The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the St. Louis Outlet Mall is expanding its restrictions on unaccompanied teenagers. In 2006, a parental-escort (陪同)policy was established: on Fridays and Saturdays starting at 6 p.m., anyone under 17 that isn't accompanied by a guardian who is at least 21 years old will be kicked out of the mall. It was around this time that other malls around the U.S. likewise banned unaccompanied teens during certain evening hours.

Starting from this Friday, the St. Louis Outlet Mall is pushing its parental-escort rule back to 3 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Similarly, the Mall of America expanded its parental-escort policy during the recent holiday shopping season. Normally, the policy bans kids under 16 without guardians(监护人) from 4 p.m. until closing time just on Fridays and Saturdays. But because of a fight in the mall involving dozens of young people that took place on Dec. 18, 2012—- a weekday, the policy was broadened to include peak 2013 holiday shopping hours, including Thanksgiving Day and all of the Christmas week.

    Teen disturbances in other malls may cause more shopping centers to introduce or expand parental-escort policies. The Indianapolis Star noted that two incidents in 2013 in area shopping centers raised the possibility that Indianapolis malls might need to consider banning unaccompanied teenagers.

   Obviously, such bans are aimed at stopping violence and other outbursts involving teenagers. More importantly, from a purely business perspective, these bans aim to attract shoppers who might otherwise be hesitant to go to the mall because of concerns about violence and outbursts involving teenagers. The restrictions allow mall security officers to systematically kick out a group of people that are considered to be loud, thuggish and bad for business overall. But they attract much criticism from online communities. Some argue that teens have the right to shop without a guardian. “Not all teens are disrespectful and troublemakers,” Pamela Chapman wrote. “In fact, it's been my experience that most are good kids.”

Again, the biggest influence on stricter mall policies for teens seems to be that they're just plain good for business. Malls reported strong sales growth after they first carried out the policies six years ago. “We've had some success with the parental-escort policy, and families like shopping out here together,” the manager of the St. Louis Outlet Mall told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . If there's one rule in retail, it's this—- if a small initiative proves successful in boosting sales, then it's all but guaranteed that a larger initiative will follow.

Keeping secrets is a burden

    “Don't tell anyone”. We hear these words when someone tells a secret to us. But it can be hard to keep a secret. We're often tempted to “spill the beans(说漏嘴)”, even if we regret it later.

    According to Asim Shah, professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, US, keeping a secret may well “become a burden”. This is because people often have an “obsessive and anxious urge to share it with someone”.

    An earlier study, led by Anita E. Kelly, a scientist at the University of Notre Dame, US, suggested that keeping a secret could cause stress. People entrusted(受委托的) with secrets can suffer from depression, anxiety, and body aches, reported the Daily Mail.

    But with secrets so often getting out, why do people share them at all? Shah explained that people often feel that it will help them keep a person as a friend. Another reason people share secrets is guilt over keeping it from someone close to them. A sense of distrust can develop when people who are close do not share it with each other. “Keeping or sharing secrets often puts people in a position of either gaining or losing the trust of someone,” according to Shah.

    He added that talkative people could let secrets slip out (泄露).But this doesn't mean that it is a good idea only to share secrets with quiet people. A quiet person may be someone who keeps everything inside. To tell such a person a secret may cause them stress, and make them talk about the secret. Shah said that to judge whether to tell someone a secret.

    Shah said that to judge whether to tell someone a secret, you'd better put yourself in their position. Think about how you would feel to be told that you mustn't give the information away. Shah also recommended that if you accidentally give up someone's secret you should come clean about it. Let the person know that their secret isn't so secret anymore.

    These days, it seems like everyone wants to go out into space and live on new planets. Rather than depend on another pre-existing planet, could we make a new, proper planet ourselves?

    To start with, if we do want to be living on it, we should find a good place in space to put the new planet. We'd want it to be in a habitable zone, meaning the planet should be at the right distance from its star to make sure there would be perfect temperatures and most importantly, liquid (液态的) water.

    We'd also need the right materials to make the planet. Our Earth is made up of many different elements (元素). If we made our own new planet we'd probably want it to have similar elements and a similar structure (结构). We'd also want enough water to form some oceans.

    But even if we get all of the materials creating a new planet like Earth could have many troubles. It might be something more like a huge space station. It would be pretty expensive if we wanted it to be super big.

    We would probably also need a lot of food since there's going to be many scientists and astronauts out in space working on this project!

    According to NASA, each astronaut uses about 0. 83 kilograms of food per meal, including 0.12 kilograms of packaging (包装) material. Without the weight of the packaging material, we'd need about 780 kilograms of food just to feed one astronaut for a year.

    Putting all these together could make it possible to make our own planet one day! In reality, creating a new planet would probably require a very modern technology and there would be tons of other things to think about. And if this is even possible, it likely won't happen for a very long time.

Tests have shown robots can diagnose heart problems in as little as four seconds, as a review of artificial intelligence (AI) finds machines are now as good at spotting illness as doctors.

Analyzing a patient's heart function on a cardiac MRI (心脏磁共振成像) scan currently takes doctors around 13 minutes. But a new trial by University College London (UCL) showed an AI program could read the scans in less time with equal accuracy. There are approximately 150,000 such scans performed in the UK each year, and researchers estimate that fully using AI to read them could save 54 clinician-days (临床天数) at each cardiac centre per year. So it can make up for the shortage of doctors.

It is hoped that AI where computer systems are able to learn from data to identify new patterns with minimal human intervention will transform medicine by helping doctors spot diseases such as heart disease and cancer faster and earlier. However, most scans are still read by specially trained doctors.

Dr Charlotte Manisty, who led the UCL research, said, "Cardiovascular MRI offers in- comparable image quality for assessing heart structure and function. However, current manual analysis remains basic and outdated. Automated machine techniques offer the potential to change this and completely improve efficiency and accuracy, and we look forward to further research that could confirm the superiority to human analysis."

She added, "Our dataset of patients with a range of heart disease who received scans enabled us to demonstrate that the greatest sources of measurement errors arise from human factors. This indicates that automated techniques are at least as good as humans, with the potential soon to be 'super-human'—transforming clinical and research measurement precision."

Professor Alastair Denniston said, "Within those handful of high-quality studies, we found that by deep learning AI could indeed detect disease ranging from cancer to eye disease as accurately as health professionals. But it's important to note that it did not absolutely exceed human professional diagnosis. "

One of the tallest wooden buildings in Europe, a 98m timber mixture skyscraper, is to rise in Berlin.

The 29-storey WoHo Tower, to be designed by a firm of Norwegian architects, is intended to be a "light-house project" for low-carbon construction, towering over Potsdamer Platz and the Landwehr Canal.

Its core, including lifts and a staircase, is to be built around a steel-reinforced concrete structure but the rest of the building, including flats, offices, cafes and a kindergarten, will be fashioned down wooden beams and panels.

"As Norwegians, we are used to working a lot with timber," Nicolai Riise, CEO of the Mad Architects' Practice said.

"The thing about timber is that it demonstrates sustainability from top to bottom. The carbon footprint is close to zero and it's a fantastic material to build with. If you look at this in a broader way, it's one of the ways we are going to be able to beat the climate crisis."

Wooden skyscrapers, once regarded as an unprofitable pipe dream, have become a realistic prospect with the coming of cross-laminated building techniques and more flexible planning laws. Because these structures' parts are fit with care, they can be far lighter than their concrete equivalents and are thought to be relatively resistant to fire. A cubic meter of wood can also take an estimated ton of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Larger wooden structures are planned elsewhere. London is examining blueprints for the 300-meter Oakwood Tower. A project in Tokyo could rise to 350m.

Would you drink water that had once been flushed down a toilet? After it's been cleaned, that is. The climate is warming, and the population of drought-prone states California continues to grow. So recycling wastewater into drinking water may become a necessity.

But, it can be really hard for people to get over their disgust at the thought of drinking recycled water. People are grossed out by cycled water, because it was once wastewater—you know, the stuff that goes down your kitchen drains, your showers, your toilets. And even though it's cleaned up to a standard that is identical, if not better, than commercially bottled water, the key barrier to recycled water acceptance is people's disgust regarding it, " said Daniel Harmon, a psychologist in University of California.

In one experiment, the researchers had some participants watch a short video promoting water conservation. And in another experiment, they added a video explaining why recycled water might trigger disgust even though all pollutants have been removed. And neither video had a strong effect on people's willingness to drink recycled water or to support the practice.

The messages were not enough to get them to actually use recycled water more. "Disgust is such a powerful reaction that simply giving more information is not going to really be effective. " The study appears in the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology.

Researchers say it's probably going to take a lot more to get people to embrace recycled water. For example, it might help to see members of their community drinking water that's gone, as it's called, from "toilet to tap, " with no ill effects.

It is clear that these kinds of more direct campaigns for acceptance are necessary to get people to get over that psychological barrier—to take that first sip, so to speak. Cheers!