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Tail Spin

    Two dolphins race around in a big pool in the Ocean Park. The smaller dolphin Grace, shown off a few of her tricks, turning around and waving hello to the crowd. The most amazing thing about her, however, is that she's even swimming at all. She doesn't have a tail.

Grace lost her tail as a baby when she got caught up in a fish trap. When the dolphin arrived at the Ocean Park in December 2005, she was fighting for her life. “Is she going to make it?” Her trainer, Abbey Stone, feared the worst. Grace did make it — but her tail didn't. She ended up losing her flukes and the lower part of her peduncle.

Over the past six years, she has learned to swim without her tail. Dolphins swim by moving their flukes and peduncle up and down. Grace taught herself to move another way—like a fish! She pushed herself forward through the water by moving her peduncles from side to side.

    The movement put harmful pressure on Grace's backbone. So a company offered to create a man-made tail for her. The tail had to be strong enough to stay on Grace as she swam but soft enough that it wouldn't hurt her.

    The first time Grace wore the artificial tail. She soon shook it off and let it sink in the bottom of the pool. Now, she is still learning to use the tail. Some days she wears it for an hour at a time, others not at all. “The tail isn't

necessary for her to feel comfortable,” says Stone, “but it helps to keep that range of motion(动作) and build muscles(肌肉).”

    Now, the dolphin is about to get an even happier ending. This month, Grace will star in Dolphin Tale, a film that focus on her rescue and recovery. Her progress has inspired more than just a new movie. Many people travel from near and far to meet her. Seeing Grace swim with her man-made tail gives people so much courage.

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    A 12 -year-old girl who had a feeling that she might be quite clever has taken a test and proved she was absolutely right.

    After raising the idea with her parents and pestering (纠缠)them for the best part of a year, Lydia took the test in her summer holidays. It turns out the test wasn't that hard after all.

    "I was really nervous before the test and I thought it was going to be really hard. But as I started the test, I thought it was a bit easier than I thought it was going to be," she said.

    Lydia Sebastian achieved the top score of 162 on Mensa's Cattell III B paper, showing she has a higher IQ than well-known geniuses Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The comparison doesn't sit well with the British student, who's currently in Year 8 at a selective girl's grammar school in Essex, England.

    "I don't think I can be compared to such great intellectuals as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. They've achieved so much. I don't think it's right," Lydia told CNN.

To explain Lydia's mark's level, the top adult score in the Cattell III B test, which mainly tests verbal(语言) reasoning, is 161. A top 2% score—which allows entry to Mensa, the club for those with high IQs—would be 148 or over. Lydia scored 162, placing her in the top 1% of the population.

    Lydia's not quite sure what she wants to do when she leaves school, although she's leaning toward something "based around Maths, because it's one of my favorite subjects." "All I'm going to do is work as hard as I can, and see where that gets me," she said.

    Every year, millions of people head to London's Trafalgar Square to see Nelson's Column, and the four lion statues that “guard” it. And last month, during the London Design Festival, a bright red lion sculpture was added to the collection.

    But this was more than just a statue: It had a large open mouth, with an LED screen inside it. At the same time, passersby could type in random words on a screen close to the lion, which were used to produce an AI-created poem. The most interesting part of the poems lies in their randomness, as the words that people choose to enter include many things, such as the time, the weather and their mood. In the daytime, the finished poem appeared on the LED screen, but at night, it was projected (投射) onto the lion's body and the famous Nelson's Column, in a 1ovely light display.

    Es Devlin, the sculpture's creator, was inspired by the history behind the four historic lion statues. Edwin Landseer, the designer of the lions, wanted them to look much more animated, but Queen Victoria refused his plan. This made Devlin wonder, "What if we could give a lion a poetic voice?" According to Devlin, although England has seen many poems about national identity in recent years, these works have been lacking imagination. "I wanted to make a piece that was poetic and collective" he told BBC News.

    After standing for almost 180 years, the purpose of Trafalgar Square has changed over the years. But thanks to the high-tech lion and its poetry, the square is standing the test of time.

    In recent years, a growing body of research has shown that our appetite and food intake are influenced by a large number of factors besides our biological need for energy, including our eating environment and our perception（感知）of the food in front of us.

    Studies have shown, for instance, that eating in front of the TV (or a similar distraction) can increase both hunger and the amount of food consumed. Even simple visual clues, like plate size and lighting, have been shown to affect portion size and consumption.

    A new study suggested that our short-term memory also may play a role in appetite. Several hours after a meal, people's hunger levels were predicted not by how much they'd eaten but rather by how much food they'd seen in front of them—in other words, how much they remembered eating.

    This disparity (新旧研究的差异）suggests the memory of our previous meal may have a bigger influence on our appetite than the actual size of the meal, says Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Bristol.

    "Hunger isn't controlled individually by the physical characteristics of a recent meal. We have identified an independent role for memory for that meal," Brunstrom says. "This shows that the relationship between hunger and food intake is more complex than we thought."

    These findings echo earlier research that suggests our perception of food can sometimes trick our body's response to the food itself. In a 2011 study, for instance, people who drank the same 380-calorie milkshake on two separate occasions produced different levels of hunger-related hormones （荷尔蒙），depending on whether the shake's label said it contained 620 or 140 calories. Moreover, the participants reported feeling more full when they thought they'd consumed a higher-calorie shake.

    What does this mean for our eating habits? Although it hardly seems practical to trick ourselves into eating less, the new findings do highlight the benefits of focusing on our food and avoiding TV and multitasking while eating.

    The so-called mindful-eating strategies can fight distractions and help us control our appetite, Brunstrom says.

    While elephants born without tusks (长牙)are not unheard of，they normally form just 2 to 6 percent of the population. However, that is not the case at Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, where an astonishing 33 percent of female elephants born after the country's civil war ended in 1992 are tuskless. While that may appear to be just a coincidence, Joyce Poole, an elephant behavior expert, has another theory. The researcher thinks we may be witnessing unnatural evolution of the species due to the constant hunting of elephants for valuable ivory.

    Poole says before the country's 15-year-long civil war, the 100,000-acre park was home to over 4,000 elephants. However, by the time the conflict ended in 1992, about 90 percent of them had been killed for ivory to help finance weapons (武器)and meat to feed the soldiers. Of the less than 200 survivors, over 50 percent of adult females had no tusks. Therefore, it is not surprising that the park's tuskless elephant population has grown greatly.

    This is not the first time researchers have observed a great change in the population of elephants. At Zambia's South Luangwa National Park and Lupande Game Management Area， areas which were heavily hunted in the 1970s and 1980s, 35% of elephants 25 years or older and 13% of those younger than 25 are now without tusks. A 2008 study published found that the number of tuskless females at the Ruaha National Park in Tanzania went from 10.5 percent in 1969 to almost 40 percent in 1989, largely due to illegal hunting for ivory.

    The recent ban on ivory in both the US and China should help get rid of, or at least reduce, elephant hunting. However, scientists are not sure how long it will take for elephants with a higher rate of tuskless females, to change the trend.

    Jimmy is an automotive mechanic (汽车修理技工), but he lost his job a few months ago. He has a good heart, but always feared applying for a new job.

    One day, he gathered up all his strength and decided to attend a job interview. His appointment was at 10 a.m. and it was already 8:30. While waiting for a bus to the office where he was supposed to be interviewed, he saw an elderly man wildly kicking the tyre of his car. Obviously there was something wrong with the car. Jimmy immediately went up to lend him a hand. When Jimmy finished working on the car, the old man asked him how much he should pay for the service. Jimmy said there was no need to pay him; he just helped someone in need, and he had to rush for an interview. Then the old man said, "Well, I could take you to the office for your interview. It's the least I could do. Please, I insist." Jimmy agreed.

    Upon arrival, Jimmy found a long line of applicants waiting to be interviewed. Jimmy still had some grease (油渍) on him after the car repair, but he did not have much time to wash it off or have a change of shirt. One by one, the applicants left the interviewer's office with disappointed looks on their faces. Finally his name was called.  The interviewer was sitting on a large chair facing the office window. Rocking the chair back and forth, he asked, "Do you really need to be interviewed?" Jimmy's heart sank. "With the way I look now, how could I possibly pass this interview?" He thought to himself.

    Then the interviewer turned the chair and to Jimmy's surprise, it was the old man he helped earlier in the morning. It turned out that he was the General Manager of the company.

    "Sorry I had to keep you waiting, but I was pretty sure I made the right decision to have you as part of our workforce (职工) before you even stepped into this office. I just know you'd be a trustworthy worker. Congratulations!" Jimmy sat down and they shared a cup of well-deserved coffee as he landed himself a new job.