Before I studied psychology, I used to think that people would laugh when funny things occurred. While I was right about that, I discovered there are lots of other psychological factors that make people laugh other than the funny part of a joke. When someone laughs at a joke, there will usually be more than one reason that makes him laugh—and the more reasons there are, the more powerful the joke will be.

    I was attending a stand-up comedy show in Egypt, and when the man started to make fun of pedestrians crossing streets, everyone laughed their hearts out. The main reason those people strongly laughed was that almost all of them felt angry towards pedestrians who crossed streets carelessly. The joke wasn't only funny, it also made the audience feel that they were right about being angry at those pedestrians. That is, people were laughing both because of the funny joke and becauseof the happiness experienced as a result of the psychological support they got.

    The better a joke makes a person feel, and the more it includes other psychological factors, the more the person will like it. For example, if you envy one of your friends, and someone tells a joke that is funny and, at the same time, makes your friend seem stupid, then you will probably laugh at it louder than if you weren't jealous of him.

    In short, we don't laugh only when we hear something funny; we also laugh when we experience some kind of happiness that results from the other psychological factors involved in the joke. I strongly discourage making fun of anyone or be littling someone to make someone elselaug. All I want to explain is that if your joke supports a person's emotions, he will certainly like it a lot.

    Junxi “Emma” Yang played Carnegie Hall before she got to high school. But her piano skills may have to take a back seat to her programming skill.

    According to World Journal, a US-based Chinese media organization, Emma, a 14-year-old student at the Brearley School in Manhattan, New York started coding when she was 6. Four years later, her beloved grandmother began developing Alzheimer's.

    When Emma's family moved to New York from Hong Kong in 2014, she became passionate about programming. By the time she was 10, her grandmother had already developed the disease.

    Emma got right to work. With her coding skills, she had a smartphone app created before long, designed to help people suffering from Alzheimer's.

    “Now, 'Timeless' has moved to the second stage of design,”says Emma.

    Emma hopes her grandmother can benefit from the artificial intelligence technology built into “Timeless,” the app Emma developed, to overcome her memory loss.

    Emma's newly finished app has gained support from Dr. Melissa Kramps, an Alzheimer's specialist, and from Kairo, a developer specializing in artificial intelligence.

    Timeless uses facial recognition to remind someone with Alzheimer's of vital information about the person whose photo they are looking at on their screen. It also signals whether they have just called somebody.

    The app also allows for the photo-talking, then moves to identify the people on the screen.

    The Timeless project is featured on the website Indiegogo for fundraising. Emma is hoping to raise $50,000 and work alongside professional programmers to have Timeless launched by the end of 2018.

    Many people have hailed Emma for her efforts. Bill Gates voiced his support, commending her on her bid to help bridge the gap between people with Alzheimer's and the ones they love.

    We have most friends at the age of 26 after having spent the first quarter of our lives building up our friendship circle, a new research has claimed.

    The research into friendship shows that our social circle peaks at 26 years and 7 months, at which we typically have five close friends.  Women are most popular at 25 years and 10 months, with men hitting the highest friendship point a little later at 27 years and 3 months.

    The research, by Forever Friends, shows that about a third of adults meet their closest friends when at school, with about a fifth saying they meet them at work.

    Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter now also play a major role in building new friendship. The research points out that 25 to 34-year-olds make 22 friends via Facebook, compared to 18 to 24-year-olds who make 12, and 35 to 44-year-olds who make just 4.

    Forever Friends' relationship coach Sam Owen says, “It is no coincidence that over a third of us meet our best friends at school.  It is a key time in our lives when friendship is growing through sharing notes, giving gifts, seeing each other regularly and laughing a lot.  As adults we can often forget how powerful these small things are and how the little things can make a difference. ”

    Later in life we find ourselves losing friends. Over half of us lose friendship through moving, while 36% say that over time they grow apart from close pals. Having children also causes 19% to drift away from childhood friends.  

    With growing pressures being put on friendship these days, it's important to make time for our friendship.

    "Iris scan (虹膜扫描), please," the bank's computer voice tells you . You step up and the computer reads your eye, comparing it to the stored file it has of your iris. The images had better match—otherwise you won't be able to get your money.

    Iris scanning and other technologies, such as fingerprint and voice scanning, have appeared in many science fiction movies in the past. Today, these advanced technologies are part of the real world. They are common at work, the bank, the airport, and your local prison. The iris scan, fingerprint scan, and voice scan are all examples of biometrics( 生物测定学) a fast developing area of automatic personal identification technology . Basically, biometrics uses various ways to verify a person's identity, based on the individual's unique characteristics, including fingerprints, voices, irises, body heat patterns, facial images, handprints, signatures and so on.

    Biometrics identification systems have a number of advantages over password systems. The primary advantage is that an individual has to be physically present in order to be identified. Another important advantage is that there are no passwords to remember, forget, lose or steal.

    The voice scan is the simplest and most affordable form of biometrics. It only requires a computer, a microphone and the correct software. The software records a subject's voice and then compares it to a stored voice sample for identification purposes.

    For additional safety, fingerprint and handprint scans can also be employed. Fingerprint scans take the image of a fingerprint and compare it to a stored file of prints. Handprint scans identify the unique features of a hand.

    Iris scans currently give the highest level of accuracy among all the available biometrics systems. Another technology, full facial scans, is currently in use at border crossings and airports. Facial scanning equipment can actually track and identify moving faces within a crowd.

    The potential of biometrics is exciting and encouraging. With continued development, testing, and application, current technologies will become even more effective in the future. Soon, the days of password and car keys will be gone. Just don't leave home without your fingerprints!

    Unlike modern animal scientists, dinosaur scientists cannot sit on a hillside and use telescopes to watch dinosaurs in order to know how they lived and whether they were good parents. Instead, they have to search hard for information from dinosaurs' fossils(恐龙化石) because dinosaurs died out millions of years ago.

    It's very difficult for the scientists to reach an agreement because different results can be got from the same fossils. Many fossils of the same kind of dinosaurs have been dug out from one place. They might have formed when an entire group of dinosaurs got stuck(陷入)all at once. Or they might have been the result of dinosaurs getting stuck one after another over a course of a few centuries. Thus we can say that dinosaurs might have in the first case lived in big groups and in the second lived alone.

    Though there are two different results, dinosaur scientists now generally agree that at least some kinds of dinosaurs lived in big groups. “That's pretty much settled at this point.” Says Paul Sereno. A kind of dinosaurs called Sauropods left behind tracks in the western United States that appear to run north and south, suggesting that they even moved long distances together.

    As to whether dinosaurs cared for their young, dinosaur scientists have turned to the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, birds and crocodiles for possible models. Birds give a lot of care to their young, while crocodiles just help their young to the water. The discovered fossils of dinosaurs sitting on their eggs and staying with their young suggest the parents were taking care of their babies, but we still cannot say that all dinosaurs did the same.

    There is still a long way to go before the above questions could be answered. Dinosaur scientists will have to find more proof to reach an agreement.

    Despite what so many people would love to believe，NASA hasn't discovered any evidence of past or present intelligent life on Mars. Therefore, when the Curiosity rover  (好奇号探测器)found something suspicious on the Red Planet's surface, they were not only surprised but also a little bit worried.

    The thin fragment (碎片)was suspicious enough to guarantee its own name, with NASA's Curiosity rover team calling it the “Pettegrove Point Foreign Object Debris，” named for where it was discovered. With no idea what it was or where it came from, the rover's handlers began to worry that it might actually be a piece of the rover itself，suggesting some unseen damage or other issue with the robot. Thankfully，those concerns seem to have been unfound.

    In a new update from NASA the object has now been identified as a natural piece of rock rather than a piece of any man-made craft or vehicle. The team analyzed the unusual object with a tool called the Chem Cam RMI. The instrument uses a laser (激光器)to sniff out the makeup of anything that is pointed at, and the results for this particular piece of debris revealed that it's actually just a very thin piece of rock.

    NASA describes the inspection: The planning day began with an interesting result from the previous plan's Chem Cam RMI analysis of a target that was referred to as “Pettegrove Point Foreign Object Debris”(PPFOD)，and supposed to be a piece of spacecraft debris fact. In fact it was found to be a very thin slice of rock, so we can all rest easy tonight. Curiosity has not begun to shed its skin!

    How this particularly thin sliver of rock got to where it is—and why it seems to be a different colour than the surrounding sand and debris—remains unexplained, but at least the rover isn't falling apart.