Speedy eaters are three times more likely to be too fat, a problem which is made even worse by the popularity of fast food and the decrease of regular dining habits, some Japanese researchers said on Wednesday.

    The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, pay special attention to how eating styles, and not just what or how much is eaten, can affect an obesity epidemic(肥胖流行病) that is becoming more and more severe because of the speed of the Western-style diet in many parts of the world.

    The World Health Organization considers around 400 million people in the world as too fat, 20 million of whom are under the age of five. The researchers are concerned that the condition raises the risk of diseases like type 2 diabetes (糖尿病) and heart problems.

    For their study, Hiroyasu Iso and the team at Osaka University asked more than 3000 Japanese volunteers (志愿者) who are 30 to 69 years old about their eating. About half of the men and a little more than half of the women said they ate until full. About 45 percent of the men and 36 percent of the women said they ate quickly.

    Those who said they ate until full and ate quickly were three times more likely to be fat than people in the “not eating until full and not eating quickly” group, the researchers found.

    They believe that the main causes are both the popularity of eating cheap fast food and bad habits such as watching television while eating.

    To fight against the bad effect of eating quickly and being too full that can lead to obesity, parents should encourage children to eat slowly and in calm environments, the study suggested.

    Outside her shabby cottage, old Mrs. Tailor was hanging out laundry on a wire line, unaware that some children lay hidden in the leaves of a nearby tree watching her every move. They were determined to find out if she really was a witch.

    They watched as she took a broomstick to clean the dirt from her stone steps. But, much to their disappointment, she did not mount the broomstick and take flight. Suddenly, the old lady's work was interrupted by the cackling of her hen-a signal that an egg had been laid in the warm nest on top of the haystack.

    The old broomstick was put aside as she hobbled off towards the haystack followed by Sooty, a black cat she had rescued from a fox trap some time back. With only three legs, it was hard for Sooty to keep up with the old lady. The cat provided proof-the children were sure that only a witch could own a black cat with three legs.

    There, standing on a wooden box, was Mrs. Tailor, stretching out to gather her precious egg. Taking the egg in one of her hands, she began to climb down when, without warning, the box broke and the old lady fell.

    "We have to got and help her," whispered Amy.

    "What if it is a trick?" replied Ben.

    "Don't be silly, Ben. If she were a witch, she would have turned us into frogs already," reasoned Meg. "Come on Amy, let's go." The girls climbed down the tree and ran all the way to the haystack.

    Approaching carefully, they could see a wound on the old lady's face. She had knocked her head on a stone and her ankle was definitely broken. "Go and get Dad," Amy yelled to her brother. "Tell him about the accident."

    The boys did not need another excuse to leave. They ran as fast as they could for help, hoping that Mrs. Tailor would not wake and turn the girls into frogs.

    Even before my father left us, my mother had to go back to work to support our family. Once I came out of the kitchen, complaining, “Mum, I can't peel(削皮) potatoes. I have only one hand.”

    Mum never looked up from sewing. “You get yourself into that kitchen and peel those potatoes,” she told me. “And don't ever use that as an excuse for anything again!”

    In the second grade, our teacher lined up my class on the playground and had each of us race across the monkey bars, swinging from one high steel rod(杆) to the next. When it was my turn, I shook my head. Some kids behind me laughed, and I went home crying.

    That night I told Mum about it. She hugged me, and I saw her “we'll see about that” look. The next afternoon, she took me back to school. At the deserted playground, mum looked carefully at the bars.

    “Now, pull up with your right arm,” she advised. She stood by as I struggled to lift myself with my right hand until I could hook the bar with my other elbow. Day after day we practiced, and she praised me for every rung(横杠) I reached.

    I'll never forget the next time, crossing the rungs; I looked down at the kids who were standing with their mouths open.

    One night, after a dance at my new junior high, I lay in bed sobbing. I could hear Mum came into my room. “Mum,” I said, weeping, “none of the boys would dance with me.”

    For a long time, I didn't hear anything. Then she said, “Oh, honey, someday you'll be beating those boys off with a bat.” Her voice was faint and cracking. I peeked(偷看) out from my covers to see tears running down her cheeks. Then I knew how much she suffered on my behalf. She had never let me see her tears.

    Think plants are just boring green things that you use for food and decoration? Think again! Plants are able to do some pretty awesome things that you're probably totally unaware of.

    Researchers have discovered that plants have the ability to communicate with an underground network made up of fungus (真菌) , which serves the plants in many ways. Tomato plants use the fungus web to warn each other of their own unhealthy conditions. Trees connected through the fungus network could move nutrients (养分) to and from each other. It is believed that larger trees move nutrients to smaller ones to help them to survive.

    Not only that, but they can also damage unwelcome plants by spreading poisonous chemicals through the fungus. It sounds like the plant world had the Internet before we did.

    Some plants have a rather impressive line of defense against being eaten. When sensing they are being swallowed, they give off a chemical into the air that attracts the insect's natural enemy. The enemy attacks the bug, thus saving the plants. This is basically the plant kingdom version of getting your older brother to beat up that kid who steals your lunch money.

    You might be aware that humans and animals have an internal clock. But did you know that plants also have this clock? This means they can prepare for certain times of day just like we do. Is it because they can react to light at sunrise? In a study, scientists found that plants use the sugars they produce to keep time, which help to regulate the genes responsible for the plant's own internal clock. So, in a sense, wake up with petunias (矮牵牛) is just as valid as ―wake up with the chickens.

    Nature is full of surprises. So for those of you who didn't know the wonders of plants, now you do.

    Barbara McCintock was one of the most import scientists of the twentieth century. She made important discoveries about genes（基因） and chromosomes （染色体）.

    Barbara McClintock was born in 1902 in Hartford, Connecticut. Her family moved to Brooklyn area of new York City in 1908. Barbara was an active child with interests in sports and music. She also developed an interest in science.

    She studied science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Barbara was among a small number of undergraduate students to receive training in genetics in 1921. Years later, she noted that few college students wanted to study genetics.

    Barbara McClintock decided to study botany, the scientific study of plants, at Cornell University. She completed her undergraduate studies in 1923. McClintock decided to continue her education at Cornell. She completed a master's degree in 1925. Two years later, she finished all her requirements for a doctorate degree.

    McCintock stayed at Cornell after she completed her education. She taught students botany. The 1930s were not a good time to be a young scientist in the United States. The country was in the middle of the great economic Depression. Millions of Americans were unemployed. Male scientists were offered jobs. But female geneticists were not much in demand.

    An old friend from Cornell, Marcus Rhoades, invited McClintock to spend the summer of 1941working at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It is a research center on Long Island, near New York City. McClintock started in a temporary（临时的）job with the genetics department. A short time later, she accepted a permanent （永久的） position with the laboratory. This gave her the freedom to continue her research without having to teach or repeatedly ask for financial aid.

    By the 1970s, her discoveries had an effect on everything from genetic engineering to cancer research. McClintock won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983for her discovery of the ability of genes to change positions on chromosomes. She was the first American woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize.

    The human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is vital to the formation of complex societies. So is the face's ability to send emotional signals, whether through an unconscious red face or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives reading faces, for signs of attraction, hatred, trust and fraud. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide true feelings or intentions.

    Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers' attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. In China, it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple's new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the home screen.

    Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental(增值的). Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the Internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode(编码)them. Although faces are unique to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, interfere with something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyze images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to opinions of privacy, fairness and trust.

    Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. Facebook's bank of facial images cannot be used by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens' privacy.

    The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analyzing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic(孤独症的)people a grasp of social signals they find difficult.