If you need help herding some sheep or retrieving a stick, you can count on your canine companion(伴犬) because dogs always seem to be keen on lending a paw. But only if their partner is a person. When it comes to cooperating with one another, dogs are truly lost－and instead it’s wolves who’ve mastered the art of teamwork. That’s according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For thousands of years, humans have been breeding (饲养) dogs that can do all sorts of neat tricks. And because dogs aim to please, we’ve come to think that domestication(驯养) has somehow boosted dogs’ powers of cooperation. But researchers in Austria have been wondering whether that idea could be barking up the wrong tree. Because left to their own devices, dogs are bigger loners than wolves.

“So wolves live in closely knit family packs, they cooperate in raising the young, they also cooperate in hunting and in defending their territories. So they really have a strong dependence on cooperation in many aspects of their lives. In contrast, to this free ranging dogs actually forage (觅食) mostly by themselves. It’s only mothers that raise their young. And they do form packs but they tend to be somewhat more fluid(不固定的), if you want.”

That’s Sarah Marshall-Pescini of the Wolf Science Center at the University of Vienna. She and her colleagues decided to test dogs’ and wolves’ relative powers of cooperation. In the setup, a pair of animals—either two dogs or two wolves—is presented with a contraption(装置) that will allow the participants to access a plate of food—but only if both members of the team pull on the two ends of a rope at the same time.

A dozen wolves and 14 dogs took the challenge. And the results? The wolves ran circles around their doggie descendants. In some 400 attempts, the wolf teams scored a snack 100 times. Which may not sound all that impressive…until you compare it with the doggie duos, who, in nearly 500 trials, succeeded only twice.

Now, it’s not that dogs are less avid learners. Or that they turned tail and avoided the apparatus. Marshall-Pescini says the dogs were curious about the device.

“What seemed to be happening was they didn’t want to get into conflict with each other. So they wouldn’t both go and try things on it but rather took it in turns. And this really hindered(阻碍了) their capacity to cooperate.”So rather than step on each others’ toes, the dogs took turns bowing out, giving their teammate a chance at the plate. That show of social grace left the poor dogs with their tummies growling (饥肠辘辘). And no treat to wolf down.

(Source:Scientific American Oct. 25, 2017)

Special trees that grow faster, fight pollution, produce better wood, and even sense chemical attacks are being planted by scientists in the US.

When 40 percent of Hawaii's US$14 million-a-year papaya (木瓜)industry was destroyed by a virus（病毒）five years ago, work began on creating genetically engineered(转基因的) trees.

Researchers successfully introduced seeds that were designed to resist the virus. Since then, more and more people have been testing genetically engineered trees.Some researchers put special bacteria into trees to help them grow faster and produce better wood. Others are trying to create trees that can clean polluted soil.Meanwhile fruit farmers are looking for trees that are strong enough to resist worms, and paper companies want trees that produce more wood and therefore more paper.

The Pentagon (五角大楼) even gave the researchers US$500,000 this year after they developed a pine tree that changes its colours if it senses a chemical attack..So far,the poplar, eucalyptus (杨树与桉树), apple and coffee trees are among those being engineered. All this can be done today because we have a better understanding of tree genomes(基因组).

However, some people fear that the genetically engineered trees will cause dangerous results. They are worried that the new trees will breed() with natural species and change the balance of the forest environment.

"It could be destructive," said Jim Diamond, an environmentalist. "Trees are what is left of our natural environment and home to many endangered species."

But researchers insist that science could give nature a fighting chance against both natural and man-made dangers.They hope to answer the critics by stopping the new trees from breeding, so their effect on the environment can be controlled.

The evidence for harmony(和谐) may not be obvious in some families. But it seems that four out of five young people now get on well with their parents, which is the opposite of the popularly held image(印象)of unhappy teenagers locked in their room after endless family quarrels.

An important new study into teenage attitudes surprisingly shows that their family life is more harmonious than it has ever been in the past. “We were surprised by just how positive today’s young people seem to be about their families,” said one member of the research team. “They’re expected to be rebellious(叛逆的) and selfish but actually they have other things on their minds; they want a car and material goods, and they worry about whether school is serving them well. There’s more negotiation(商议) and discussion between parents and children and children expect to take part in the family decision-making process. They don’t want to rock the boat.”

So it seems that this generation of parents is much more likely than parents of 30 years ago to treat their children as friends.” My parents are happy to discuss things with me and willing to listen to me,” says 17-years-old Daniel Lazall. “I always tell them when I’m going out clubbing. As long as they know what I’m doing, they’re fine with it.” Susan Crome, who is now 21, agrees. “Looking back on the last 10 years, there was a lot of what you could call negotiation. For example, as long as I’d done all my homework, I could go out on a Saturday night. But I think my grandparents were a lot stricter with my parents than that.”

Maybe this positive view of family life should not be unexpected. It is possible that the idea of teenager’s rebellion is not rooted in real facts. A researcher commented, “Our surprise that teenagers say they get along well with their parents comes because of a brief period in social history when teenagers were regarded as different beings. But that idea of rebelling and breaking away from their parents really only happened during that one time in the 1960s when everyone rebelled. The normal situation throughout history has been a smooth change from helping out with the family business to taking it over.”

This is Copycat, a kitten who will go down in history. The two-month-old kitten, with blue eyes and a pink button nose, looks like any other kitten. But Copycat is a pioneer of commercial (商业的，盈利的)cloning. She means that cats of the future could have more than nine lives.

The company which produced her ---by the same technique as Dolly the Sheep ---plans to charge wealthy pet owners thousands of pounds to replicate （复制）animals that have died. They are already working on a cloned dog.

Copycat was created in a laboratory at the Texas A&M University. She is a copy of an adult cat from which DNA was removed, and is quite different from the surrogate mother（代孕母亲）who gave birth to her. Despite having identical genes to the adult cat, Copycat has slightly different patterns on her cream and coat（皮毛）. The Texas team say this is because the patterns are the result of the kitten’s natural development as well as genetics（遗传）.

Copycat’s creation was financed by 81-year-old John Sperling, who owns a company called Genetic Savings & Clone. He plans to offer the technology to wealthy people seeking to replace beloved pets. He also wants to replicate “socially-valuable” animals such as search-and-rescue dogs.

Experts predict that commercial pet cloning will become widely available in just a few years and claim that it will be the first breakthrough in the field to directly benefit the public. However, the breakthrough raises more concerns about how cloning techniques are being used. Critics have considered the work as disturbing the mature and a waste of scientific resources. They warn that cloned pets, even if they are genetically identical to the animals they are meant to replace, could be quite different in character and behavior. The UK’s Animal Procedures Committee says cloning for “trivial purposes” such as pets should be banned and that cloning should be used to help people solve some big and life-threatening problems.

Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new “species”of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name —phubbers (低头族).

Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfie in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events eventually leads to the destruction of the world.

Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real.

Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. “Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck,” Guangming Daily quoted doctors as saying, “the neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching.” Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

But that’s not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stick to their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Beijing Evening News reported.

It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

Electric cars are dirty. In fact, not only are they dirty, they might even be more dirty than their gasoline-powered cousins. 

People in California love to talk about “zero-emissions (排放) vehicles”, but people in California seem to be clueless about where electricity comes from. Power plants mostly use fire to make it. Aside from the new folks who have their roofs covered with solar cells, we get our electricity from generators (发电机). Generators are fueled by something--usually coal, oil, but also by heat generated in nuclear power plants. There are a few wind farms and geothermal (地热)plants as well, but by far we get electricity mainly by burning something.

In other words, those "zero-emissions" cars are likely coal-burning cars. It’s just because the coal is burned somewhere else, it looks clean. It is not. Itˈs as if the California Greens are covering their eyes—“If I canˈt see it, itˈs not happening.” Gasoline is an incredibly efficient way to power a vehicle; a gallon of gas has a lot of energy in it. But when you take that gas（or another fuel）and first use it to make electricity, you waste a nice part of that energy, mostly in the form of wasted heat—at the generator, through the transmission lines, etc.

A gallon of gas may propel your car 25 miles. But the electricity you get from that gallon of gas wonˈt get you nearly as far— so electric cars burn more fuel than gasoline-powered ones. If our electricity came mostly from nukes or geothermal, or hydro or wind or solar, then an electric car truly would be clean. But for political, technical, and economic reasons, we donˈt use much of those energy sources. 

In addition, electric carsˈ batteries which are poisonous for a long time will eventually end up in a landfill. And finally, when cars are the polluters, the pollution is spread across all the roads. When itˈs a power plant, though，all the junk is in one place. Nature is very good at cleaning up when things are too concentrated, but it takes a lot longer when all the garbage is in one spot. 

China is embracing an era of sharing economy. After sharing bikes, sharing books are the next trend. The book-sharing program at Sanxiaokou Xinhua Bookstore in Hefei, capital of Anhui province, has been running for several months since its launch on July 16, 2017. Customers are encouraged to borrow up to two books, from all books available in this store, for free via an app, pay 99 yuan online as the deposit and return the books within 10 days.

A survey of 601 app users conducted by the company in late July found that more than 90 percent of the readers said they may want to keep some of the borrowed books permanently, but they donˈt want to visit the store again to complete the purchase. When another nine stores joined the book-sharing program in August, the ability to purchase the borrowed books was made available on the app.

Zhao Shiping, a manager of the Sanxiaokou store, said that the daily customer flow in the first week of the book-sharing program was about 7,000 while the figure for the same period last year was 5,000 to 6,000. So, book-sharing will reduce barriers for book purchasing and increase customer flow, which will increase the business value of the bookstore, its brand value and increase its value as a partner for companies outside the book sales sector.

In addition to bookstores, banks have also joined the trend of book-sharing. Two branches of China Everbright Bank introduced book loan service at the end of this July. The service is free for seven days and 0.1 yuan is charged after that and 0.5 yuan after 21 days. Readers can return borrowed books to any branch of the bank.

This book-sharing project, a cooperation between Everbright Bank and an app called Youshugongdu, which translates as "letˈs read books together", will be expanded to other outlets to turn each outlet into a small community library with 1,000 to 2,000 books.

①Increasing the customer flow

②Bringing convenience to the bookstores

③Reducing the barriers for book purchasing

④Increasing the brand value of the bookstores

According to new research from the University of Cambridge in England, sheep are able to recognize human faces from photographs.

The farm animals, who are social and have large brains, were previously known to be able to recognize one another, as well as familiar humans. However, their ability to recognize human faces from photos alone is novel.

The recent study, the results of which were published in the journal Royal Society; Open Science, show the woolly creatures could be trained to recognize still images of human faces, including those of former President Barack Obama and actress Emma Watson.

At first, the sheep were trained to approach certain images by being given food rewards. Later, they were able to recognize the images for which they had been rewarded. The sheep could even recognize images of faces shown at an angle, though their ability to do so declined by about 15 percent—the same rate at which a human’s ability to perform the same task declines, “Anyone who has spent time working with sheep will know that they are intelligent and individual animals who are able to recognize their handlers.” said Professor Jenny Morton, who led the Cambridge study. “We’ve shown with our study that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, close to those of humans and monkeys.”

Recognizing faces is one of the most important social skills for human beings, and some disorders of the brain, including Huntington’s disease, affect this ability.

“Sheep are long-lived and have brains that are similar in size and complexity to those of some monkeys. That means they can be useful models to help us understand disorders of the brain, such as Huntington’s disease that develop over a long time and affect cognitive (认识的) abilities. Our study gives us another way to monitor how these abilities change.” Morton said.

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side?

Most people know this joke. But recently, some people have been much more worried about how the grizzly bear(灰熊) and mountain lion can cross the road.

“Millions of animals die each year on US roads,” the Federal Highway Administration reports. In fact, only about 80 ocelots（豹猫）， an endangered wild cat, exist in the US today. The main reason? Road kill.

“Ecopassages” may help animals cross the road without being hit by cars. They are paths both over and under roads.“These ecopassages can be extremely useful so that wildlife can avoid road accidents,” said Jodi Hilty of the Wildlife Protection Society.

But do animals actually use the ecopassages? The answer is yes. Paul Beier of Northern Arizona University found foot marks left by mountain lions on an ecopassage that went under a highway. This showed that the lions used the passage.

Builders of ecopassages try to make them look like a natural part of an area by planting trees on and around them. Animals seem to be catching on Animals  as different as salamanders(蝾螈) and grizzly bears are using the bridges and underpasses.

The next time you visit a park or drive through an area with a lot of wildlife, look around. You might see an animal overpass!

Camping wild is a wonderful way to experience the natural world and, at its best, it makes little environmental influence. But with an increasing number of people wanting to escape into the wilderness, it is becoming more and more important to camp unobtrusively(不引人注目地)and leave no mark.

Wild camping is not permitted in many places, particularly in crowded lowland Britain. Wherever you are, find out about organizations responsible for managing wild spaces, and contact them to find out their policy on camping and shelter building. For example, it is fine to camp wild in remote parts of Scotland, but in England you must ask the landowner’s permission, except in national parks.

Camping is about having relaxation, sleeping outdoors, experiencing bad weather, and making do without modern conveniences. A busy, fully-equipped campsite seems to go against this, so seek out smaller, more remote places with easy access to open spaces and perhaps beaches. Better still, find a campsite with no road access: walking in makes a real adventure.

Finding the right spot to camp is the first step to guaranteeing a good night’s sleep. Choose a campsite with privacy and minimum influence on others and the environment. Try to use an area where people have obviously camped before rather than create a new spot. When camping in woodland, avoid standing dead trees, which may fall on a windy night. Avoid animal runs and caves, and possible homes of biting insects. Make sure you have most protection on the windward side. If you make a fire, do so downwind of your shelter. Always consider what influence you might have on the natural world. Avoid damaging plants. A good campsite is found, not made—changing it should be unnecessary.