The popular TV program Readers has prompted more people in China to practice reading aloud in booths(亭) set up in big cities across the country．

    As the latest TV show to help people's love for literature recover, CCTV program Readers invites people from all walks of life to read aloud their favorite poems，essays and books，or even personal letters they wrote to their loved ones．Just as the weekly show has been well-received，its reading booths, equipped with professional recording devices and cameras，have become instant hits．

    A crowd of more than 200 people were pictured lining up outside the Shanghai Library at 11 a.m. on March 4 — the first day of the booth's opening to the public in Shanghai. The deadline for registrations was brought forward to 2 p.m. instead of the scheduled 5:30 p.m., as the number of waiting readers continued to grow. Some waited more than nine hours for a try-out in the booth, according to library management．

     “There is an old photo in the late 1970s capturing people lining up outside the Shanghai Library before it opens. If that was a spring of reading in Shanghai, now I think another spring has arrived again.” library manager Zhou Deming, told the Shanghai-based The Paper．

    The reading booth is the only one of its kind in the city of economic center at the moment, but more are expected to be put into use in the coming months, according to the library's website．

    The Readers program has also led to booths in other cities including Beijing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Xi'an to appeal to more people to read and share their life stories．

    With the recent boom of culture-themed TV shows such as Readers and Chinese Poetry Competition，some are optimistic that this will help the country love literature and reading again in general．

    Women are friendly．But men are more competitive．Why? Researchers have found it's all down to the hormone oxytocin （荷尔蒙催生素）．Although known as the love hormone, it affects the sexes differently．

"Women tend to be social in their behavior．They often share with others．But men lend to be competitive．They are trying to improve their social status," said Professor Ryan．

    Generally, people believe that the hormone oxytocin is let out in our body in various social situations and our body creates a large amount of it during positive social interactions （互动） such as falling in love or giving birth．

But in a previous experiment Professor Ryan found that the hormone is also let out in our body during negative social interactions such as envy．

    Further researches showed that in men the hormone oxytocin improves the ability to recognize competitive relationships, but in women it raises the ability to recognize friendship．

Professor Ryan's recent experiment used 62 men and women aged 20 to 37．Half of the participants（参与者）received oxytocin．The other half received placebo （安慰剂）．

    After a week, the two groups switched with participants．They went through the same procedure with the other material．

    Following each treatment, they were shown some video pictures with different social interactions．Then they were asked to analyze the relationships by answering some questions．The questions were about telling friendship from competition．And their answers should be based on gestures, body language and facial expressions．

    The results indicated that, after treatment with oxytocin, men's ability to correctly recognize competitive relationships improved, but in women it was the ability to correctly recognize friendship that got better．

    Professor Ryan thus concluded: "Our experiment proves that the hormone oxytocin can raise people's abilities to better distinguish different social interactions．And the behavior differences between men and women are caused by biological factors （因素） that are mainly hormonal．"

    People aren't walking any more-if they can figure out a way to avoid it.

    I felt superior about this matter until the other day I took my car to mail a small parcel. The journey is a matter of 281 steps. But I used the car. And I wasn't in any hurry, either. I had merely become one more victim of a national sickness: motorosis.

    It is an illness to which T had thought myself immune(免疫的), for I was bred in the tradition of going to places on my own two legs. At that time, we regarded 25 miles as a good day's walk and the ability to cover such a distance in ten hours as a sign of strength and skill. It did not occur to us that walking was a hardship. And the effect was lasting. When I was 45 years old I raced—and beat-a teenage football player the 168 steps up the Statue of Liberty.

    Such enterprises today are regarded by many middle-aged persons as bad for the heart. But a well-known British physician, Sir Adolphe Abrahams, pointed out recently that hearts and bodies need proper exercise. A person who avoids exercise is more likely to have illness than one who exercises regularly. And walking is an ideal form of exercise-the most familiar and natural of all.

    It was Henry Thoreau who showed mankind the richness of going on foot. The man walking can learn the trees, flowers, insects, birds and animals, the significance of seasons, the very feel of himself as a living creature in a living world. He cannot learn in a car.

    The car is convenient means of transport, but we have made it our way of life. Many people don't dare to approach Nature any more; to them the world they were born to enjoy is all threat. To them security is a steel river thundering on a concrete (混凝土) road. And much of their thinking takes place while waiting for the traffic to turn green.

    I say that the green of forests is the mind's best light. And none but the man on foot can evaluate what is basic and everlasting.

    Fashions have a lot of rules. Most of them, however, are just wrong. But there's one rule that goes beyond tradition and into the field of scientific study of the brain: Black clothes are slimming. It all comes down to how your visual system processes the light. The below holes in each square are the same in size, yet the white hole looks bigger than the black hole.

    In the 1500s, Galileo Galilei noticed that some of the planets looked larger when viewed with the naked eye than they did when viewed through a telescope, making the white light of Venus appear eight to ten times larger than Jupiter in the night sky. He knew something strange must be going on with his vision to cause this illusion, but he wasn't sure what it was. Luckily, scientists never stopped wondering, and in 2014, they figured it out.

    Our visual system operates via two main channels: "on" neurons (神经元) that are sensitive to light things and "off" neurons that are sensitive to dark things. When it came to the dark "off" neurons, the researchers found that they responded predictably to dark shapes on a light background the greater the contrast between the two, the more active these neurons were. But the light on" neurons behaved unpredictably. Even with the same amount of contrast, light objects on a dark background caused a greater response in these neurons.

    This phenomenon makes some sense, evolutionarily speaking. In the dark of night, you'd want to be able to take in every bit of light you can get, so a visual system that enlarges light objects on a dark background could be very useful. However, it's not that hard to see dark objects in the light of day. It has some effects in the colors of your clothes and in the appearance of the planets—the brighter appearance of Venus in the night sky makes it look bigger than the darker Jupiter.

    Twenty years ago, most experts believed that differences in how boys and girls behaved were mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends. It's hard to cling to that belief today. Recent research has shown that there are biological differences between boys and girls. Understanding these differences is important in raising and educating children.

    For example, girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and the difference increases as kids grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely (反过来), boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away too hear the teacher.

    Likewise, girls are better in their expression of feelings. Studies reveal that negative emotions are seated in an area of the brain called the amygdala. Girls develop all early connection between this area and the cerebral cortex (大脑皮层), enabling them to talk about their feelings. In boys these links develop later. So if you ask a troubled adolescent boy to tell you what his feelings are, he often cannot say much.

    Dr. Sax, an advocate of single-sex education, points out that keeping boys and girls separate in the classroom has yielded striking educational, social, and interpersonal benefits. Therefore, parents and teachers should try to recognize, understand, and make use of the biological differences that make a girl a girl, and a boy a boy.

    It is well known that male humpback whales(座头鲸)are skilled singers. Their songs are thought to attract females in high frequency sounds while to compete with other males in low frequency sounds. Research led by the Wildlife Conservation Society has now made a new discovery.

    The study looked at the songs of two humpback whale populations, based on sound recordings collected from 2013 to 2018. One group was based in the South Atlantic, off the coast of Gabon, and the other in the Indian Ocean near Madagascar.  Analysis of the recordings showed that the two groups picked up musical ideas from each other and borrowed phrases and themes into their latest song. This suggested that the males from the two groups came into contact with each other over the five years and shared songs.

    To uncover this musical cooperation, researchers recorded the songs and transcribe them into more than 1,500 individual sounds and patterns, or song units.  They found that the units were composed into larger phrases, which were then repeated to form themes. These themes were sung for hours at a time, or even days. By 2018, both populations have been singing largely the same songs.

    "This similarity in the songs shows that these two populations come into closer contact than other southern populations, explains Dr Melinda Rekdahl, leading author of the study. As well as being an interesting phenomenon, she explains that those songs allow even greater insight into the workings of the humpback whale populations.