One of the greatest gifts one generation can give to other generations is the wisdom it has gained from experience. This idea has inspired the award -winning photographer Andrew Zuckerman. He interviewed and took photos of fifty over- sixty- five- year -olds all over the world. His project explores various aspects of their lives. The photos and interviews are now available on our website.Click on the introductions to read the complete interviews.

    Let us now have a culture of peace.——Federico Mayor Zaragoza, SpainFederico Mayor Zaragoza obtained a doctorate in pharmacy(药学) from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1958. After many years spent in politics, he became Director- General of UNESCO in 1987. In 1999, he created the Foundation for a Culture of Peace, of which he is now the president. In addition to many scientific publications, he has published four collections of poems and several books of essays.

    Writing is a discovery.——Nadine Gordimer, South AfricaDue to a weak heart, Nadine Gordimer attended school and university briefly. She read widely and began writing at an early age. She published her first short story at the age of fifteen, and has completed a large number of works, which have been translated into forty languages. In 1991, Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

    Jazz is about the only form of art today.——Dave Brubeck, USADave Brubeck studied music at the University of the Pacific and graduated in 1942. After World War Ⅱ he was encouraged to play jazz. In 1951, he recorded his first album(专辑). Brubeck's 1959 album has become a jazz standard. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996.For more figures CLICK HERE.

    A mother goat is able to pick out her own baby from its voice alone by the time the kid is just five days old.

    Researchers from University of London played kids' bleats to female goats and studied their responses. They were surprised to find that the animals were able to pick out their own kids' voices.

    “A mother and the kid rely a lot on smell to recognize one another and, in the wild, during the first week of their lives, the animals hide in grass and don't call much. It's a strategy they use to avoid enemies,” Dr Elodie Briefer, who led the research, explained to BBC News. “The mother call to the kids when she want them to come and feed, so we expected that kids would recognize the mothers' voices.” In fact, this was the case for deer, which also use this hiding strategy, although they do not belong to the same family of species as goats.

    She and her team recorded and played back young kids' calls to the female goats and recorded their responses. She explained, “Even when the calls came from kids that are five to six days old, we could see the mothers responding more to the voices of their own babies.” Hearing the voice of their own kids, the females would look towards the speaker that the sound was coming from, moving around and calling in response.

    The scientists say that understanding how goats behave and communicate is very important. “This helps us understand just how smart these animals are,” said Dr. Briefer. “Farmers might be able to change their way to raise goats considering this natural behaviour.”

    British scientists have discovered the willow trees planted at an angle could increase sugars for biofuel production.

    Willow is a fast-growing species. It is already used to produce fuels for the renewable heating and power market. In future it could also help to produce biofuel to power vehicles. It has been known that when willows growing in the wild are blown sideways, they tend to produce more sugars. But for a while it has not been known why this happens.

    Researchers at Imperial College London, led by Dr Nicholas Brereton and Dr Michael Ray of the Department of Life Sciences, have now solved the mystery. When the tree is blown sideways, its genes (基因) produce large numbers of sugar molecules (分子) to straighten the tree upwards.

    “This is an important breakthrough. Our study now shows that natural genetic changes are related to these differences. And this could well be the key to unlocking the future for green energy from willow,” said Dr Brereton.

    The research was carried out under lab conditions. The willows were grown at an angle of 45 degrees. They were compared to willows which grow naturally straight upwards. The team then looked for the same effect among the willows growing on the Isle of Orkney where strong winds cause the trees to bend at extreme angles. They discovered that the Orkney trees produce five times the amount of sugars found in willows grown in sheltered conditions.

    Willow is widely planted across the UK. The results show that biofuel crops such as willows could be grown in climatically changeable conditions where chances of growing food crops are limited.

    The study is published in Biotechnology for Biofuels.

Both humans and animals have enemies. It is easy for us to know the difference between our friends and our enemies. But can other animals do the same? Elephants can! They can use their sense of vision and smell to tell the difference between people who mean a threat and those who do not. In Kenya, researchers find that elephants react differently to clothing worn by men of the Maasai and Kamba ethnic groups. Young Maasai men hunt animals and thus mean a threat to elephants; Kamba men are mainly farmers and are not a danger to elephants.

In an experiment conducted by animal scientists, elephants were first presented with clean clothing or clothing that had been worn for five days by either a Maasai or a Kamba man. When the elephants noticed the smell of clothing worn by a Maasai man, they moved away from the smell faster and took longer to relax than when they noticed the smells of either clean clothing or clothing worn by a Kamba man.

Clothing color also plays a role. In the same study, when the elephants saw red clothing not worn before, they reacted angrily, as red is typically worn by Maasai men. Rather than running away as they did with the smell, the elephants acted angrily toward the red clothing.

The researchers believe that the elephants' emotional reactions are due to their different senses of smell and sight. Smelling a possible danger means that a threat is nearby and the best thing to do is run away and hide. Seeing a potential threat without its smell means that risk is low. Therefore, instead of showing fear and running away, the elephants express their anger and become aggressive.

    By analyzing the fossilized teeth of some of our most ancient ancestors, a team of scientists led by the universities of Bristol (UK) and Lyon (France) have discovered that the first humans significantly breastfed their infants (婴儿) for longer periods than their contemporary relatives.

    The results, published in the journal Science Advances, provide a first insight into the practice of weaning (断奶)that remain otherwise unseen in the fossil record.

    The team sampled minute amounts from nearly 40 fossilized teeth of our South African fossil relatives, early Homo, Paranthropus robustus and Australopithecus africanus. They measured the proportions of their stable calcium isotopes (同位素）in the tooth enamel(牙釉质), which are a function of the mother milk intake by infants. They show that early Homo offspring(后代) was breastfed in significant proportions until the age of around three to four years, which likely played a role in the apparition of traits that are specific to human lineage(血统), such as the brain development.

    In contrast, infants of Paranthropus robustus, that became extinct around one million years ago and were a more robust species in terms of dental anatomy, as well as infants of Australopithecus africanus, stopped drinking sizeable proportions of mother milk in the course of the first months of life.

    These differences in nursing behaviors likely come with major changes in the social structures of groups as well as the time between the birth of one child and the birth of the next.

    One of the study's lead authors, Dr Theo Tacail said: "The practice of weaning -- the duration of breastfeeding, age at non-milk food introduction and the age at cessation of suckling -- differs among the modern members of the hominid family which includes humans and modern great apes: orangutan, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.

    The development of such behavioral differences likely played major roles in the evolution of the members of human lineage, being associated for instance with size and structure of social groups, brain development.

    However, getting insights into these behavioral changes from fossils that are millions of years old is a challenge and, so far, little evidence allow discussing nursing practices in these fossil species.

    The findings stress the need for further exploration of calcium stables isotopes compositions in the fossil record in order to understand the co-evolution of weaning practices with other traits such as brain size or social behaviors."

http://www.dentaldailynews.com/first-human-ancestors-breastfed-for-longer-than-contemporary-relatives/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190829115427.htm

The periodic table of elements is a common sight in classrooms，campus hallways and libraries. The mode periodic table arranges the elements by their atomic numbers and periodic properties（周期性）. Several scientists worked over a century to assemble the elements into this format. 

In 1789，French chemist Antoine Lavoisiertried grouping the elements as metals and nonmetals. Forty years later，German physicist Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner observed similarities in physical and chemical properties of certain elements. He arranged them in groups of three in increasing order of atomic weight and called them triads，observing that some properties of the middle element，such as atomic weight and density，approximated the average value of these properties in the other two in each triad. 

A breakthrough came with the pu blication of a revised list of elements and their atomic masses at the first international conference of chemistry in Karlsruhe，Germany，in 1860. They concluded hydrogen would be assigned the atomic weight of 1 and that the atomic weight of other elements would be decided by comparison with hydrogen. For example，carbon，being 12 times heavier than hydrogen，would have an atomic weight of 12. 

In 1869，Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev created the framework that became the moder periodic table，leaving gaps for elements that were yet to be discovered. Mendeleev predicted the properties of some undiscovered elements and gave them names such as"eka-aluminum"for an element with properties similar to aluminum. Later "eka-aluminum"was discovered as gallium. 

German chemist Lothar Meyer produced a version of the periodic table similar to Mendeleev's in 1870. He left gaps for undiscovered elements but never predicted their properties. The Royal Society of London awarded the Davy Medal in 1882 to both Mendeleev and Meyer. The later discovery of elements predicted by Mendeleev verified（证实）his predictions and his periodic table won universal recognition. In 1955 the 101st element was named mendelevium in his honor. 

On UNESCO website，it wrote，"The Periodic Table of Chemical Elements is more than just a guide or catalogue of the entire known atoms in the universe；it is essentially a window on the universe，helping to expand our understanding of the world around us. "