolo Bacigalupi and Margaret Atwood. A list of other candidate Cli-Fi novels was provided by Sarah Holding in the Guardian.

    What makes a Cli-Fi novel good? In my opinion, it has to have some real science in it. And it has to get the science right. Second, it has to be fun to read. When done correctly, Cli-Fi can connect people to their world; it can help us understand what future climate may be like, or what current climate effects are.

    One thing that is hard to imagine is the future. What will the world be like decades from now when Earth temperatures have continued to rise? What will agriculture be like? What will coastal communities be like? It is also hard to imagine what living a subsistence agriculture life is like, today. What happens to lives and communities when the rains change, or don't come at all? What would that world look like?

    One recent example of Cli-Fi literature is South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby. In this book we follow Cooper Gosling, who is traveling to a research location on Antarctica to create paintings. Yes, an artist is sent to live with researchers and crew ­ with funding from the National Science Foundation. After arriving at the South Pole, Cooper has to become acquainted with the strange social system that exists there. Ashley writes the book in such a way that you actually feel you are huddled(拥挤) in the cold with her and her co-workers.