What's your opinion on spicy food? Some people cannot handle even the smallest amount of chili(辣椒) in their dinner while others can't get enough of it.       

Scientists have long been puzzled by why some people love chili and others loathe it. Plenty of research has been done on the subject, dating back to as far as the 1970s. Previous results showed that a love of chili is related to childhood experiences, and cultural influences affect our taste buds, too. But the latest study has found that a person's love of spicy food may be linked to his or her personality more than anything else, CBC News reported.

“We have always assumed that liking drives intake—we eat what we like and we like what we eat. But no one has actually directly bothered to connect these personality traits with intake of chili peppers,” said Professor John Hayes from Pennsylvania State University, who led the study.

But before you look at the study, you should first know that “spicy” is not a taste, unlike sour, sweet, bitter and salty. It is, in fact, a burning sensation that you feel on the surface of your tongue. This got scientists thinking that maybe a love of spicy food is brought about by people's longing for thrill, something they usually get from watching action movies or riding a roller coaster.

In the study, 97 participants, both male and female, were asked to fill out questionnaires about certain traits of their personality, for example. Whether they like new experiences or tend to avoid risks. They were then given cups of water with capsaicin(辣椒素), the plant chemical that makes chili burn, mixed into them.

By comparing the answers to questionnaires and what participants said they felt about the spicy water. Researchers found that those who most tended to enjoy action movies or take risks were about six times more likely to enjoy the spicy water.

    Interestingly, we used to believe that the reason some people can withstand spicy food is that their tongue have become less sensitive to it. However, this latest study has found otherwise. It's not that it doesn't burn as badly, it's that you actually learn to like the burn,” Hayes explained.  

    One May morning, 10-year-old Khadab played in the ruins of a school near his home in northern Iraq. He saw something that looked interesting. It was yellow and plastic and looked like a ball. He reached for his new toy and, BANG!

    The last thing he remembered was a big noise. When Khadab awoke, he was in hospital. His parents stood sadly by his side. They told him he had picked up an unexploded bomb. When it exploded, Khadab lost an arm.

    He was just one of hundreds of Iraqi children who have been injured or killed by stepping on and picking up explosives left over from the war.

    These landmines (地雷) and bombs have injured and killed at least 15 people a day since Saddam Hussein's government fell on April 9. And children are the most affected.

    Iraq is among the worst landmine-affected countries in the world. Many villages in the war-torn areas are surrounded by minefields (雷区). These landmines lie on the ground between rocks, up in trees and on riverbeds.

    Even though the war in Iraq is over, many children have not returned to school. They can be seen walking the streets with the natural curiosity of young kids. Their new playgrounds are places where the fighting took place. Many boys can be seen playing with unexploded bombs. A new game is to throw the bombs and run away. Some of them get away, but too many are killed. They do this for fun, and don't realize the dangers until it's too late.

    UNICEF (联合国教科文组织) has warned children, through the TV, of the dangers of landmines and unexploded bombs in Iraq. They hope to make children aware of the dangers they face.

    “I can't imagine there's going to be a classroom in the north without scared children in it. It's so widespread,” said Sean Sutton of the British-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG).

    MAG is an organization working to clear unexploded bombs and landmines in war-torn areas.

    It is difficult to report the exact number of deaths. Sutton said MAG found 320 injuries in northern Iraq in the first month after April 9. But he said the real figure was probably much higher.

    The clearing of my parents' home has made me think about the importance, even centrality of books to the house's life and soul. The house, and our lives in it, would not have been the same without books. The force of the statement comes home to me as I see what happens when shelves are emptied. The rooms suddenly look uncomfortably bare.

    I always rather took it for granted that books furnished a room. The only rooms in our house without books were the dining-room and the bathrooms. Otherwise there were books everywhere: in all the bedrooms, in the drawing-room and in the piano room which became my parents' comfortable winter study.

    I couldn't help feeling that books were rather like people: some more formal and boring, others more entertaining; some simply for show, others with unpromising outsides but rich interiors. They did more, in fact, than furnish a room; they were companions who could offer insights, good advice.

    Now the books are being contributed (not all, to be sure, but very many), and I fear for their future, almost as if they were refugees (难民). “Habent sua fata libelli”, goes as the old Latin saying, originally written by Terentianus; it meant that the fate and future of books were determined by the capability of the reader. But the meaning of the phrase has been misunderstood by time and is now associated with the physical fate of particular books, how they have passed from owner to owner. This is how Walter Benjamin read the saying when he wrote his essay “Unpacking My Library”, which analyses the extraordinarily close relationship between a collector and his or her books.

    When I deal with the books that many are going to charity shops, I hope they will find good homes, I can't help wondering if my generation is the last that will oversee such a process. Books are disappearing, as more and more are bought in electronic form and exist only as bytes of information on e-books or other devices. Does this matter? Could books become more spiritual, as they lose their physicality?

    Devon Gallagher, a college graduate from Philadelphia, wants the world to know exactly where she's been while she's on her worldwide vacation in a special way. The traveler, who was born with a bone disease, had her right leg amputated (截肢) at the age of four. Although the amputation caused inconvenience for Gallagher early on, she now sees it as nothing short of inspiration for living her best life.

    To spread that message. Gallagher has gone to social media, where she shares photos of her travels across the world, but instead of simply using a geo-tag (地理位置标签), she writes her location on her artificial leg before taking a picture.

    Now she has been taking pictures across the Continent, which show her cycling over the canal in Amsterdam relaxing on a wall overlooking the city of Barcelona, posing with a waffle in Brussels, taking in the beautiful Parthenon temple in Athens and enjoying a river ride in Budapest, all with the well-known locations written on her artificial leg.

    "I get a new leg every two years and I can choose the design on it. One day I had a sudden thought to get a chalk-board," Gallagher said. "My mum and grandmother didn't like the idea, but my friends thought it was great and told me to go for it, so I did."

    Gallagher said people often stare when she's writing on her leg, but once she shares the photos, she receives only positive feedback (反馈), "My leg hasn't stopped me from doing anything I've wanted to do," she said. "I don't know if it's my determination to prove to myself that I can do it, anyway, I've been able to keep up with people at my age and lead a pretty great life."

    Gallagher shows us that you should never let anything stand in the way of your dreams. And if life gives you an artificial leg, make art.

When your boss calls and tells you to send $100,000 to a supplier, be on your toes. It could be a fake call. As if fake emails weren't enough, on the rise now is the deep fake audio (虚假音频) that can be cloned to sound almost real and perfect and is easy to create. "It's on the rise, and something to watch out for," says Vijay Balasubramaniyan, the CEO of a company called Pindrop.

Balasubramaniyan stated during a safety meeting how easy it is to use machine to create sentences that a person probably never said from recorded words. "All you need is five minutes of audio, and you can create fake audio," says Balasubramaniyan. Then, he showed a database (数据库) of voices, typed a sentence, and connected it to a famous people's name on the list. A few seconds later, he clicked "play", and it sounded quite real.

More costly are fake phone calls, where cheaters are able to fake the phone number of real contacts and make calls that result in workers sending off lots of money. He mentioned the example of a United Kingdom energy company in 2019 that got attacked by deep fake audio in a call that asked a worker to send $243,000 to a supplier. Reported by the Wall Street Journal, the worker was directed to pay it within an hour.

Balasubramaniyan says if you were to get that kind of call from a "boss" be doubtful and ask to call back right away to prove authenticity (真实性). Besides this, in his opinion, companies need to use more safety measures for keeping up with deep fake artificial intelligence (AI) that produces phone calls and software to check authenticity versus fake calls. "This is a threat that's waiting to happen," he says. "It's a very small number now, but it's very real."

With amazing Christmas lights and some very special guests, Pallion Action Group kicked off the festive season in style after another year of giving much-needed support to theSunderland community.

"We've got wreath making, our singers and dancers and, of course, a visit from Santa.This event brings out so much enthusiasm in the community,"said organizer Karen Noble."We'll also go and surprise anyone we know who's going to be lonely at Christmas."

Pallion has been at the heart of the community here since 1993, but the past couple of years have seen people increasingly struggling financially and feeling lonely. "This time last year, people were in great poverty,"said Karen. "But if we've done our job properly, they've become more financially resilient(可迅速恢复的) or less lonely and we should be helping different people this year. And a lot of those who were helped last year are volunteering for us now. People are so kind—we get loads of homemade thank-you cards. But I think the biggest thanks we get is knowing we've helped somebody to the point where they're independent and getting on with life."

Karen and the team organize a wide range of activities, from after-school clubs and cookery sessions to line dancing and computer classes to keep older people connected. But all this wouldn't be possible without funding from People's Health Trust, with money raised through The Health Lottery(彩票). Every time you play The Health Lottery, not only could you win up to £100,000, but you're also helping to raise much-needed funds that go straight to the heart of the community."So playing The Health Lottery is not just the chance to win a prize. You could be making a real difference,"said Karen.