Researchers around the world have been trying their hand at making better use of the huge amount of wind energy available in nature to produce clean energy. Apart from this, studies are being carried out to harness(利用) usable windenergy produced by man-made technologies.

    One useful source identified by Indian inventor Santosh Pradhan about two years ago is a speeding train, which produces fierce wind that can betrans formed into electricity.

    According to Pradhan's proposal, with a few small improvements in existing trains running in Mumbai, the largest city in India, at least 10,000 megawatts(兆瓦) of electricity could be harvested each day.

    Building on this principle, designers Ale Leonetti Luparinia and Qian Jiang from Yanko Design have created a device(装置) called T-Box that harnesses wind energy from speeding trains.

    T-Box can be placed within the railway tracks. It is half-buried underground between the concrete sleepers(水泥枕木), which does not disturb the normal train operating at all. According to Yanko, around 150T-Boxes can be fitted along a 1,000-meter railway track.

    A train running at a speed of 200 kph can produce winds blowing at 15 miles a second. Based on this calculation, 150 T-Boxes can produce 2.6 KWH of electricity per day. The T-Box's design won a silver medal in last year's Lite-On Awards and was exhibited last summer at the Xue Xue Institute inTaipei, Taiwan Province.

    Though the figures look impressive, it is important to remember that the design is still at a conceptual stage and hasn't taken into account issues such as pieces of waste material produced by the device and the efforts and costs involved in the maintenance(维护) of the device.

    We can expect the technology to see the light of the day only after it clears these issues. If so, rail travel, one of the greenest forms of travel, will become greener and more energy-efficient.

    If you ever visit an English village, make sure to look out for morris dancing. Undoubtedly one of the strangest traditions of English culture, morris dancing is a form of folk dancing that dates back to the 15th century. If you ever get the opportunity, you really have to see it.

    Men and women wearing old-fashioned, shabby clothing dance in the streets of towns and villages across the country during the holiday periods. Women wear long, frilly (有褶皱边的) skirts and men wear short trousers with bells attached to them. They dance to traditional folk music which is often played on traditional musical instruments.

    Some groups carry heavy black sticks which they beat against each other while they dance. Other groups wave handkerchiefs in the air while they perform. The dances are usually performed near a pub so that when it's over, the dancers and audience can sing some traditional folk songs over a pint of beer. The celebrations will often continue long into the night, by which point most people are too drunk to think about performing again.

    Morris dancing is a great English tradition but it's facing a big crisis. As the years go by, fewer and fewer young people are joining morris dancing groups. The dancers are getting older and older and eventually. If you've ever had the fortune to see morris dancing, you may understand why teenagers aren't rushing to sign up. Putting it to the point, it's not exactly the coolest thing for an 18-year-old to be doing. Why dress up in bells and funny costumes when you could be going clubbing? Or playing sport? Or doing anything else?

However, it would be a great shame to lose such a fun and lively part of England's history and culture. It's important to look after some traditions and customs especially when it's something as harmless and happy as morris dancing. So here's a toast to the next generation of would-be morris dancers! Let's hope they don't leave it too late.

    Education is not a bystanders sport. Numerous researchers have shown that when students participate in classroom discussion they hold more positive attitudes toward school, and that positive attitudes promote learning. It is no coincidence that girls are more passive in the classroom discussion and score lower than boys on SATs.

    We found that at all grade levels in all communities and in all subject areas boys controlled classroom communication. They participated in more interactions than girls did, and their participation became greater as the year went on.

    Our research contradicted the traditional assumption that girls control classroom communication in reading while boys in math. We found that whether the subject was language arts and English or math and science, boys got more than their fair share of teacher attention. That teachers talk more to male students is simply because boys are more aggressive in grabbing their attention by calling out answers to the teachers' questions first. While girls sit patiently with their hands raised or keep silent. Psychologist Lisa Serbin and K.Daniel O'Leary, then at the state university of New York at stony brook studied classroom interaction at preschool level and found that teachers gave boys more attention, praised them more often and were at least twice as likely to have extended conversations with them.

    Years of experience have shown that the best way to learn something is to do it yourself. It is also important to give students specific and direct feedback about the quality of their work and answers. Teachers behave differently depending on whether boys or girls are active to provide answers during discussions. During classroom discussion, teachers in our study reacted to boys answers with powerful, precise and effective responses, while they often gave girls mild and unclear reactions because of their silence. Too often, girls remain in the dark about the quality of their answers. Active students receiving precise feedback are more likely to achieve academically. And they are more likely to be boys.

    This kind of communication game is played at work, as well as at school. As reported in numerous studies, it goes like this.

    Men speak more often and frequently interrupt women.

    Listeners recall more from male speakers than from female speakers, even when both use a similar speaking style and cover the same content.

    Women participate less actively in conversation. They do more smiling and gazing, and they are more often the passive by standers in professional and social conversations among peers.

    Women often their own statements into unsure comments. This is accomplished by using qualifiers and by adding tag question. These uncertain patterns weaken impact and signal a lack of power and influence.

    Only when girls are active and treated equally in the classroom will they be more likely to achieve equality in the workplace.

    Darwin noted that some human emotional expressions might have started as part of a physiological function: for example, exposing the teeth to bite food. The function, however, took on meaning and became a form of communication which signals anger.

    The same may be true for the animals. Baby monkeys cry for attention. They also cry to signal to an adult that they want to be carried.

    “Chimpanzees do make upset voice when they are being weaned (断奶) by their mothers or have lost their mothers or another individual,” says Anne Pusey, a professor at the University of Minnesota. “They whimper (呜咽) and cry and scream. When we hear these calls, the emotion involved seems obvious. However, they do not weep in the sense of producing tears. I have seen an adolescent male whimpering when he lost sight of his older brother with whom he had been traveling.”

    Babies of many mammalian species, including rats, cry. Moreover, when a baby rat cries, often his mother brings the fallen pup back into the nest. This is probably a straightforward communication, as it is with humans. However, psychologists at the University of Iowa aren't convinced.

    The Iowan researchers can cause the same crying sounds by producing large decreases and then increases in blood flow. The blood flow also goes down when baby rats get cold. Thus, they conclude baby rats cry in the same way that we sneeze. Of course the rat baby could be crying because he's cold and wants his mother to know.

    “All young mammals make cries when separated from their mother,” says Jaak Panksepp, a psychologist at Bowling Green State University. “If you're willing to call this crying, then certainly other animals show this emotional response.” he says, “Some of us take seriously that animals do have emotions.”

    Born in the 1950s, shopping malls were once the symbol of the U.S. consumer culture, but many are now dying out.

    Dying shopping malls can be found across the United States, often in middle-class suburbs. Economic decline in certain areas together with an upward trend towards online shopping and new forms of urban shopping centers have pushed the once seemingly unbeatable shopping malls into decline. It is estimated that 15 to 50 percent of shopping malls may close in the coming decades.

    American shopping culture follows its housing culture. Numerous shopping malls were therefore born after the Second World War, as Americans with cars and fat wallets moved to the suburbs. U.S. shopping malls were built at a rapid pace as shoppers fled cities, peaking in the mid-1990s when they were being built at a rate of 140 a year. Thus, too many shopping malls are left though construction has gradually decreased since then.

    Currently, there are around 1,500 shopping malls across the U.S. Most share a handful of similar feature. They usually contain two or three stories of stores separated by walkways. Food courts serve pizza and other fast food. Parking lots are big enough to easily misplace a car.

    Shopping malls in Europe might contain grocery stores or childcare centers, while those in Japan are often built around mass transit (交通枢纽). But the suburban American shopping malls are hard to get to and mainly sell clothes and gifts.

    As many shopping malls became redundant (过剩的), leaders in many U.S. towns who once fought for malls now struggle with how to transform them to new uses. Highland Mall in Texas is being transformed into a community college campus, and Lakeland Mall in Florida now houses a megachurch (大型教会). Others have been redeveloped to include housing, offices and even green space. However, it is hard to imagine every shopping mall meeting the demands for such transformations.

On Monday, a scientist and doctor Robert Winston is to formally ask a question in congress about what assessments the government has made "for requiring adults riding bicycles in city centres to heave a licence and third-party insurance". The letter below is the entirely imagined response I would like the government to make to him.

Dear Robert,

You ask what assessments we've made for your proposal about obliging cyclists to have licences and insurance. The brief answer is: none. Nor do we have any plans to do so.

Why? Again, the short answer is this: it's a silly and pointless thing to suggest, as evidenced by the fact that practically no countries or territories anywhere in the world require cyclists to be licensed, or to have compulsory insurance.

I suppose it's only fair if I explain why I think it is such a non-issue. It's pretty simple: such a plan would achieve pretty much nothing, while causing significant problems. More widely, any sensible governments will do everything in their power to get more people cycling, not to put pointless obstacles in their way.

Let's just take one example. As I'm sure you know as a doctor, one of the problems facing our nation is that the National Health System is likely to collapse under the caring for an increasingly overweight population. Inactive living is central to this. Even a fairly brief daily bike trip can have miraculous benefits for people's health.

Next, how would such rules even work? Would the licensing and insurance be just for adults, or also children? How would the system even be enforced-would it also require all bikes to be registered with number plates?

Finally, what would you hope to achieve by this? If you believe licensing transport users stops wrongdoing, can I point to you the data showing how a third of drivers admit to using handheld phones while driving, despite the law forbidding it.

So, to summarize：your plan would be to introduce a hugely new administrative scheme that would most likely have limited effect on the behaviour of averagely law-abiding (守法的) transport users who rarely harm others, while putting people off from this beneficial type of transport.

I'm afraid I just don't get it.