Fear may be felt in the heart as well as in the head, according to a study that has found a link between the cycles of a beating heart and the chance of someone feeling fear.

    Tests on healthy volunteers found that they were more likely to feel a sense of fear at the moment when their hearts are contracting(收缩) and pumping blood around their bodies, compared with the point when the heartbeat is relaxed. Scientists say the results suggest that the heart is able to influence how the brain responds to a fearful event, depending on which point it is at in its regular cycle of contraction and relaxation.

    Sarah Garfinkel at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School said: “Our Study shows for the first time that the way in which we deal with fear is different depending on when we see fearful pictures in relation to our heart.”

The study tested 20 healthy volunteers on their reactions to fear as they were shown pictures of fearful faces. Dr Garfinkel said, “The study showed that fearful faces are better noticed when the heart is pumping than when it is relaxed. Thus our hearts can also affect what we see and what we don't see一and guide whether we see fear.”

To further understand this relationship, the scientists also used a brain scanner(扫描仪) to show how the brain influences the way the heart changes a person's feeling of fear.

“We have found an important mechanism by which the heart and brain ‘speak' to each other to change our feelings and reduce fear,” Dr Garfinkel said.

    “We hope that by increasing our understanding about how fear is dealt with and ways that it could be reduced, we may be able to develop more successful treatments for anxiety disorders, and also for those who may be suffering from serious stress disorder.”

    It was a cold winter. The wind blew all night and the snow was blinding. When morning came, my three children and I got up and made our way to the windows. As we looked out the window, we saw that the henhouse was gone. Our three hens had been blown away.

    I looked at the emptiness outside. Then I saw all three chickens sat around the edge of a white bucket. How was this violent wind not blowing them into the field beyond? I quickly pulled on long snow pants and heavy winter coat, wrapped a scarf and stuck my feet into very large boots .

    I shouted at the wind as it blew. I was alone, save for my children. They stared out the window into the vast white sea of snow, their eyes peeled for any sign of movement. Outside I heard the sound of my boots as I walked against the wind.

    The snow circling around me, I steadily made my way to the soft cluck-cluck-cluck sound my hens always made. When I reached them, I saw that their little feet were holding on to the edge of the bucket, heads bent forward and away from the wind. I gently lifted each hen and put it carefully into the warm inside. Then I began the freezing walk back to the small shed directly behind our house. One by one I laid my chickens on the cold floor, and they began to cluck softly.

    As I shut the shed doors, my eyes went directly to the window where my children were watching. They jumped up and down cheering, and so did I! I wasn't some dragon slayer (屠龙者) from a fairy tale. I was simply a mom, but the look on my children's faces told me that they thought I was a hero mom.

    When it comes to medical care, many patients and doctors believe “more is better.” But what they do not realize is that overtreatment—too many scans, too many blood tests, too many procedures—may bring harm. Sometimes a test leads you down a path to more and more testing, some of which may be attacking, or to treatment for things that should be left out.

    Terrence Power, for example, complained that after his wife learned she had Wegener's disease, an uncommon disorder of the immune system(免疫系统), they found it difficult to refuse testing recommended by her doctor. The doctor insisted on office visits every three weeks, even when she was feeling well. He frequently ordered blood tests and X-rays, and repeatedly referred her to experts for even minor complaints. Even when tests came back negative, more were ordered, and she was hospitalized as prevention when she developed a cold. She had as many as 25 doctor visits during one six-month period. The couple was spending about $30,000 a year for her care.

    After several years of physical suffering and near financial ruin from the medical costs, the couple began questioning the treatment after discussing with other patients in online support groups. “It's a really hard thing to determine when doctors have crossed the line,” Mr. Power said. “You think she's getting the best care in the world, but after a while you start to wonder: What is the purpose?” Mr. Power then spoke with his own primary care doctor, who advised him to find a new expert to oversee Mrs. Power's care. Under the new doctor's care, the regular testing stopped and Mrs. Power's condition was stable. Now she sees the doctor only four or five times a year.

    Latrice Brown was excited about starting her junior year. She had volunteered to take part in the Lincoln High School Friendship Program. As an upperclassman, she would be assigned a “freshman(新生) friend”. Her duties would include helping her friend get used to high school life by offering friendship. Latrice thought it was important to have someone with whom to talk and share concerns. She knew that the friendship program was likely to make the freshman year of high school a positive experience. On August 2nd Latrice received a notice in the mail about the schedule of events for the freshman orientation (适应指导).

Freshman Orientation

    Please call your freshman friend and introduce yourself over the telephone.

    Confirm that he or she will be attending the orientation.

    Recently, the Oxford English Dictionary, or OED, added about 1,000 words and new definitions to its website. The changes are to help users understand a mix of terms, some dating back many centuries. The additions include words such as "brencheese", "deathshildy" and "hip-pop".

    The new entries are part of the company's update to oed.com, its searchable online dictionary for paid members. The OED makes changes to the website four times each year. But the latest print version has been in process since the year 2000, and may not be ready for 10 more years. That information comes from Katherine Connor Martin, who heads the company's dictionary operations in the United States.

    Usually, the OED watches usage of a word for at least 10 years before deciding whether to add a new entry, new definition or word related to an existing entry, she said. This general rule, however, is sometimes not followed. That is what happened with "tweet", a word that the OED added far before the 10-year mark. Other times, the company adds words that are very old, but were not included in the dictionary in the past.

    “It's funny because we talk about new words, but many of the words we add are already obsolete. It's just that they were never in the dictionary before," Martin told the Associated Press.

    That is the reality, she said, of a historical dictionary trying to put more than 1,000 years of English into books that already have over 855,000 entries. So, you get "brencheese", a rarely used term for when bread and cheese are eaten together. The word dates back to the year 1665. The word "deathshildy" is from Old English. It means someone who is guilty of a serious crime and condemned to death.

    The website defines the term "hip-pop" for music that combines parts of hip-hop and popular music. The OED discovered the term “hip-hip pop” was used in a 1985 story from a Pennsylvania newspaper. It noted that the term "hip-pop" appeared in a 1991 U. S. newspaper report about the rap artist M.C. Hammer.

    The website has added several other terms related to modern culture. They include three popular terms: "binge-watching", "spoiler alert" and "microaggression".

    Here are a few other new entries if you long to read on.

A bot is a software program that often works by itself on the internet to perform the same kinds of actions as humans do. The report, produced by California-based internet security company Imperva, found that 49.6 percent of worldwide internet traffic ( 互联网流量） came from bots in 2023, while from human users fell to 50.4 percent. Imperva's study also found that web traffic linked to "bad bots" grew to 32 percent in 2023, a rise of 30.2 percent from 2022. Nanhi Singh, a security advisor at Imperva, said that bots are currently one of growing threats facing almost every industry.

Bots are generally designed to visit websites and independently search for many kinds of online information. They are able to operate at much greater speeds than humans and can process repeated searches and process large amounts of data. Online search advisor Yoast notes that some bots are considered good because they can be useful to individuals through tools such as OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGPT. Some others are considered malicious, because they are trained to hack, or break into network computer systems. These kinds of bots pretend themselves as humans and collect private data or financial information that can be used to commit crimes. And some bots are even designed to spread misinformation and false news.

The study also suggested that some countries have a much bigger problem with bad bots than others. Web traffic linked to bad bots in 2023 accounted for 71 percent in Ireland while Germany was next, with 67.5 percent. The percentage of Mexico and the USA was reported to be 42.8 percent and 35.4 percent respectively. Imperva even reported that bad bot activity would lead to account takeovers, which increased 10 percent in 2023 over 2022. The highest number of account takeovers – 36.8 percent–happened in the financial services industry. Next was the travel industry, with 11.5 percent, followed by business services at eight percent.

Nanhi Singh said the problem is likely to worsen in coming years to the point where such bots would exist everywhere. She urged organizations to introduce bot management and security tools in an effort to limit automated traffic and prevent dangerous account takeovers.