Baby girls make their way to dolls as soon as they can crawl, while boys will head for the toy cars,  a study has shown. The findings, the first to show consistent differences in very young babies, suggest there is a biological basis to their preferences.

    Psychologists Dr Brenda Todd from City University London carried out an experiment involving 90 babies aged nine months to 36 months. They were allowed to choose from seven toys. Some were boys' toys - a car, a digger, a ball and a blue teddy.  The rest were girls' toys: a pink teddy, a doll and a cooking set. They were placed a meter away from the toys, and could pick whichever toy they liked. Their choice and the amount of time they spent playing with each toy were recorded.

    Of the youngest children (nine to 14 months), girls spent much longer playing with the doll than boys, and boys spent much more time with the car and ball than the girls did. Among the two-and three-year-olds, girls spent 50 percent of the time playing with the doll while only two boys briefly touched it. The boys spent almost 90 percent of their time playing with cars, which the girls barely touched. There was no link between the parents' view on which toys were more appropriate for boys or girls, and the children's choice.

    Dr Brenda Todd said: “Children of this age are already exposed to much socialization. Boys may be given ‘toys that go' while girls get toys they can care for, which may help shape their preference. But these findings agree with the former idea that children show natural interests in particular kinds of toys. There could be a biological basis for their choices. Males through evolution have been adapted to prefer moving objects, probably through hunting instincts（本能）, while girls prefer warmer colors such as pink, the color of a newborn baby.”

    The question of what children learn, and how they should learn it, is continually being debated and redebated. Nobody dares any longer to defend the old system, the parrot-fashion（way of learning by repeating what others say）of learning lessons, the grammar-with-a-whip（鞭子）system, which was good enough for our grandparents. The theories of modern psychology have stepped in to argue that we must understand the needs of our children. Children are not just small adults; they are children who must be respected as such.

    Well, you may say, this is as it should be, and a good idea. But think further. What happens? “Education” becomes the responsibility not of teachers, but of psychologists. What happens then? Teachers worry too much about the psychological implications（暗示） of their lessons, and forget about the subjects themselves. If a child dislikes a lesson, the teacher feels that it is his fault, not the child's. So teachers worry whether history is “relevant” to modern young children. And do they dare to recount stories about violent battles? Or will this make the children themselves violent? Can they tell their classes about children of different races, or will this encourage racial hatred? Why teach children to write grammatical sentences? Oral expression is better. Sums? Arithmetic? No; real-life mathematical situations are more understandable.

    You see, you can go too far. Influenced by educational theorists, who have nothing better to do than write books about their ideas, teachers leave their teaching-training colleges filled with grand, psychological ideas about children and their needs. They make complicated preparations and try out their “modern methods” on the long-suffering children. Since one “modern method” rapidly replaces another, the poor kids will have well been fed up by the time they leave school. Frequently the modern methods are so complicated that they fail to be understood by the teachers, let alone the children; even more often, the relaxed discipline so necessary for the “informal” feeling the class must have, prevents all but a handful of children from learning anything.

    Modern inventions have speeded up people's loves amazingly. Motor-cars cover a hundred miles in little more than an hour, aircraft cross the world inside a day, while computers operate at lightning speed. Indeed, this love of speed seems never-ending. Every year motor-cars are produced which go even faster and each new computer boasts of saving precious seconds in handling tasks.

    All this saves time, but at a price. When we lose or gain half a day in speeding across the world in an air plane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfortable feeling known as jetlag; our bodies feel that they have left behind on another time zone. Again, spending too long at computers results in painful wrists and fingers. Mobile phones also have their dangers, according to some scientists, too much use may transmit harmful radiation into our brains, a consequence we do not like to think about.

    However, what do we do with the time we have saved? Certainly not relax, or so it seems. We are so accustomed to constant activity that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing, or even just one thing at a time. Perhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story on the radio, letting imagination take us into another world.

    There was a time when some people's lives were devoted simply to the cultivation of the land or the care of cattle. No Multi-tasking there; their lives went on at a much gentler pace, and in a familiar pattern. There is much that we might envy about a way of life like this. Yet before we do so, we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors faced, they farmed with bare hands, often lived close to hunger, and had to fashion tools from wood and stone, Modern machinery has freed people from that primitive existence.

    From self-driving cars to carebots for elderly people, rapid development in technology has long represented a possible threat to many jobs normally performed by people. But experts now believe that almost 50 percent of occupations existing today will be completely unnecessary by 2025 as artificial intelligence continues to change businesses.

    "The next fifteen years will see a revolution in how we work, and a revolution will necessarily take place in how we plan and think about workplaces," said Peter Andrew, Director of Workplace Strategy for CBRE Asia Pacific.

    A growing number of jobs in the future will require creative intelligence, social skills and the ability to use artificial intelligence.

    The report is based on interviews with 200 experts, business leaders and young people from Asia Pacific, Europe and North America. It shows that in the US technology already destroys more jobs than it creates.

    But the report states: "Losing occupations does not necessarily mean losing jobs — just changing what people do." Growth in new jobs could occur as much, according to the research.

    "The growth of 20 to 40 person companies that have the speed and technological know-how will directly challenge big companies," it states.

    A 2014 report by Pew Research found 52 percent of experts in artificial intelligence and robotics were optimistic about the future and believed there would still be enough jobs in the next few years. The optimists pictured "a future in which robots do not take the place of more jobs than they create," according to Aaron Smith, the report's co-author.

    "Technology will continue to affect jobs, but more jobs seem likely to be created. Although there have always been unemployed people, when we reached a few billion people there were billions of jobs. There is no shortage of things that need to be done and that will not change," Microsoft's Jonathan Grudin told researchers.

    JERUSALEM—Israel's Environmental Protection Ministry asked citizens Wednesday to avoid unnecessary physical activity and stay indoors, as a serious sandstorm struck the Middle East in a thick yellow haze (霾) for a second day with no hope to see things clearly.

    The ministry said heavy levels of dust and sand in the air were a threat to cities throughout the country. The ministry's website advised pregnant women, the elderly and those with heart and respiratory (呼吸的) conditions to stay indoors, and asked schools to keep children indoors.

    The emergency service Magen David Adom reported that it has treated more than 300 Israelis suffering from breathing problems, and that hospitals have more respiratory-related patients, including a large number of the elderly and those with asthma and related conditions.

    The domestic Israeli airlines Arkia and Israir continued to ground their flights to Eilat because of reduced visibility.

    The sandstorm has affected Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, where at least five deaths have been reported.

    "There has been nothing that came close to the magnitude of this sandstorm," said Daniel Rosenfeld, a professor with the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

    "While Israel has experienced a number of sandstorms in the past, they started from the Sinai Desert and the Sahara Desert to the south and were joined by winter windstorms that cleared the air," he said. In this case, the storm comes from Syria and Iraq to the north and east.

    Because the storm is hitting during the summer, at a time of both little wind and severe heat and humidity, forecasters expect the particles to remain in the air throughout the weekend and possibly into next week.

    "This is really puzzling," said Rosenfeld, adding that he and his colleague will conduct research into the origins of the unprecedented (前所未有的) storm. (326 words)

    On a recent trip to London, I decided to visit some exciting new restaurants that are using technology to change the way people dine out. My first stop was at an Italian restaurant in the city center. When I walked into the restaurant, I was given a tray (托盘)and a special card, but I had no idea what to do next! The manager came up to me and explained that I could swipe (刷) my card at any of the food and drink stations in the restaurant, and that the card would record my order. No waiters necessary! I made my selection and then handed my card to the cashier. Once I'd paid for my meal, I collected it and made my way to the dining area on the second floor. The food was very delicious, but, I must admit, I didn't enjoy having to carry my food up two flights of stairs.

    On the next night, a friend of mine suggested that we visit his favorite high-tech restaurant. When we arrived, I was surprised to discover that there were no paper menus; instead, the menus appeared on the touch screen surface of the table. All we had to do was touch our choices with our fingers and wait for the waiters to bring us our meal. The touch screen tabletop also allowed us to change different tablecloths and even play games. We had so much fun playing games that we hardly touched our food when it arrived--we really should have told the waiter to give us takeaways instead.

    On my last day in London, I decided to get some tapas from a Spanish takeaway near my hotel. I had heard that the owners had placed a webcam (网络摄像机) at the restaurant to allow their customers to watch the long lunchtime queue (队列) online. This came in very handy for me. While I packed my baggage, I kept an eye on the queue and then raced to the restaurant when the lunchtime rush was over. Without that wonderful webcam, I could have missed my plane.