Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new “species” of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name —phubbers(低头族).

    Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfie in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events eventually leads to the destruction of the world.

    Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real.

    Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. “Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck,” Guangming Dailyquoted doctors as saying, “the neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching.” Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stick to their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Beijing Evening News reported.

    It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

Distance runners often worry about “hitting the wall” during training or races—that terrible moment when negative thoughts become so overpowering that they make it difficult to continue.

Hitting the wall typically happens around 20 miles in a marathon, when the body's supplies become exhausted. At this point, many runners feel exhausted and discouraged, slow their pace, have trouble focusing and want to quit or walk.

“Generalized tiredness, unintentionally slowing their pace, the desire to walk, and shifting focus to just surviving the marathon appear to be particularly common characteristics of it,” said Dr. Alistair McCormick, an exercise psychologist in England who co-authored a new study. “A marathon becomes a real mental battle when runners ‘hit the wall.'”

    Psychological blocks are an extremely common experience for recreational endurance (耐力) athletes, according to the study. To learn how they affect people, sports psychologists asked 30 recreational runners and cyclers about the psychological demands of training, preparing for and participating in competitions.

     “Recreational runners and cyclists found it stressful trying to find the time to train, McCormick said. “What was also interesting was the number of potential banana skins they met with before and during competition-disasters that could cause the athletes to lose their focus and their motivation to keep persevering.”

    These roadblocks included difficult environmental conditions and equipment failure, problems with nutrition or making a mistake, the study reported. The athletes in the study said they fell these obstacles (障碍) affected their motivation and concentration, negatively affecting their overall performance.

According to the study, 43 percent of marathoners are likely to hit the wall during a race. Finding ways to move past those kinds of experiences, then, could have major benefits for an athlete's performance and well-being.

    We know the famous ones — the Thomas Edisons and the Alexander Graham Bells — but what about the less famous inventors? What about the people who invented the traffic light and the windshield wiper（雨刮器）? Shouldn't we know who they are?

    Joan Mclean think so. In fact, Mclean, a professor of physics at Mountain University in Range, feels so strongly about this matter that she's developed a course on the topic. In addition to learning “who” invented “what”, however, Mclean also likes her students to learn the answers to the “why” and “how” questions. According to Mclean, “When students learn the answers to these questions, they are better prepared to recognize opportunities for inventing and more motivated to give inventing a try.”

    Her students agree. One young man with a patent for an unbreakable umbrella is walking proof of Mclean' statement. “If I had not heard the story of the windshield wiper's invention,” said Tommy Lee, a senior physics major, “I never would have dreamed of turning my bad experience during a rainstorm into something so constructive.” Lee is currently negociating to sell his patent to an umbrella producer.

    So, just what is the story behind the windshield wiper? Well, Mary Anderson came up with the idea in 1902 after a visit to New York City. The day was cold and stormy, but Anderson still wanted to see the sights, so she jumped aboard a streetcar. Noticing that the driver was struggling to see through the snow covering the windshield, she found herself wondering why there couldn't be a built-in device for cleaning the window. Still wondering about this when she returned home to Birmingham, Alabama, Anderson started drafting out solutions. One of her ideas, a lever（操作杆）on the inside of a vehicle that would control an arm on the outside, became the first windshield wiper.

    Today we benefit from countless inventions and innovations. It's hard to imagine driving without Garrett A. Morgan's traffic light. It's equally impossible to picture a world without Katherine J. Blodgett's innovation that makes glass invisible. Can you picture life without clear windows and eyeglasses?

    People from East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions — and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why.

    Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly(均匀的) across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes.

    "We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions," Jack said. "Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect (忽略) the mouth."

    According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.

    The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.

    It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than Westerners did. "The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions," Jack said. "Our data suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less."

    In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.

    It's common knowledge that the woman in Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting seems to look back at observers, following them with her eyes no matter where they stand in the room. But this common knowledge turns out wrong.

    A new study finds that the woman in the painting is actually looking out at an angle that's 15.4 degrees off to the observer's right­well outside of the range that people normally believe when they think someone is looking right at them. In other words, said the study author, Horstmann, "She's not looking at you." This is somewhat ironic, because the entire phenomenon of a person's gaze (凝视) in a photograph or painting seeming to follow the viewer is called the "Mona Lisa effect" . That effect is absolutely real, Horstmann said. If a person is illustrated or photographed looking straight ahead, even people viewing the portrait from an angle will feel they are being looked at. As long as the angle of the person's gaze is no more than about 5 degrees off to either side, the Mona Lisa effect occurs.

    This is important for human interaction with on-screen characters. If you want someone off to the right side of a room to feel that a person on-screen is looking at him or her, you don't cut the gaze of the character to that side­surprisingly, doing so would make an observer feel like the character isn't looking at anyone in the room at all. Instead, you keep the gaze straight ahead.

    Horstmann and his co-author were studying this effect for its application in the creation of artificial-intelligence avatars(虚拟头像) when Horstmann took a long look at the "Mona Lisa" and realized she wasn't looking at him.

    To make sure it wasn't just him, the researchers asked 24 people to view images of the "Mona Lisa" on a computer screen. They set a ruler between the viewer and the screen and asked the participants to note which number on the ruler intersected Mona Lisa's gaze. To calculate the angle of Mona Lisa's gaze as she looked at the viewer, they moved the ruler farther from or closer to the screen during the study. Consistently, the researchers found, participants judged that the woman in the "Mona Lisa" portrait was not looking straight at them, but slightly off to their right.

    So why do people repeat the belief that her eyes seem to follow the viewer? Horstmann isn't sure. It's possible, he said, that people have the desire to be looked at, so they think the woman is looking straight at them. Or maybe the people who first coined the term "Mona Lisa effect" just thought it was a cool name.

4-Day Classic Beijing Tour

    The 4-day classic Beijing tour is designed for tourists who come to visit China for the first time. It covers the most popular and typical places in Beijing, fully displaying the scenery, culture, history, local lifestyles and features, food and drinks, business, etc. for you.

Day 1: Arrival in Beijing

    Your guide meets you at Capital Airport, and helps you check in at your hotel

    Enjoy Beijing Duck as welcome dinner.

    Accommodation: Beijing downtown

Day 2: The Great Wall & the Summer Palace

    Start your day at the most famous part of the Great Wall, the Badaling Great Wall. Leave the downtown for the Great Wall at 8 am. Since it is a long drive to the Great Wall (about 2 hours' riding) have a break at the Jade Museum on the way. Lunch will be enjoyed in a local restaurant. In the early afternoon come back to the city and have a sightseeing tour of the Summer Palace.

    Recommended Activity: Beijing Opera Show (Liyuan Theatre, 19:30-21:10 every evening)

    Accommodation: Beijing downtown

Day 3: Beijing city sightseeing & Local experience

    Your guide meets you at the hotel at 8 am and set out for the day's touring: Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City.

    After visiting the two sites, have a break and get ready for lunch.

    Hutong visit: see some traditional arts of the old Beijing, such as paper cutting and kite making, and visit a local family.

    Accommodation: Beijing downtown

Day 4: Beijing Olympic sites

    Visit the Olympic sites: Bird's Nest, Water Cube and Olympic Park, witnessing the fast developing modern China. Enjoy some free time after visiting the sites.

    After lunch, it is shopping time and then the tour is over.