Many people don't consider their breakfast without a glass of milk. Right now, cows, buffalos, goats and sheep provide most of the world's milk. But soon, people could get milk from roaches(蟑螂).

   That isn't as crazy as it might sound. New research shows this "milk" is super-nutritious. What's more, some scientists have already begun referring to a lot of insects as source of milk.

   In 2004, Subramanian Ramaswamy started studying milk crystals(晶体) found inside the roach. At the time, he was teaching biochemistry at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

   To learn more about the milk crystal from roaches, the scientists used X-rays to look at the atoms in it. The data basically revealed the chemical recipe of the roach crystal. They showed that roach milk is a "complete food". It contains sugar with a fatty acid stuck to it. Fatty acids are the building blocks of fats. The protein in the milk is also full of essential amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Since our bodies can't produce the "essential" ones, we need to get them from our food. And so do baby roaches.

   Barbara Stay, a biologist at Iowa University, also worked on the new study. She says the new data show that the roach milk is "three times more nutritious than cow's milk and four times more nutritious than buffalo's milk".

   Ramaswamy would like to see roach milk turned into a protein supplement to feed hungry people. But not everyone is confident that it can be done.

   Marcel Dicke studies insects as a potential source of human food at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Dicke says this is a "sound study". However, in his opinion, "Extracting(提取) milk from roaches can only likely be done in a destructive way with only small quantities". That means you'd have to raise and kill many bugs to get even tiny quantities of the milk.

Anger is a kind of feeling. Many things can make you angry. When your teacher gives you too much homework, when your team loses an important game, when a friend borrows your favorite thing and then breaks it, you may get really angry.

Usually, your body will tell you when you are angry. For example, you breathe faster, your face turns red, and you may want to break something or hit someone, but sometimes, you hide your anger. For example, you may hide it in your heart. The problem is that if you do this, you may get a headache or your stomach may hurt.

In fact, itˈs not good to hide your anger, and itˈs normal for you to get angry sometimes. But anger must be let out in the right way, without hurting others or yourself.

When you get angry, you can talk about it with other people. Itˈs helpful to talk about your anger with an adult, such as parents, a teacher, etc. When you talk about anger, those bad feelings can start to go away. Here are some other things you can do when you start to feel angry: talk to a good friend; count from 1 to 100; give someone a hug; go for a bike ride ; think about good things, etc.

Remember that how you act when you are angry can make everything better or worse. Donˈt let your anger control you.

Do you know how it is when you see someone yawn and you start yawning too? Or how hard it is to be among people laughing and not laugh yourself? Well, apparently it's because we have mirror neurons (神经元) in our brains.

   Put simply, the existence of mirror neurons suggests that every time we see someone else do something, our brains imitate (模仿) it, whether or not we actually perform the same action. This explains a great deal about how we learn to smile, talk, walk, dance or play sports. But the idea goes further: mirror neurons not only appear to explain physical actions, they also tell us that there is a biological basis for the way we understand other people.

   Mirror neurons can undoubtedly be found all over our brains, but especially in the areas which relate to our ability to use languages, and to understand how other people feel. Researchers have found that mirror neurons relate strongly to language. A group of researchers discovered that if they gave people sentences to listen to (for example: "The hand took hold of the ball"), the same mirror neurons were triggered as when the action was actually performed (in this example, actually taking hold of a ball).

   Any problems with mirror neurons may well result in problems with behavior. Much research suggests that people with social and behavioral problems have mirror neurons which are not fully functioning. However, it is not yet known exactly how these discoveries might help find treatments for social disorders.

   Research into mirror neurons seems to provide us with ever more information concerning how humans behave and interact (互动). Indeed, it may turn out to be the equivalent (相等物) for neuroscience of what Einstein's theory of relativity was for physics. And the next time you feel the urge to cough in the cinema when someone else does—well, perhaps you'll understand why.

          Chinais going green. In order to reduce air pollution and oil-shortages, car makers have announced their plans to develop hybrid（混合燃料）cars for the Chinese market. Toyota’s hybrid car Prius will be ready to drive in China this week. Let’s have a look at the new car.

       Any vehicle is a hybrid car when it combines two or more sources of power. Hybrid cars have special engines, which are smaller than traditional gasoline engine. They run at 99 percent of their power when the car is going at a steady speed. A specially designed battery motor provides extra power for running up hills or when extra speed-up is needed.

       Step into a Prius, and turn on the engine. The first thing you notice is how much quieter it is than a traditional car. At this point, the car’s gasoline engine is at rest. The electric motor will provide power until the car reaches about 24 kilometers per hour. If you stay at a low speed, you are effectively driving an electric car, with no gasoline being used, and no waste gas gives off.

       The computer makes the decision about when to use a gas engine, when to go electric, and when to use a combination of the two. If you go over 24 kilometers per hour, when you step on the gas, you are actually telling the computer how fast you want to go.

       The electronic motor recharges automatically using a set of batteries. When driving at a high speed, the gasoline engine not only powers the car, but also charges the batteries.

       Any time you use the brake, the electric motor will work like a generator（发电机）and produce electricity to recharge the batteries. As a result, the car’s batteries will last for around 200,000 miles.

C

Like people, plants experience stress. And also, like people, the response to that stress can determine success.

Bad environmental conditions, such as drought, flood, heat and other stresses, affect yields（产量）more than crop pests and diseases. We are trying to find a way to equip plants with the ability to tolerate environmental stress and maintain high production, said Stephen Howell, a professor of genetics and cell biology.

Plant cells produce proteins（蛋白质）and ship them to different parts of the cell. Under normal conditions, these proteins are folded into their normal, healthy structures as they are produced. When a plant is under stress, its cells produce poorly folded or unfolded proteins. Then a built-in system senses this and “sets off an alarm in the cell,” said Howell.

In response to the alarm, another protein (IRE1) starts working and creates a different process which activates (激活) the stress response genes whose products bring about defensive measures that help the plant survive.

“As it turns out, responses that are activated under stress conditions actually inhibit the growth of plants,” said Howell. “This allows them to preserve their energy to survive the stress conditions.”

For plants in the wild, this response is a help for survival, he said. In production of agriculture crops, however, this response reduces production.

“You don’t want crop plants to stop growing,” Howell said. “You want them to continue to grow and produce even though they are under stress.”

With the new understanding of this stress response, the next step may be to silence the alarm system, said Howell. “What may be important is to disable some of these stress responses. That may make the plant more productive under stress conditions.”

  Is there anything we can do about protecting the environment? Letˈs discuss how to protect it.

     Many organizations, at a local, national and international level, devote to protecting the environment. Together they form the "green movement". These groups already enjoy a lot of public support, but their most important work is education. Unless people understand how threats to the environment affect them, they wonˈt know the importance of protecting habitats.

      Many farmers support the "green movement". Some make an effort to protect small areas of wood lands and are careful not to spray(喷洒) these areas with pesticide（杀虫剂）. A few have turned their backs on modern methods and use no chemicals at all.

      Farming without chemicals is known as organic（有机的） farming. In several countries, organic products have become very popular. Because no chemicals are used to grow the food, there are none to enter the human food chain. By choosing organic products, people think they are also choosing to save the countryside.

      In the developing countries, action is finally being taken to save the rain forests by the governments. In Africa, the Ivory Coast recently banned（禁止） all timer exports（出口）. In central America, the government of Panama made it illegal to cut down trees which are more than five years old. Such actions show great determination because timer exports have been a major source of income.

      It is difficult to persuade poor people in developing countries of the importance of saving forests. They need more food and want to use farmland to grow it on. What we risk losing is not only the enjoyment of nature, but also the contribution of life on this planet.

D

 Researchers found that women who had given birth might have a reduced risk of death from several common conditions than those who had not, according to a study released Friday by the Imperial College London (ICL).

The study, led by ICL researchers, was published in the journal BMC Medicine. It investigates the association between the so-called reproductive factors -- such as having children and breastfeeding -- and a woman's risk of death.

Researchers analyzed data from 322,972 women across 10 countries, including the UK, France, Germany and Sweden, with an average age of 50.

Each woman was followed for an average of 12.9 years. During this period, there were 14,383 deaths overall, which included 5,938 deaths from cancer and 2,404 deaths from circulatory system diseases, according to the study.

The team compared reproductive factors with risk of death from several common conditions, such as breast cancer, stroke and heart disease.

The researchers found that women who had given birth had a 20 percent reduced risk of death than those who had not. It was also found that there was a reduced risk of death (eight percent) in women who had breastfed compared to those who did not.

The risk of death from cancer was lower in those that had given birth compared to those that had not. Within this group, the risk was reduced even further in women that gave birth to two or three children in comparison to those who had only one child.

"Hormonal mechanisms may explain the lower risk of death that we observed with breastfeeding, and having given birth, as these factors are associated with changes in hormone levels," said Dr Melissa Merritt from ICL, who led the study.

For ten weeks, in a great house on the island of St Thomas , John C. Lilly tried to teach a six-year-old dolphin to speak English. Margaret Howe, an experiment (试验) helper, would live day and night with Peter, a dolphin. And they would eat, bathe (洗澡), sleep and play together from Sunday to Friday, with only Saturdays off for Margaret. She lived her life in swimming clothes — with a coat on colder evenings — and cut her hair short so that she could get on with Peter more easily.

After a few days. Peter was becoming more and more interested in winning her attentions. He threw a ball against her shower towel to get her to play. As time went by, he only wanted to play ball with her and not on his own.

The problem was that, just at the time Peter and Margaret began to get on well just as two best friends, the experiment ended and the lab was closed. After a few weeks, Margaret received the sad news that Peter had killed himself by refusing to breathe, and sinking to the bottom of his pool.

Dolphins may not speak English — but, just like humans, they know all about broken hearts.

                               B

   When an ant dies, other ants take it out of the nest, often within an hour after its death. This behavior interests scientists and they wonder how ants know for sure—and so soon—that another ant is dead.

   One scientist recently came up with a way to explain this ant behavior. Dong-Hwan Choe is a biologist, a scientist who studies animals and plants. He found that ants have a chemical on the outside of their bodies that signals to other ants“I'm dead—take me away”when it is dead.

   But there's a question to answer: As we know, if an ant is dead, it stops moving. But when an ant is sleeping or knocked unconscious, it is also not moving. However, other ants don't move the living ant out of the nest. How do they know this ant is not dead? Choe found that ants have another chemical on their bodies, which tells nearby ants something like “Wait—I'm not dead yet”when it is not dead. Choe suspects that when an ant dies, the chemical that says, “Wait— I'm not dead yet” quickly goes away. When other ants detect the “dead”chemical without the “not dead yet”chemical, they move away the body.

   To test his theory, Choe and his team put different chemicals on ants. When the scientists used the “I'm dead” chemical, other ants quickly moved the treated ant away. When the scientists used the “Wait—I'm not dead yet”chemical, other ants left the treated ant alone. Choe believes this behavior shows that the “not dead yet” chemical overrides the “dead” chemical when picked up by other ants. And that when an ant dies, the “not dead yet” chemical fades away. Other nearby ants then detect the remaining “dead” chemical and remove the body from the nest.

   Understanding this behavior can help scientists figure out how to stop ants from invading new places and causing problems.

C

Each year, about 10,000 to 100,000 animal species die off. They join the countless species that have gone extinct over the course of the Earth’s history — and extinction means forever. At least it used to. Scientists are now on their way to bringing back extinct species. No, this doesn’t mean the plot of Jurassic Park is going to become a reality.

Researchers need DNA to bring back a species. DNA is the chemical that carries the structure of a living thing. Dinosaurs have been gone too long for any of their DNA to remain in fossils. But there’s a very real chance that we will be able to bring back more recently extinct species. This could even include Ice Age animals like the woolly mammoth(猛犸象). In 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists re-created the Pyrenean ibex, which had gone extinct three years earlier. The new animal didn’t survive long, but scientific advances should improve the success rate. In January, Australian scientists announced that they were on their way to bringing back the gastric brooding frog(胃育溪蛙).

     That we can bring species back doesn’t mean that we should. There may be benefits to reviving a species. But there’s no way to know how it will turn out. For example, would a passenger pigeon fit into its old habitat? Or might it crowd out existing species?

   Environmentalists worry that our ability to bring species back might cut down support for the hard work of traditional conservation. Why worry about preserving a wild life habitat or fighting poachers(偷猎者) if we know we can just make up for our mistakes?

But those extinctions are our mistakes to correct. As businessman and environmentalist Stewart Brand recently put it, “Humans have the ability to repair some of that damage.”

We would do well to remember the lesson of Jurassic Park: Continue with caution.