We've reached a strange—some would say unusual—point. While fighting world hunger continues to be the matter of vital importance according to a recent report from the World Health Organization (WHO), more people now die from being overweight, or say, from being extremely fat, than from being underweight. It's the good life that's more likely to kill us these days.

Worse, nearly 18 million children under the age of five around the world are estimated to be overweight. What's going on?

    We really don't have many excuses for our weight problems. The dangers of the problem have been drilled into us by public ­health campaigns since 2001 and the message is getting through—up to a point.

    In the 1970s, Finland, for example, had the highest rate of heart disease in the world and being overweight was its main cause. Not any more. A public ­health campaign has greatly reduced the number of heart disease deaths by 80 per cent over the past three decades.

    Maybe that explains why the percentage of people in Finland taking diet pills doubled between 2001 and 2005, and doctors even offer surgery of removing fat inside and change the shape of the body. That has become a sort of fashion. No wonder it ranks as the world's most body ­conscious country.

We know what we should be doing to lose weight—but actually doing it is another matter. By far the most popular excuse is not taking enough exercise. More than half of us admit we lack willpower.

    Others blame good food. They say: it's just too inviting and it makes them overeat. Still others lay the blame on the Americans, complaining that pounds have piled on thanks to eating too much American­ style fast food.

    Some also blame their parents—their genes. But unfortunately, the parents are wronged because they're normal in shape, or rather slim.

    It's a similar story around the world, although people are relatively unlikely to have tried to lose weight. Parents are eager to see their kids shape up. Do as I say—not as I do.

    Are you content with the shape of your nose? If not, the climate may be to blame, not your parents.

    This is according to a recent study carried out by scientists from Pennsylvania State University, US. They found that climate played a key role in shaping our noses. The findings were based on an examination of the size and shape of noses of 476 people from four regions — West Africa, East Asia, South Asia and Northern Europe, using 3D facial imaging technology.

     “People have thought for a long time the difference in nose shape among humans across the world may have arisen as a result of natural selection because of climate,” Arslan Zaidi, one of the lead authors of the study, told the Guardian. But while previous studies were based on measurements from human skulls(头骨), Zaidi and his team looked at nose shape itself.

    The result showed that wider noses are more common in warm and humid climates, while narrower noses are more common in cold and dry climates. That, Zaidi said, could be because narrower nasal passages (鼻道) help to increase the wet content of air and warm it, which is easier on our lungs. This, in turn, led to a gradual decrease in nose width in populations living far away from the equator (赤道).

    More study is still needed to test the link between climate and nose shape, but Zaidi believes the current findings are valuable in understanding potential health issue. “As we become more of a global community, we are going to come across climates that we are not adapted to,” he told the Guardian. This means moving to a very different climate might increase the risk of breathing problems.

    However, he added, “This may not be necessarily true for various reasons such as of modem medicine and the fact that our current climate is very different from what it used to be.”

    They had a dozen children, six boys and six girls, in seventeen years. One reason Dad had so many children was that he was confident anything he and Mother teamed upon was sure to be a success.

    Our house at Montclair, New Jersey, was a sort of school for scientific management and the removal of wasted motions — or “motion study,” as Dad and Mother named it.

    Dad took moving pictures of us children washing dishes, so that he could determine how we could reduce our motions and thus hurry through the task. Each child who wanted extra pocket money put forward an offer saying what he would do the job for. The lowest bidder got the contract(合约).

    Dad put process and work charts in the bathrooms. Every child old enough to write — and Dad expected his children to start writing at a young age — was required to sign their names on the charts in the morning after he had brushed his teeth, taken a bath, combed his hair, and made his bed. At night, each child had to weigh himself, mark the figure on a graph, and sign the process charts again after he had done his homework, washed his hands and face, and brushed his teeth. Mother wanted to have a place on the charts for saying prayers, but Dad said as far as he was concerned prayers were voluntary.

    It was strict management, all right. Yes, at home or on the job, Dad was always the efficiency expert. He buttoned his vest from the bottom up, instead of from the top down, because the bottom-to-top process took him only three seconds, while the top-to-bottom took seven. He even used two shaving brushes to make his face smooth enough, because he found that by so doing he could cut seventeen seconds off his shaving time. For a while he tried shaving with two razors, but he finally gave that up.

    “I can save forty-four seconds,” he complained, “but I wasted two minutes this morning putting this bandage on my throat.” It wasn't the injured throat that really bothered him. It was the two minutes.

    Four years ago, we asked ourselves: what if we could create a shopping experience with no waiting in lines and no checkout? Or could we create a physical store where customers could simply take what they want and go? Our answer to those questions is Amazon Go, where you could experience the idea of "just walk out shopping".

    Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required. We created the world's most advanced shopping technology, so you never have to wait in line. With our "just walk out shopping" experience, simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products you want, and go! No lines, no checkout.

    Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our "just walk out technology" automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in your virtual cart（虚拟购物车）. When you've done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we'll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt(收据).

    We offer delicious ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack options made fresh every day by our on-site chefs and favorite local kitchens and bakeries. Our selection of foodstuff ranges from bread and milk to cheeses and locally made chocolates. You'll find well-known brands we love, plus special finds we're excited to introduce to customers. For a quick home-cooked dinner, pick up one of our chef-designed Amazon Meal Kits, and you can make a meal for two in about 30 minutes.

    Our 1,800-square-foot shopping space is conveniently compact(紧凑的), so busy customers can get in and out fast. It is located at 2131, 7th Ave, Seattle, WA, on the corner of 7th Avenue and Blanchard Street. All you need is an Amazon account, a supported smartphone, and the free Amazon Go app.

    Amazon Go is currently only open to Amazon employees in our testing program, and will be open to the public soon.

    Reading may be fundamental, but how the brain gives meaning to letters on a page has been a mystery. Two new studies fill in some details on how the brains of efficient readers handle words. One of the studies, published in the April 30 Neuron, suggests that a visual-processing area of the brain recognizes common words as whole units. Another study, published online April 27 in PLOSONE, makes it known that the brain operates two fast parallel systems for reading, linking visual recognition of words to speech.

    Maximilian Riesenhuber, a neuroscientist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., wanted to know whether the brain reads words letter by letter or recognizes words as whole objects. He and his colleagues showed sets of real words or nonsense(无意义的词语)words to volunteers undergoing fMRI scans. The words differed in only one letter, such as “farm” and “form” or “soat” and “poat”, or were completely different, such as “farm” and “coat” or “poat” and “hime”. The researchers were particularly interested in what happens in the visual word form area, or VWFA, an area on the left side of the brain just behind the ear that is involved in recognizing words.

    Riesenhuber and his colleagues found that neurons(神经元)in the VWFA respond strongly to changes in real words. Changing “farm” to “form”, for example, produced as great a change in activity as changing “farm” to” coat”, the team reports in Neuron. The area responded slowly to single-letter changes in made-up words.

    The data suggests that readers grasp real words as whole objects, rather than focusing on letters or letter combinations. And as a reader's exposure to a word increases, the brain comes to recognize the shape of the word. Meaning is passed on after recognition in the brain, Riesenhuber says.

    The researchers don't yet know how longer and less familiar words are recognized, or if the brain can be trained to recognize nonsense words as a unit.

    Scientists dug up human remains from the Stonehenge dating back to about 5,000 years ago. To our surprise, people journeyed far to get to the Wessex site. These men and women potentially played a huge role in the construction of Stonehenge.

    The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, reveals that a number of people buried at the Wessex monument originated from West Wales, which is also the source of the bluestones used in Stonehenge's early construction.

    According to a report from the University College London, scientists from Oxford and Belgium came together to analyze 25 of the burials dug in 2008. Many of them were buried around 3,000 BC, which is around the time when the bluestones were put up to form the Aubrey holes around Stonehenge. The famous stones weren't built until 500 years later. The team used chemical isotope (同位素) analysis and radiocarbon dating (放射性碳年代测定法) the study and found out that at least 10 of the 25 individuals analyzed didn't live near the Stonehenge site but in western Britain. This region includes West Wales, where the bluestones were sourced. Furthermore, the wood that was used to burn the bodies was also found to have come from different trees. Some of the pieces of trees come from trees in dense woodland, many of which are found in West Wales. Some of the individuals may have been cremated elsewhere before being buried in Stonehenge.

    The researchers suggest that these prehistoric people may have been part of the sacred site's early construction crew. They may have been the ones to transport the bluestone materials from the Preseli Mountains in West Wales. The findings are an interesting revelation, particularly since it means that there were significant interregional connections that existed as far back as 5,000 years ago. Even back then, in the Neolithic Period (新石器时代), human civilization had wide contacts and exchanges.