Is beauty something always positive? Almost everyone thinks attractive people are happier and healthier, have better marriages and have more respectable jobs. Personal advisors give them better advice for finding jobs. Even judges are softer on attractive defendants. But in the executive（主管的） circle, beauty can become a disadvantage.

    While attractiveness is a positive factor for a man on his way up the executive ladder, it is harmful to a woman. Handsome male executives were considered having more honesty than plainer men; effort and ability were thought to lead to their success. Attractive female executives were considered to have less honesty than unattractive ones; their success was connected not with ability but with factors such as luck.

    All unattractive women executives were thought to have more honesty and to be more capable than the attractive female executives. Why are attractive women not thought to be able? An attractive woman has an advantage in traditionally female jobs, but an attractive woman in a traditionally manly position appears to lack the manly qualities required.

    This is true even in politics, “When the only clue is how he or she looks, people treat men and women differently, ” says Anne Bowman, who recently published a study on the effects of attractiveness on political candidates（候选人）. She asked 125 college students to rank two groups of photographs, one of men and one of women, in order of attractiveness. The students were told the photographs were of candidates for political offices. They were asked to rank them again, in the order they would vote for them.

    The results showed that attractive males completely defeated unattractive men, but the women who had ranked most attractive unchangeably received the fewest votes.

    “The failure to play is now a serious issue and it calls for action for change,” says Sir Ken Robinson, a leading expert in education, creativity and human development. This is the driving force behind Outdoor Classroom Day—a global teacher-led campaign, supported by Dirt is Good, a company producing daily chemical products.

    Outdoor Classroom Day, taking place on 17th May and 1st November this year, will see schools around the world swap the inside for the outside and take learning into the playground and beyond to make playtime a key part of the school day. This might involve using natural objects like stones to do sums, or going on an insect hunt to encourage curiosity. By now, Outdoor Classroom Day has grown from a grassroots movement to a global campaign that is expected to benefit five million children and over 40,000 schools from all around the world in 2018.

    This is helping to change the trend that sees many schools selling up or building on their playgrounds and cutting back on playtime to make more room for academic studies, while at home children's lives are increasingly filled with organized activities intended to help them learn. Today globally 61% of parents surveyed in the Dirt is Good Qualitative Study said that children don't know how to play without using technology.

    Outdoor Classroom Day is making playing time happen, with 22% of participating schools having increased their playtime since joining the campaign. 93% of teachers surveyed saw improvements in children's creativity after playing outside, and 97% believe that time outdoors is necessary for children to reach their full potential.

    Scientific studies show that real play—the active, physical, self-directed play—is essential for children to develop key life skills that are not taught elsewhere. Few would question the value of developing creativity, leadership, resourcefulness, and curiosity.

    Imagine you're standing in line to buy a snack at a store. You step up to the counter and the cashier scans your food. Next, you have to pay. But instead of scanning a QR Code(二维码) with your smart phone, you just hold out your hand so the cashier can scan your fingerprint. Or, a camera scans your face, your eyes or even your ear.

    Now, this type of technology might not be far away. As technology companies move away from the traditional password, biometric (生物特征识别的) security, which includes fingerprint, face and voice ID, is becoming increasingly popular.

    In 2013, Apple introduced the iPhone 5s, one of the first smart phones with a fingerprint scanner. Since then, using one's fingerprint to unlock a phone and make mobile payments has become a commonplace, bringing convenience to our lives. And since 2016, Samsung has featured eye-scanning technology in its top smart phones, while Apple's new iphone X can even scan a user's face. But despite its popularity, experts warn that biometrics might not be as secure as we imagine." Biometrics is ideally good in practice, not so much," said John Michener, a biometrics expert.

    When introducing the new iPhone's face ID feature, Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president, said. "The chance that a random person in the population could look at your iPhones X and unlock it with their face is about one in a million." But it's already been done. In a video posted on a community website Reddit, two brothers showed how they were each able to unlock the same iPhone X using their own face. And they aren't even twins.

    "We may expect too much from biometrics," Anil Jain, a computer science professor at Michigan State University, told CBS News. "No security systems are perfect."

    Earlier last year, Jain found a way to trick biometric security. Using a printed copy of a thumbprint, she was able to unlock a dead person's smart phone for the police, according to a tech website Splinter. "It's good to see biometrics being used more," Jain told CBS News, "because it adds another factor for security. But using multiple security measures is the best defense."

    Internet slang refers to a variety of slang languages used by different people on the Internet. It is difficult to provide a standardized definition of Internet slang due to the constant changes made to its nature. However, it can be understood to be a type of slang that Internet users have popularized, and in many cases, have coined. Such terms often begin with the purpose of saving keystrokes or to compensate(补偿)for small character limits. Internet slang consists of a number of different ways of speaking, sub-languages, expressions, spelling techniques and idioms that have obtained most of their meaning on the Internet.

    Love it or hate it, there is no escape from Internet slang. It has become popular among the teenagers. Just like US teenagers use “LOL”(laugh out loud) when commenting on a funny video, China's post-00s generation, a group born between 2000 and 2009, like to use “XSWL” (laughing my head off). Acronyms(首字母缩略词) and shortened expressions may be popular as they offer shorter ways of communicating. For teenagers, they could also allow them to communicate in their own way.

    Understanding the most common acronyms and texting symbols can help to decode and decipher any text message, email or instant message online. Here are some of the most popular symbols, abbreviations, and acronyms you are likely to stumble upon when texting or receiving messages and chatting on line. OMG: Oh my God; BRT: Be right there; TTYL: Talk to you later; JK: Just kidding; G2G: Got to go; NMU: Not much, you? RBAY: Right back at you; IDC: I don't care.

    Some people think that Internet slang affects the language negatively. However, Melbourne University linguist Rosey Billington doesn't agree.

    “When you are able to use language in a creative way, you show you are linguistically knowledgeable because you know the language rules well enough to use words in a different way.”Billington told News.com. Au .Her view is supported by two linguists, Lauren Spradlin and Taylor Jones.

    What is the capital of Canada? If you're well-versed in geographic knowledge, you know the answer is Ottawa. But why is that? After all, Toronto is much larger than any other city in Canada. Montreal is an international city with ties to Europe. Vancouver is a major city with a very strategic port. Quebec City is centrally located.

    Why were none of these cities chosen to be the capital of Canada? As it tums out, choosing a capital city is more complicated than pointing to the biggest city on the map.

    Ottawa was a good choice because it was centrally located between two other major contenders. Montreal (which was predominantly French) and York (now Toronto, which was predominantly British). These two cities were the largest in Ontario and Quebec, which were at the center of Canada in the middle of 19th century. Picking Ottawa was a good compromise, as the Queen did not want to appear to favor one major city over the other.

    Also, unlike Toronto and Montreal, Ottawa was central but also a safe distance away from Canada's southern neighbor, the United States. It meant the capital would be safer in the event the U.S. decided to attack again. After all, it had only been 40 years since the War of 1812 when American troops had invaded as a result of British interference (干涉) in shipping. Although America was unable to capture Canada, the invasion was costly for the British government, who was not about to let it happen again.

    Hence, Ottawa was a great choice for the capital of Canada.

A group of small, waggling (扭动) robots that communicate by flashing lights can make collective decisions. This is similar to the process bees use to reach an agreement on where to build their nest.

"We believe that in the near future there are going to be simple robots that will do jobs that we don't want to do, and it will be very important that they make decisions on their own," says Carmen Miguel at the University of Barcelona in Spain. She and her team tested how copying bees might help with that.

When bees go house-hunting, they communicate their preferred locations through a "waggle dance". The more a bee recommends one location, the longer and harder it waggles. Eventually other bees join them, and they reach an agreement when a majority are waggling together. Researchers previously translated this behavior into a mathematical model, and Miguel and her colleagues used it to program decision-making rules into small robots called kilobots.

Each kilobot with three thin legs had an infrared-light emitter (红外线发射器) and receiver, and a colored LED light. Within a group, kilobots could move around, turn clockwise or anticlockwise and use infrared signals to exchange information.

Ezequiel Ferrero at the University of Barcelona says that across all the experiments, kilobots reached an agreement within about half an hour, even when they didn't have many immediate neighbors to communicate with. He says that getting the right combination of how long they spend transmitting their message and how much they walk around allowed them to make a collective decision in the end.