According to new research from the University of Cambridge in England, sheep are able to recognize human faces from photographs.

    The farm animals, who are social and have large brains, were previously known to be able to recognize one another, as well as familiar humans. However, their ability to recognize human faces from photos alone is novel.

    The recent study, the results of which were published in the journal Royal Society; Open Science, show the woolly creatures could be trained to recognize still images of human faces, including those of former President Barack Obama and actress Emma Watson.

    Initially, the sheep were trained to approach certain images by being given food rewards. Later, they were able to recognize the images for which they had been rewarded. The sheep could even recognize images of faces shown at an angle, though their ability to do so declined by about 15 percent—the same rate at which a human's ability to perform the same task declines.

    “Anyone who has spent time working with sheep will know that they are intelligent and individual animals who are able to recognize their handlers.” said Professor Jenny Morton, who led the Cambridge study. “We've shown with our study that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, close to those of humans and monkeys.”

    Recognizing faces is one of the most important social skills for human beings, and some disorders of the brain, including Huntington's disease, affect this ability.

    “Sheep are long-lived and have brains that are similar in size and complexity to those of some monkeys. That means they can be useful models to help us understand disorders of the brain, such as Huntington's disease that develop over a long time and affect cognitive (认识的) abilities. Our study gives us another way to monitor how these abilities change.” Morton said.

    The technique can lead to new ways to produce medicines, the researchers from the universities of Istanbul and Hawaii hope.

    As part of an effort to improve treatments for life-threatening illnesses, a team of scientists have created rabbits that glow(发光) in the dark.

    Their efforts produced two rabbits out of a litter of eight that went from being a normal, fluffy white to glowing green in the dark. The rabbits were born at the University of Istanbul as part of a collaboration（合作） between scientists from universities in Turkey and Hawaii.

    The rabbits glow to show that a genetic manipulation technique can work efficiently, though the specific color is more cosmetic than scientific. "The green is not important at all – it's just a marker to show the experiment can be done successfully," said University of Hawaii associate professor Stefan Moisyadi.

    To produce the glowing effect, researchers injected jellyfish DNA into a mother rabbit's embryos. Those altered embryos（胚胎）. Those altered embryos were then inserted back into the mother. Similar experiments have resulted in glowing cockroaches and cats.

    Eventually, the researchers hope the technique can lead to new ways to produce medicines, Moisyadi said. “The final goal is to develop animals that act as barrier reactive to produce beneficial molecules in their milk that can be cheaply extracted, especially in countries that can't afford big pharma plants that make drugs, that usually cost $1bn to build, and be able to produce their own protein-based medication in animals," Moisyadi said.

    The rabbits are expected to have the same life span as their non-glowing counterparts（副本）, but Moisyadi said he understands people can object to this kind of experimentation involving live animals.

    "To the people against, I say: think about, what are the benefits and what are the injuries?" Moisyadi said. "And if the benefits outweigh the injuries, let's go with the benefits."

    Moisyadi, a native of Turkey who is now with the University of Hawaii, started developing the project in 2006, and researchers are now waiting to see if pregnant sheep produce similar results.

    US student Vanessa Tahay stands out from the other teenagers in her school. Her skin is dark, her accent is thick, and if you ask her, she will tell you these are the things she is proudest of. Tahay is a poet, and at 18 she was considered among the best in Los Angeles.

    When she is on the stage, audiences often go silent. They also laugh, shout and cry. But this doesn't come easily for someone who comes from a village that sits at the base of a huge mountain range in Central America. When she first appeared at school, she was teased by others for being short and different. She never spoke, so they called her “mouse”.

    “How do I defend myself?” Tahay thought. “I don't know how.”

    “Keep going,” her mother would tell her. “At some point, you'll learn.”

    She spent hours after school and on weekends watching the same DVDs: English without Barriers.

    Tahay's elder brother, Elmer, persuaded her to go to the after-school poetry club. In the last six years, her English teacher Laurie Kurnick has turned Cleveland Charter High School's poetry program into one of the most respected in the city. Her team draws from the likes of D.H. Laurence, Pat Mora and Kendrick Lamar to create poems about their own lives. The poems focus on many things —some funny, some painful.

    The first time Tahay read the group's poems, chills went up her spine (脊柱). “I wish I could write like that,” she thought. “I want to say something.”

She wrote her first poem about her first year in America. She called it Invisible. The day her turn came to recite in front of the team, she broke down crying. She cried for 15 minutes. “I had so much held in,” Tahay said. “I couldn't even finish it.”

    But she kept at it despite her less-than-perfect grammar, spelling and diction (措辞). Still, she wouldn't tell her friends about her poetry because she worried they would make fun of her.

    But with time, her poems changed her. “They gave me pride,” Tahay said. “They told me that I'm worth something.”

    “She had this innocence,” Kurnick said. “This willingness to be genuine and show you things you don't ever see.”

    Cold weather during winter months may keep many people from leaving home and running in the open air.

    However, a new study shows that the drop in temperature is a good reason to run. In fact, researchers say, running in cold weather helps improve one's performance.

    Many people say running in the winter can be difficult. Two reasons are the low temperatures and bitter winds. Yet many runners might find it easier than running in hot weather.

    That could be because lower temperatures reduce stress on the body. When you run in cold weather, your heart rate and the body's dehydration (脱水) levels are lower than in warmer conditions. The body needs less water on a cold day than in warm weather.

    This information comes from sports scientists at St. Mary's University in London. John Brewer is a professor of applied sport science at St. Mary's.

    For this study, he and other researchers put a group of people into a room they called an "environmental chamber." The researchers then recreated summer and winter weather conditions in the room. The test subjects were asked to run 10,000 meters under both conditions. Brewer says he and his team recorded biological measurements of the runners.

    "We've got a group of subjects into the environmental chamber, we've changed the conditions to replicate the summer or winter and we've got them to run a 10km under both of those conditions and taken various measurements on each runner while they've been completing their 10km."

    Brewer says every movement runners make produces heat. He explains that one way in which we lose heat is by sweating. The body loses heat through droplets of sweat. He says the body also loses heat by transporting the blood to the surface of the skin.

    This story starts with my two kids. We were hiking in the Oakland woods when my daughter noticed some plastic litter in a creek. She looked at me and said, "Daddy? That doesn't go there”.

    When she said that, it reminded me of my summer camp. On the morning of that camping day, right before they'd let our anxious parents come through the gates, our camp director would say Quick! Everyone pick up five pieces of litter, "We got one hundred kids each picking up five pieces, and pretty soon, we got a much cleaner camp. So I thought, why not apply that crowdsourced cleanup model to the entire planet? And that was the inspiration for Literati. The goal is to create a litter-free world. Let me show you how it started. I took a picture of a cigarette using Instagram.

    Then I took another photo, and another. And at the end of a few days, I had 50 photos on my hone and I had picked up each piece, and I realized that I was keeping a record of the positive impact I was having on the planet. That's 50 fewer things you might see, or you might step on, or some bird might eat. So I started telling people what I was doing, and they started participating. I realized that Litterati was more than just pretty pictures; we were becoming a community that was collecting data. Each photo tells a story. It tells us who picked up what, a geo-tag tells us where and a time stamp tells us when. Gradually, the community grew.

    Litter —it's blending into the back ground of our lives. But what if we brought it to the fore front? What if we understood exactly what was on our streets, our sidewalks and our school yards?

    How might we use that data to make a difference?

    In many developed countries, people who have high degrees begin to work longer than those who don't. About 65% of American men aged 62－74 with a professional degree are in the workforce (劳动人口), compared with 32% of men who only finish high school. This gap is part of a deepening divide between the well­educated wealthy and the unskilled poor. Rapid technological advance has raised the incomes of the highly skilled while squeezing those of the unskilled. The consequences, for individuals and society, are profound(意义深远的).

    The world is facing an astonishing rise in the number of old people, and they will live longer than ever before. Over the next 20 years the global population of those aged 65 or more will almost double, from 600 million to 1.1 billion. The experience of the 20th century, when greater longevity (长寿) translated into more years in retirement rather than more years at work, has persuaded many observers that this shift (变化) will lead to slower economic growth, while the swelling (渐增的) ranks of pensioners will create government budget problems.

    Policies are partly responsible. Many European governments have abandoned policies that used to encourage people to retire early. Even the better­off must work longer to have a comfortable retirement. But the changing nature of work also plays a big role. Pay has risen sharply for the highly educated, and those people continue to reap (获得) rich rewards into old age because these days the educated elderly are more productive than the preceding (先前的) generation. Technological change may well reinforce (强化) that shift: the skills that complement (补充) computers, from management know­how to creativity, do not necessarily decline with age.