A new study has found the amount of antibiotics(抗生素) given to farm animals is expected to increase by two thirds over the next 15 years. Researchers are linking the growing dependence on the drugs to the increasing need for meat, milk and eggs. However, the drugs could quicken the development of antibiotic-resistant infections(感染).Such infections are already a major public, health concern in the United States.

The World Health Organization notes when people stop living in poverty, the first thing they want to do is eat better, rather than earn more money. For most people, that means their diet should contain more meat. With the rapid development of Asia, people there are eating nearly four times as much meat, milk and other milk products as they did 50 years ago.

To meet the need, farmers have put many animals into smaller space. As the animals are crowded together, the easiest way to deal with some of the problems of crowding is to give them antibiotics. It's clear that antibiotics help animals stay healthy in a crowded environment and grow faster. But bacteria can develop resistance to the drugs gradually.

Nowadays, doctors find antibiotics that once worked against the infections no longer work. The bacteria have learned ways to fight against the drugs. The heavy use of antibiotics in animals is responsible for the growth of antibiotic resistance worldwide. In the United States, at least two million people get drug-resistant infections each year and at least 23,000 die from an infection.

Europe has banned the use of antibiotics to increase animal growth. And the United States is hoping to persuade farmers to stop using antibiotics for that purpose.

There are thousands of products of all colors and shapes in a supermarket, making you believe that they are worth a try. How? Packaging (包装) is the silent but persuading salesman .

There on the shelves, each bottle, can, box, and jar has been carefully designed and measured to speak to the inner self of the consumer (消费者), so that is buying not only a product but also his belief in life. Scientists have studied consumer behavior recently and found that the look of the package has a great effect on the “quality” of the product and on how well it sells, because “Consumers generally cannot tell between a product and its package. Many products are packages and many packages are products,” as Louis Cheskin, the first social scientist studying consumers’ feeling for packaging, noticed.

Colors are one of the best tools in packaging. Studies of eye movement have shown that colors draw human attention quickly. Take V8 for example. For many years, the bright red color of tomatoes and carrots on the thin bottle makes you feel that it is very good for your body. And the word “green” today can keep food prices going up.

Shapes are another attraction. Circles often suggest happiness and peacefulness, because these shapes are pleasing to both the eye and the heart. That’s why the round yellow M signs of McDonald’s are inviting to both young and old.

This new consumer response (反应) to the colors and shapes of packages reminds producers and sellers that people buy to satisfy both body and soul.

Patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease often struggle to remember recently learned information, meaning they forget things like important appointments or where they left their keys. But it seems that these memories are not lost. They are still filed away in the brain somewhere; they just can’t be easily accessed.

Now, researchers at MIT have developed a means of getting back memories in mice suffering from Alzheimer’s. The method relies on a technique that uses light to control genetically modified neurons (转基因神经元). Currently it is too early to be used in human trials as it involves inserting light emitting (发光) equipment into the subjects’ brains, but the same principles still apply, the researchers said.

“The important point is that this is evidence of concept. That is, even if a memory seems to be gone, it is still there. It’s a matter of how to get it back,” said senior researcher Susumu Tonegawa.

The team took two groups of mice, one genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s and one healthy. They then placed them into a room and gave them a mild electric shock. All of the mice showed fear when put back in an hour later. When placed in the room a third time several days later, the Alzheimer’s mice acted normally. They had forgotten the shock.

The researchers were then able to bring back the memory of the shock by activating (激活) the cells in which the memories were stored. Even when the mice were put into an unfamiliar room, they showed fear when the cells associated with the shock were activated.

“Short-term memory seems to be normal, on the order of hours. But for long-term memory, these early-Alzheimer’s mice seem to be damaged,” said lead researcher Dheeraj Roy. “Directly activating the cells that we believe are holding the memory helps them get it back. This suggests that it is indeed an access problem to the information, not that they’re unable to learn or store this memory.”

On the occasional clear-frost autumn night, I was hiking through the dark forest with my GMO wolf. Yes, my best friend is a genetically modified organism（转基因生物）; deliberate selection has produced the blunt-toothed, small-pawed wonder that walks by my side.

      Our world is changing rapidly. In the last five decades, global population has fully doubled, with 3.7 billion hungry mouths added to our planet. During this same time span, the amount of land suitable for agriculture has increased by only 5%. Miraculously, this did not result in the great global famine（饥荒）one might have predicted.

      How do scientists modify a plant so that it makes more food than its parents did? We could treat each harvest like a litter of wolf pups and select only plants bearing the fattest, richest seeds for the next season. This was the method our ancestors used to engineer rice, corn and wheat from the wild grasses they encountered.

      During my childhood, advances in genetic technologies allowed scientists to identify and clone the genes responsible for repressing stem growth, leading to shorter, stronger stalks that could bear more seed—the high-yield crops that feed us today. The 21^st century has brought with it a marvelous new set of high-tech tools with which to further quicken the process of artificial selection. Plant geneticists can now directly edit out or edit in sections of DNA using molecular scissors. We can minimize a plant’s weaknesses while adding to its strengths, and we don’t have to wait for seasons to pass to test the result.

      It is the transformative potential of these techniques to quickly supply the next-generation crops required for upcoming climate change that has led me to believe in the safety and function of GMO plants in agricultural products. We need more GMO research to feed the world that we are creating.

      I love the quiet forest that stands between my lab and my home. But I know that as a scientist, I am responsible first to humanity. We must feed, shelter and nurture one another as our first priority, and to do so, we must take advantage of our best technologies, which have always included some type of genetic modification. We must continue as before, nourishing the future as we feed ourselves, and each year plant only the very best of what we have collectively engineered. I keep the faith of my ancestors each night when I walk through the forest to my lab, and my GMO wolf does the same when she guards my way home.