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      A glass a day keeps obesity at bay. Wine has always been thought to cause weight gain because of its high sugar content, but new research suggests a glass a day could form part of a diet. Looking at past studies they found that, while heavy drinkers do put on weight, those who drink in moderation can actually lose weight.

    A scientist for the research team at Navarro University in Spain says, “Proper drinking may be more likely to protect against, rather than promote, weight gain.” An official organization reviewed the findings and agreed with most of the conclusions, particularly that present data do not clearly show if proper drinking increases weight.

    Boston University's Dr. Harvey Finkel found that the reasons relating alcohol (酒精) to changes in body weight are not properly understood. His team pointed out the strong protective effects (效果) of proper drinking on the risk of getting conditions like diabetes (糖尿病), which relate to increasing obesity. Some studies suggest that even very fat people may be at lower risk of diabetes if they are moderate drinkers.

    The group says alcohol provides energy that is quickly absorbed into the body and is not stored in fat, and that this process could explain the differences in its effects from those of other foods. They agree that future research should be directed towards assessing the roles of different types of alcoholic drinks, taking drinking patterns into consideration.

    For now there is little evidence that drinking small to moderate amounts of alcohol on a regular basis increases one's risk of becoming too fat. What's more, a study three years ago suggested that a chemical found in grapes and red wine, destroys fat cells.

    Oh my God, the robots are taking over! We're doomed! Doomed! Now that I've gotten that out of my system, it's become clear that while we may or may not be doomed, the robots are taking over. The latest example is the government's new guidelines for self-driving cars.

    Tesla, Google and Uber are already testing driverless cars in cities across America. Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick is among those predicting that by 2021, self-driving cars will play a big part in urban settings.

    Nearly 40,000 people died last year in this nation in automobile-related accidents, and we believes driverless cars can save tens of thousands of lives annually.

    Makes sense. Robot drivers are less likely to get drunk, drive without a license, text while driving or feel agitated at the scene of a pileup. On the other hand, I wonder how these highly sensitive cars will react, with walkers constantly dashing into the street. Will they jam on the brakes every 10 seconds?

    But there's a bigger picture. Not only are robots replacing humans behind the wheel, but behind the work desk, in warehouses, senior homes, you name it. Robots aren't just taking over in the workplace.

    The question is, where can't a robot function better than a human? How about writing songs? A robot can go through every combination of notes in record time and come up with a pleasing melody. The lyrics might be a different story. Is a Grammy-winning song co-written by Hank Human and R-3071 in our future?

    Finally, it's only a matter of time until we have robot politicians and presidential candidates. Why not? They can be programmed to be experts in world and domestic affairs and come up with the best solutions without corruption and bad humors.

     Actually, it's too bad such technology isn't available in 2016. Pretty sure the robot would win in a landslide.

    My timing has always been a little off with Elizabeth Strout. I've read and pretty much admired everything she's written, but, for whatever reason, the books of hers I've picked to review have been the good ones, like Amy and Isabelle andThe Burgess Boys, rather than the extraordinary ones, like Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Anything Is Possible is Strout's latest book and it's gorgeous. Like Olive Kitteridge, Anything Is Possible reads like a novel constructed out of linked stories. In fact, it's hard to know exactly what to call this — a novel or a short story collection. In any case, these stories are animated (栩栩如生) by Strout's signature themes: class humiliation, loneliness, spiritual and, sometimes, reawakening. When Strout is really on her game, as she is here, you feel like you've been carefully lowered into the unquiet depths of quiet lives.

    Strout began working on Anything Is Possible at the same time she was writing her novel My Name Is Lucy Barton, which was published last year. Lucy, a dirt-poor child who grows up to become a celebrated writer, floats in and out of these interlocking stories. Some characters catch a glimpse of her being interviewed on TV; one travels to see her at a bookstore. An older Lucy even appears “in the flesh” in one story when she returns home to the small town in rural Illinois where most of these tales are set to visit her troubled brother; but Anything Is Possible also stands on its own. Indeed, a few of the characters here would be ticked off if they thought their stories depended in any way on that Barton girl. Strout's writerly eye works like a 360 degree camera, so that a character or place that's on the margins of one tale takes center stage in a later one. This technique sounds contrived, but Strout carries it off lightly.

    ①One of the most powerful stories here is called “Dottie's Bed & Breakfast,” which is an establishment we readers glimpse earlier in the book. Dottie desires to be middle-class and she harbors a grudge (怨恨) against life because she's had to rent out rooms to make a living. Dottie also possesses a sensitive nose for sniffing out the lower-class origins of some of her guests.

    ②“Shoes always gave you away,” comments a woman in a story called “Cracked” about a houseguest's too-high cork wedges(坡跟鞋). And, in the final story here, called “Gift,” a once-poor man made good says, “The sense of apology did not go away, it was a tiring thing to carry.”

    ③But, back to Dottie. When an elderly doctor and his wife come to stay at her guesthouse, Dottie bonds over tea with the wife, Shelley, who shares a story about a long-ago social humiliation.

    ④At breakfast the next morning, however, Shelley obviously regrets that confidence and becomes the Doctor's wife again. She freezes Dottie out and puts her back in her place as the inn-keep.

    There's comic satisfaction in seeing Dottie secretly spitting into the breakfast jam, but the more profound rewards of this story have to do with its recognition of the many varieties of human insecurity — or, as Lucy Barton herself more bluntly puts it, the many ways “people are always looking to feel superior to someone else.”

    Other stories have to do with sexual shame, or with the tragic ways close neighbors or family members misread each other; but I'm making Anything Is Possible sound too grim when, in fact, so many of these stories end in an understated (低调的) gesture of forgiveness. Strout is in that special company of writers like Richard Ford, Stewart O'Nan and Richard Russo, who write simply about ordinary lives and, in so doing, make us readers see the beauty of both their worn and rough surfaces and what lies beneath.

    If you live in Shanghai, Beijing or many other cities, you may see many orange bicycles on the streets these days.

    These bikes are owned by a company called Mobike. You can order a bike through an app on your phone. When you find a bike, you just scan a QR code （扫描二维码） on the bike so you can use it. You don't need to return the bike to a station- you can park it anywhere.

    China was known as "the kingdom of bicycles" about 30 years ago. But more people choose to drive cars and catch the subway these days. Bike rental（租凭的） services like Mobike are bringing bikes back.

    "Back then, I got the feeling that Chinese people were trying to be modern and push away the past. So they did not want to be linked with bicycles," said Ines Brunn, a German woman who runs a bike store in Beijing. "I do believe changes in people's tastes will shape new thinking about bikes."

    Online rental services are making biking more convenient, but it's still not easy to ride bikes in Chinese cities. Cars often take up bicycle lanes （道路）. Bikers have to ride next to cars in car lanes, which can be very dangerous.

    Beijing plans to build over 3,200km of new bike lanes. Drivers who drive in bike lanes will be punished. Traffic signs will be put up to better protect bikers.

    Developed by researchers and designers specializing in typography(印刷术)and behavioral science, Sans Forgetica is a new font(字体)designed to help readers better remember the information they read by forcing them to spend a bit more time on each word.

    The design of Sans Forgetica is based on a font called Albion, but with substantial  modifications(修改)to reduce familiarity and attain its goal of engaging the brain more and helping the reader retain(保留) more information. It was developed by scientists at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, who believe it could help students studying for exams.

    “We believe this is the first time that specific principles of design theory have been combined with specific principles of psychology theory in order to create a font, ”Behavioral economist Jo Peryman told DW.

    If fonts are too familiar, readers often glance over them without their brain creating may  memories of what was read. At the same time, if a font is too outlandish, the brain has to struggle too much to decipher(破译)it while neglecting the retention of information. According to its developers, “Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstacle has been added to create that memory retention.” Its modifications force readers to spend more time, but not too much time, reading each word, allowing the brain to engage in deeper cognitive processing.

    So does Sans Forgetica actually work? Does it help readers better remember the information they read? So far, studies have shown that it can make a difference, although not a significant one.

    One experiment had 96 participants recall word pairs presented in three different fonts. They remembered 69 percent of the word pairs written in Sans Forgetica, compared to 61 percent for the other fonts. In a different experiment, 303 students took a mock(模拟)multiple-choice exam, and whenever the text was presented in Sans Forgetica, they remembered 57 percent of the text, compared to only 50 percent of the surrounding text written in Arial font.

    So Sans Forgetica won't give you the memory of an elephant, but if you're the kind of person who believes every little bit helps, it might be worth a try.

    Scientists have recreated a 1985 study of birds in Peru that shows climate change is pushing them from their natural environment. Thirty years ago, researchers studied more than 400 kinds of birds living on a mountainside in Peru. In 2017, researchers looked again at the bird populations. They found that almost all had moved to higher places in the mountain. Almost all had decreased in size. And, the scientists say at least eight bird groups that move to the higher altitude had died out completely.

    Mark Urban, director of the Center of Biological Risk at the University of Connecticut, said this recent study was the first to prove that rising temperatures and moving to avoid them can lead to extinction.

    In 1985, Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, and a team of scientists established a camp alongside a river running down a mountainside in southeastern Peru. He wanted to document where tropical bird groups lived. His team spent several weeks using nets to catch and release birds. They kept detailed notes of birds they caught, saw or heard. In 2016, Fitzpatrick passed his notes, photos and other records to Benjamin Freeman. Freeman who has been researching tropical birds for more than 10 years set out in August and September of 2017 to copy Fitzpatrick's study. His team used the same methods, searching the same places in the same time of year.

    Freeman said that the birds moved an average of 98 meters further up the mountain, believing that temperature is the main cause of the birds' movement. Fitzpatrick noted that birds used to living in areas with little temperature change might be especially at risk because of climate change. He said, "We should expect that what's happening on this mountain top is happening more generally in the Andes, and other tropical mountain ranges."