Human brains begin growing and developing at a very young age. They learn from the simplest experiences, which enable your children to be aware of the world. There's no denying that outdoor play helps a lot!

Times when children have to wait for their turns on playground equipment and following the playground rules by sharing, all these form components of a healthy social-emotional development. Young children develop their social-emotional skills through practice and small steps over time.

As parents or caregivers, it is fairly simple to support your child's social-emotional skills. Acts like holding him, touching him, and speaking to him and giving him loving care and attention are all helping factors. When you allow them freedom to play, it is important to follow their interests in helping build their social-emotional skills.

Difficulties in social-emotional skills can often lead to children having trouble when playing with other children. Becoming easily angry or not empathizing (理解) with other children are all signs that may point in this direction. This can in turn lead to them not empathizing with the needs of other children.

    As for the development of cognitive (认知的) skills, these develop through practice and opportunity over time. And while some cognitive skills may be genetic, most are learned through real life situations. In other words, learning and thinking skills can be improved through experiences.

    To enable them to learn, it is important that we are mindful of what our children are interested in. And this realization is only set in place once the child is given enough room and time to grow and explore.

    Depriving children of such experiences can mean that they might struggle with higher- level thinking skills. And while it is normal to keep them safe, we forget that by rushing them and cutting down on play time, we're actually causing more harm than good.

    Four years ago, Chris Nagele did what many other technology CEO have done before—he moved his team into an open concept office.

    His staff had been working from home, but he wanted everyone to be together. It quickly became clear, though, that Nagele had made a huge mistake. Everyone was distracted, productivity(生产率) suffered and the nine employees were unhappy, not to mention Nagele himself.

    In April 2015, about three years after moving into the open office, Nagele moved the company into a 10,000-square-foot office where everyone now has their own space — complete with closing doors.

    Numerous companies have accepted the open office. But we're 15% less productive, we have great trouble concentrating.

    Since moving, Nagele himself has heard from others in technology who say they long for the closed office lifestyle. It's unlikely that the open office concept will go away anytime soon, but some companies are following Nagele's example and making a return to private spaces.

    There's one big reason we'd all love a space with four walls and a door that shuts: focus. The truth is, we can't multitask(多任务化) and small distractions can cause us to lose focus for upwards of 20 minutes.

    What's more, certain open spaces can negatively impact our memory. We retain(保留) more information when we sit in one spot, says Sally Augustin, an environmental and design psychologist in La Grange Park, Illinois. It's not so obvious to us each day, but we offload(卸下) memories — often little details — into our surroundings, she says.

    Beside the cheaper cost, one main argument for the open workspace is that it increases teamwork. However, it's well documented(记载) that we rarely brainstorm brilliant ideas when we're just talk casually in a crowd.

    In every British town, large and small, you will find shops that sell second-hand goods. Sometimes such shops deal mostly in furniture, sometimes in books, sometimes in ornaments（装饰） and household goods, sometimes even in clothes.

    The furniture may often be "antique", and it may well have changed hands many times. It may also be very valuable, although the most valuable piece will usually go to the London salerooms, where one piece might well be sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds. As you look around these shops and see the polished wood of chests and tables, you cannot help thinking of those long-dead hands which polished that wood, of those now-closed eyes which once looked at these pieces with love.

    The books, too, may be antique and very precious; some may be rare first printings. Often when someone dies or has to move house, his books may all be sold, so that sometimes you may find whole libraries in one shop. On the border between England and Wales, there is a town which has become a huge bookshop as well. Even the cinema and castle have been taken over, and now books have replaced sheep as the town's main trade.

    There are also much more humble shops, sometimes simply called "junk shops", where you can buy small household pieces very cheaply. Sometimes the profits（利润）from these shops go to charity. Even these pieces, though, can make you feel sad; you think of those people who once treasured them, but who have moved on to another country or to death.

    Although the British do not worship（崇拜）their ancestors, they do treasure the past and the things of the past. This is true of houses as well. These days no one knocks them down; they are rebuilt until they are often better than new. In Britain, people do not buy something just because it is new. Old things are treasured for their proven worth; new things have to prove themselves before they are accepted.

The Domestication （驯化）of Cats

    For centuries, the common view of how domestication had occurred was that prehistoric people, realizing how useful it would be to have animals kept for food, began catching wild animals and breeding （繁殖）them. Over time, by allowing only animals with "tame"（驯养）characteristics to produce their babies, human beings created animals that were less wild and more dependent upon people. Eventually this process led to the domestic farm animals and pets that we know today, having lost their ancient survival skills and natural abilities.

    Recent research suggests that this view of domestication is incomplete. Prehistoric human beings did catch and breed useful wild animals, but specialists in animal behavior now think that domestication was not simply something people did to animals—the animals played an active part in the process. Wolves and wild horses, for example, may have taken the first steps in their own domestication by hanging around human settlements, feeding on people's crops and getting used to human activity. The animals which were not too nervous or fearful to live near people produced their babies that also tolerated humans, making it easier for people to catch and breed them.

    In this version, people succeededin domesticating only animals that had already adapted easily to life around humans. Domestication required an animal that was willing to become domestic. The process was more like a dance with partners than a victory of humans over animals.

    At first glance, the laming of cats seems to fit nicely into this new story of domestication. A traditional theory says that after prehistoric people in Egypt invented agriculture and started farming, rats and mice gathered to feast on their stored grain. Wildcats, in tum, gathered at the same places to hunt and eat the rats and mice. Over time, cats got used to people and people got used to cats. Some studies of wildcats, however, seem to call this theory into question. Wildcats don't share hunting and feeding areas, and they don't live close to people. Experts do not know whether wildcats were partners in their own domestication. They do know that long after people had acquired domestic dogs, sheep and horses, they somehow acquired domestic cats. Gradually they produced animals with increasingly tame qualities.

    Chinese scientists recently have produced two monkeys with the same gene, Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, using the same technique that gave us Dolly the sheep. These monkeys are not actually the first primates(灵长类)to be cloned. Another one named Tetra was produced in the late 1990s by embryo(胚胎)splitting, the division of an early-stage embryo into two or four separate cells to make clones. By contrast, they were each made by replacing an egg cell nucleus(原子核)with DNA from a differentiated body cell. This Dolly method, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer(SCNT), can create more clones and allows researchers greater control over the edits they make to the DNA.

    Success came from adopting several new techniques. These included a new type of microscopy to better view the cells during handling or using several materials that encourage cell reprogramming, which hadn't been tried before on primates. Still, the research process proved difficult, and many attempts by the team failed. Just two healthy baby monkeys born from more than 60 tested mothers. This leads to many researchers' pouring water on the idea that the team's results bring scientists closer to cloning humans. They thought this work is not a stepping stone to establishing methods for obtaining live born human clones. Instead, this clearly remains a very foolish thing to attempt, it would be far too inefficient, far too unsafe, and it is also pointless.

    But the scientists involved emphasize that this is not their goal. There is now no barrier for cloning primate species, thus cloning humans is closer to reality. However, their research purpose is entirely for producing non-human primate models for human diseases; they absolutely have no intention, and society will not permit this work to be extended to humans. Despite limitations, they treat this breakthrough a novel model system for scientists studying human biology and disease.

    Imagine a town with crosswalks but no pedestrians, cars and trucks but no drivers. Welcome to Mcity, a fake “city” built by researchers who are testing out the driverless cars of the future.

    The controlled test environment, which opened today (July 20, 2015) at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, covers 32 acres (the size of about 24 football fields) and contains all the trappings of a real suburb or small city. There is an entire network of roads lined with sidewalks, streetlights, stop signs and traffic signals. There's even a “downtown” area complete with fake buildings and outdoor dining areas.

    The idea behind Mcity is simple: test out new driverless car innovations in a human-free environment before these technologies are unleashed in the real world.

    "Mcity is a safe, controlled, and realistic environment where we are going to figure out how the incredible potential of connected and automated vehicles can be realized quickly, efficiently and safely," Peter Sweatman, director of the Mobility Transformation Center at U-M, said in a statement.

    The roads of Mcity are built to stand up to “rigorous, repeatable” testing, according to MTC officials. While Mcity drivers don't have to compete with real pedestrians, there will be one mechanical foot-traveler (a robot-like machine named Sebastian) that steps out into traffic to see whether the automated cars can hit the brakes in time. The fake city also features a traffic circle, a bridge, a tunnel, some unpaved roads, and even a four-lane highway with entrance and exit ramps, according to a report by Bloomberg Business.

    In addition to evaluating fully automated, or driverless cars, the researchers also hope to test out so-called connected vehicles within Mcity's limits. Connected cars can either communicate with one another (vehicle-to-vehicle control, or V2V) or with pieces of equipment, such as traffic lights, that are located near roadways (vehicle-to-infrastructure control, or V2I).

    Even the smallest details of Mcity have been planned out in advance to copy the conditions that connected and automated vehicles could face in the real world. For example, there are street signs covered up with graffiti, and faded yellow and white lane markings line the streets.

    Mcity is just one part of a much larger project that MTC and its partner organizations are establishing in an effort to get a whole fleet of connected and driverless cars on the road in Ann Arbor by 2021. In addition to the fake city, MTC is also continuing to launch connected and semi-autonomous(半自动) cars on real roadways. Eventually, the University of Michigan and the Michigan Department of Transportation said they hope to put 20,000 connected cars on the roads of southern Michigan.