20 years ago, a couple of ecologists, Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, convinced Del Oro, a large orange juice producer, to donate part of their forestland to a national park in exchange for the right to dump (倾倒) massive amounts of orange peels on a 3-hectare piece of land within the national park, at no cost. Dealing with tons of waste peels usually involved burning them or paying to have them dumped at a landfill, so the proposal was very attractive.

    A year after the contract was signed, Del Oro dumped around 12,000 tons of sticky orange waste in the land. However, another juice company and rival of Del Oro challenged the deal in court, arguing that their competitor was “polluting the national park”. They ended up winning, and the deal between Del Oro and the national park fell through. The 3-hectare piece of land virtually covered with fruit waste was completely forgotten.

    Then, in 2013, Timothy Treuer, a scientist at Princeton University visited that piece of land 15 years earlier. What he found shocked him. “It was completely overgrown with trees and vines,” Timothy Treuer recently said, “the difference between fertilized and unfertilized areas was visually surprised us a lot! We needed to come up with some really good standards to evaluate exactly what was happening there.”

    To confirm that the fruit waste was responsible for the revival of plant life, Treuer and his team spent months picking up samples, analyzing and comparing them. They found “dramatic differences between the areas covered in orange peels and those that were not. The area fertilized by orange waste had richer soil, greater tree-species richness and greater forest coverage. In a sense, it's not just a win-win between the company and the local park—it's a win for everyone.”

    The effect the orange peels had on the land is probably not that surprising to people familiar with composting (堆肥), but what is shocking is that a judge actually called this particular example polluting the national park and stopped it from going forward. Now that Timothy Treuer's study has received worldwide attention, this type of polluting is being seriously considered as a way of bringing tropical forests back to life.

    LOS ANGELES, Nov. 12 (Xinhua)—Legendary comic book writer Stan Lee has died at the age of 95, according to media reports on Monday.

    Lee, born in Stanley Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, began his career in 1939 and joined the Marvel Comics in 1961.

    He is considered as one of the most legendary names in the history of comic books and the leading creative force behind the rise of Marvel Comics. He co-created iconic fictional characters such as Spider-Man, X-Men, the Avengers, and many more.

    Lee's characters often have super powers, but they also have weaknesses. They were humans, not gods. They not only struggled to save the world, but also to pay their bills, make friends, and hold jobs. This made Marvel comic book heroes stand apart from its competitor DC, which produced the seemingly perfect heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman. Those superheroes have been adapted into blockbuster films, most of which were made after Disney acquired Marvel in a 4-billion-dollar deal in 2009.

    In a statement, Bob Iger, chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company said Stan Lee was as extraordinary as the characters he created.

Marvel also praised Lee on its website by putting on one of Lee's famous quotes, which goes, "I used to be embarrassed because I was just a comic-book writer while other people were building bridges or going on to medical careers. And then I began to realize: entertainment is one of the most important things in people's lives. Without it, they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you're able to entertain, you're doing a good thing. "

Praise from his Hollywood peers and colleagues was generous. President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige appreciated Lee's unparalleled impact on the industry. "No one has had more of an impact on my career than Stan Lee, " Feige said. "Our thoughts are with his family and the millions of fans who have been forever touched by Stan's genius, charisma and heart. "

    The popular wisdom for years has been that drinking in moderation (适度)—that's one “standard” drink a day for women and two for men-is linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular (心血管的) disease. But recent studies are casting some doubt on that long-held learning. Science now says it depends on your age and drinking habits.

    A 2017 study of nearly 2 million British with no cardiovascular risk found that there was still a modest benefit in moderate drinking, especially for women over 55 who drank five drinks a week. Why that age? Alcohol can influence the substance in the blood in positive ways, experts say, and that's about the age when heart problems begin to occur.

    Also, a 2018 study found that drinking more than 100 grams of alcohol per week—equal to roughly seven standard drinks in the United States or five to six glasses of wine in the UK—increases your risk of death from all causes and in turn lowers your life expectancy. Links were found with different forms of cardiovascular disease, with people who drank more than 100 grams per week having a higher risk of stroke, heart failure.

    Another 2018 study found that consistently drinking a moderate amount of alcohol, within recommended guidelines, had a protective effect on the heart over time. Unstable drinking habits were associated with a higher risk of heart disease, which the authors reflected might indicate broader lifestyle changes, such as poor health or stress. Former drinkers were also at greater risk.

    Overall, however, the latest thinking is that any heart benefit may be outweighed by other health risks, such as high blood pressure, certain cancers and liver damage.

Women who drink are at a higher risk for breast cancer; alcohol contributes about 6% of the overall risk, possibly because it raises certain dangerous hormones in the blood. Drinking can also increase the chance you might develop liver, mouth and oral cancers. One potential reason: Alcohol weakens our immune systems, making us more likely to inflame (发炎)—a driving force behind cancer.

Learning New Vocabulary during Deep Sleep

    Sleeping time is sometimes considered unproductive time. This raises the question whether the time spent asleep could be used more productively, e.g. for learning a new language? Up-to-now sleep research focused on the stabilization and strengthening of memories that had been formed during wakefulness. However, learning during sleep has rarely been examined. There is enough evidence for wake-learned information undergoing a revision by replay in the sleeping brain. The replay during sleep strengthens the still weak memory and leaves the newly acquired information in the pre-existing store of knowledge.

    If re-play during sleep improves the storage of wake-learned information, then first-play, i.e. the initial processing of new information, should also be possible during sleep.

    The research group of Katharina Henke examined whether a sleeping person is able to form new semantic（语义的）associations between played foreign words and translation words during the brain cells' active states, the so-called "Up-states." It turned out to be that what they thought was reasonable. When we reach deep sleep stages, our brain cells progressively coordinate their activity. During deep sleep, the brain cells are commonly active for a brief period of time before they jointly enter into a state of brief inactivity. The active state is called "Up-state" and the inactive state "Down-state". The two states alternate（交替）about every half-second.

    New evidence for sleep-learning challenges current theories of sleep and theories of memory. The concept of sleep that we are separated from the physical environment is no longer reasonable. "It's false that complex learning be impossible during deep sleep," says Simon Ruch, co-first-author. "In how far and with what consequences deep sleep can be applied for the acquisition of new information will be a topic of research in upcoming years," says Katharina Henke.

    The research group of Katharina Henke is part of the Interfaculty Research Cooperation (IRC). Thirteen research groups in medicine, biology and psychology are part of the IRC. The aim of these research groups is to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms（原理）involved in sleep and consciousness.

    Blogs(博客) have become an important part of life. Millions of people have blogs. Perhaps you would like to have one; you would like to improve your blog; perhaps you would like to make your blog as a means of earning money or attracting more people. Whatever your aim is, this course shows you how to become better bloggers. You will learn how to find the right tone for your blog, set it up and keep it, write something that are effective and worth reading, and attract people from all over the world to your blog. While it's simple to start a blog, it takes energy and skill to do it really well, as is true of any kind of writing.

    Among the topics covered: introduction to the blog, the benefits of blogging, focusing on your blog concept, how to set up and keep a page, tips for effective blog writing and drawing visitors to your blog.

    Course offered

    How to blog

    In this four-week course, a blogging expert will guide you through the process of designing, setting up, writing, and improving a blog. Each student will talk with the expert on blog, then set up a "live" blog and introduce it to the rest of the class for suggestions. Students will also have chances to ask the expert questions.

    Online classes

Tuition(学费): $ 125.      Registration(注册): $ 25.

Each class is strictly limited to 25 students aged 18 and up.

    Scientists at the University of Oxford have developed new artificial intelligence(AI) software to recognize and follow up the faces of chimpanzees(黑猩猩)in the wild. The new software will allow researchers and wildlife conservationists to significantly cut back on time spent analyzing videos, according to the new paper published in Science Advances.

    For species(物种)like chimpanzees which have complex social lives and live for many years, getting photos of their behavior taken from short-term field research can only tell us so much," says Dan Schofield, researcher and DPhil student at Oxford University's Private Models Lab, School of Anthropology. "By taking advantage of the power of machine learning to unlock large video files, it makes it possible to measure behavior over the long term."

    The computer model was trained using over 10 million images(影像):from Kyoto University s Primate Research Institute(PRI) video files of wild chimpanzees in Guinea, West Africa. The new software is the first to continuously track and recognize individual a wide range of poses, performing with high accuracy in difficult conditions such as low lighting and poor image quality.

    "Access to this large video file has allowed us to use deep neural networks to train models to a degree that was previously not possible," says Arsha Nagrad, co-auther of the study and DPhil student at the Department of Engineer Science, University of Oxford." Additionally, our new software differs from previous primate face recognition software in that it can be applied to videos with limited manual intervention(人工干预), saving hours of time."

    The technology can be potentially used to monitor species for conservation Although the present application focuses on chimpanzees, the AI software provided will be applied to other species, and help drive the adoption of AI systems to solve(解决)a range of problems in the wildlife sciences.