Next time you raise an eyebrow at the views of your partner, friend, sibling (兄弟姐妹) or colleague, remember they could be helping to make you smarter.

    New research shows that intelligence is not fixed but can be boosted throughout adulthood by family members, bright mates and intellectually stretching (拉伸) careers.

    The study challenges the commonly held belief that intelligence is static by the age of about 18. Current scientific consensus suggests that intelligence is controlled by genes, with environmental factors such as schooling and nutrition playing a partial role up to this age. After this point, IQ scores stabilize (稳定).

    But James Flynn, professor of political studies and psychology at the University of Otago in New Zealand, argues that people can “upgrade” their own intelligence throughout their lives. He believes intellectual stimulation (刺激) from others is crucial as the “brain seems to be rather like a muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it gets”. However, the opposite is also true – so people sharing a home or workplace with those who are intellectually challenged risk seeing their IQ levels fall as a result.

    He found the “understanding quality” of a family changes the IQs of all members, especially children. It can “lift” or hold back, depending on the “gap between their brightness and that of their siblings and parents”. A bright ten-year-old with brothers and sisters of average intelligence will suffer a five to ten point IQ disadvantage, compared to a similar child with equally bright siblings. However, children with a low IQ could gain six to eight points by having brighter siblings and special educational treatment to help pull them up.

    Professor Flynn also concluded that although genetics and early life experiences determine about 80 percent of intelligence, the remaining 20 percent is linked to lifestyle. This means that people can raise their IQ, or allow it to fall, by ten points or more. Therefore, the best way to boost IQ level is to mix with bright friends, find an intellectually challenging job and marry someone cleverer.

    People who multitask all the time may be the worst at doing two things at once, a new research suggests. The findings, based on performances and self-evaluation by about 275 college students, indicate that many people multitask not out of a desire to increase productivity, but because they are easily distracted and can't focus on one activity. And “those people turn out to be the worst at handling different things,” said David Sanbonmatsu, a psychologist at the University of Utah.

    Sanbonmatsu and his colleagues gave the students a set of tests and asked them to report how often they multitasked, how good they thought they were at it, and how sensation-seeking (寻求刺激) or imperative (冲动) they were. They then evaluated the participants' multitasking ability with a tricky mental task that required the students to do simple mathematical calculations while remembering a set of letters.

    Not surprisingly, the scientists said, most people thought they were better than average at multitasking, and those who thought they were better at it were more likely to report using a cellphone while driving or viewing multiple kinds of media at once. But those who frequently deal with many things at the same time were found to perform the worst at the actual multitasking test. They also were more likely to admit to sensation-seeking and impulsive behavior, which connects with how easily people get bored and distracted.

     “People multitask not because it's going to lead to greater productivity, but because they're distractible, and they get sucked into things that are not as important.” Sanbonmatsu said.

    Adam Gazzaley, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not a member of the research group, said one limitation of the study was that it couldn't find out whether people who start out less focused tend toward multitasking or whether people's recognizing and understanding abilities change as a result of multitasking.

    The findings do suggest, however, why the sensation-seeker who multitask the most may enjoy risky distracted driving. “People who are multitasking are generally less sensitive to risky situations.” said Paul Atchley, another researcher not in the group. “This may partly explain why people go in for these situations even though they're dangerous.”

Work and the Young: Generation Jobless

    “YOUNG people ought not to be idle (闲置的) . It is very bad for them," said MargaretThatcher in 1984. She was right: there are few worse things that society can do to its young than to leave them ignored.

    Yet more young people are idle than ever. The International Labour Organization reports that 75m (m=million) young people globally are looking for a job. World Bank surveys suggest that 262m young people are economically inactive. The number of young people without a job is nearly as large as the population of America (311m).

Two factors play a big part. First, the long slowdown in the West has reduced demand for labour, and it is easier to put off hiring young people than it is to fire older workers. Second, inemerging economies population growth is the fastest in countries with disordered labour markets, such as India and Egypt.

    One possible way to settle this problem is to stimulate growth. That is easier said than done in a world suffering from debt, and is anyway a possible answer. The countries where the problem is worst (such as Spain and Egypt) suffered from high youth unemployment even when their economies were growing. Throughout the recession ( 经济不景气)，companies have continued to complain that they cannot find young people with the right skills. This underlines the importance of two other solutions: reforming labour markets and improving education.

    Youth unemployment is often at its worst in countries with inflexible labour markets. High taxes on hiring, strict rules about firing, high minimum wages: all these help force young people to the street corner. South Africa has some of the highest unemployment, in part because it has powerful trade unions and inflexible rules about hiring and firing. Many countries with high youth unemployment rate have high minimum wages and heavy taxes on labour. India has around 200 laws on work and pay.

    Across the OECD (经合组织) , people who left school at the earliest opportunity are twice as likely to be unemployed as university graduates. But it is unwise to conclude that governments should simply continue increasing the number of people who graduate from university. In both Britain and the United States many people with arts degrees are finding it impossible to get appropriate jobs. In North Africa university graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed as non-graduates.

    What matters is not just number of years of education people get, but its content. This means expanding the study of science and technology and closing the gap between the world of education and the world of work-for example by upgrading vocational education and by building closer relations between companies and schools. Germany, which has the second lowest level of youth unemployment in the rich world, owns long-history system of vocational schooling and apprenticeships (学徒制).

    The problem of youth unemployment has been getting worse for several years. But there are at last some reasons for hope. Governments are trying to address the mismatch between education and the labour market. Companies are beginning to take more responsibility for the young. The world has a real chance of introducing an education-and-training revolution worthy of the solution to the problem.

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    Researchers at the University of York in England published their findings on facial recognition that, on average, people can remember as many as 5,000 faces.

    There have been many studies recently on facial recognition technology. But the authors of this study say theirs is the first time that scientists have been able to put a number to the abilities of humans to recognize faces. Rob Jenkins, leader of the research, said the researchers' study centered on "the number of faces people actually know." and were not able to discover whether there is a "limit on how many faces the brain can handle."

    Jenkins said the ability to tell individual people apart is "clearly important." In today's modern world of big cities, we meet and deal with thousands of people. The study suggests our facial recognition abilities help us to deal with the many different faces we see on the screens, as well as those we know. The results of the study give a baseline for comparing the "facial vocabulary" of humans with facial recognition software.

    Today, facial recognition technology is used in many ways, including by law enforcement agencies to prevent crime and violence. Governments use it to keep secret areas secure and, in extreme cases, control populations. Some governments use the software to watch people and find out where they go and what they do. Even Facebook uses facial recognition. For example, when you name a friend, Facebook technology may recognize the person's face from a different picture you had shared before.

    For the human study, people spent one hour writing down as many faces from their personal lives as possible. At first, they found it easy to come up with many faces. But by the end of the hour, they found it harder to think of new ones. Their change in speed let the researchers estimate when they would have run out of faces completely. 1,000 to 10,000 faces remembered. People who took part in the study were also shown thousands of photographs of famous people. Researchers asked them which ones they recognized. To make sure they knew these people, researchers required them to recognize two different photos of each famous person. The results showed that the participants knew between 1,000 and 10,000 faces.

    How do they explain such a wide range? Jenkins said one explanation may be that some people have a natural ability for remembering faces. "There are differences in how much attention people pay to faces and how well they process the information." Also it could be because of different social environments. Some people may have grown up in more populated places. So, they may have had more social contact throughout their lives.

    Researchers think age may be an interesting area for further research. “It would be interesting to see whether there is a peak age for the number of faces we know”, Jenkins said. He said it is possible that we gather more faces throughout our lifetime. But, he added, there also may be an age at which we start to find it harder to remember all of those faces.

As far as we know batteries are playing an important role in our life. We couldn't live without batteries. Why so? Batteries provide power for anything from small sensors to large systems. While scientists are finding ways to make them smaller but even more powerful, problems can arise when these batteries are much larger and heavier than the devices themselves. University of Missouri (MU) researchers are developing a nuclear energy source that is smaller, lighter and more efficient.

" To provide enough power, we need certain methods with high energy density (密度)", said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU." The radioisotope(放射性同位素) battery can provide power density that is much higher than chemical batteries."

Kwo n and his research team have been working on building a small nuclear battery, presently the size and thickness of a penny, intended to power various micro/ nanoelectromechanreal systems(M/NEMS). Although nuclear batteries can cause concerns, Kwon said, they are safe.

" People bear the word‘ nuclear' and think of something very dangerous," he said," However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pace- makers, space satellites and underwater systems."

His new idea is not only in the battery's size, but also in its semiconductor(半导体). Kwon's battery uses a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor.

" The key part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure(晶体结构) of the solid semiconductor, Kwo n said," By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem."

Together with J. David Robertson, chemistry professor and associate director of the MU Research Reactor, Kwo n is working to build and test the battery. In the future, they hope to increase the battery's power, shrink its size and try with various other materials. Kwo n said that battery could be thinner than the thickness of human hair.