It is interesting to see that the force of only 6 or 7 people pushing in the same direction can cause up to 1,000 pounds of force-enough to break brick walls. During a deadly stampede(逃奔), people can even die standing up. People die when pressure is put to their bodies in a front to back direction, causing them not to be able to breathe.

If you are in a crowd, the first and most important thing is to make yourself familiar with your surroundings and find different exits. No matter where you are, make sure you always know how to get out. Make yourself aware of the type of the ground you are standing on, and know that in a crowd of moving people wet ground can cause you to fall.

When in danger, a few seconds can make a difference, giving you the possibility of making use of your escaping route. Always stay closer to the escape route. If you find yourself in the middle of a moving crowd, do not fight against the pressure, do not stand still or sit down, because you can easily get trampled（踩踏）. Instead, move in the same direction of the crowd; make use of any space that may open up to move sideways to the crowd movement where the flow is weaker.Keep your hands up by your chest, like a boxer-it gives you movement and protects your chest. If you fall, get up quickly. If you can’t get up because you are injured, get someone to pull you up. If you have kids, lift them up.

If you fall and cannot get up, keep moving in the same direction of the crowd, or if that is not possible, then cover your head with your arms; do not lie on your stomach or back.

Noise-cancelling audio instruments have been around for a while now，but one Berlin-based designer believes that blocking “visual noise” is as important，if not more so，as cancelling out unwanted sounds．To this end he has created a simple accessory（配件） called the Focus Cap．

Open work spaces definitely have their benefits，but they come with the drawback of offering employees little to no control over visual distractions(干扰)．With so many people around and so much going on，some of us can easily get disturbed by this information overload and lose focus in what’s really important．That’s where the Focus Cap comes into play．

“As we are still cavemen or mammals kept in an unnatural environment，I believe that only by reclaiming(收回) the normal，stress-free human state through simple tools and techniques can we finally release our actual creative potential and create our meaningful work for a brighter future，”says German designer Hannes Greblin，inventor of the Focus Cap．

After looking at other products designed at minimizing visual distractions，Greblin decided that most of them were either too expensive or too uncomfortable to become mainstream，so he decided to go with something much simpler —a simple cap with a retractable visor (可伸缩的帽沿)．

Greblin’s Focus Cap is really straightforward．You just wear it like a regular cap with the sides of the visor retracted，and just collapse the sides whenever you need to focus on what’s ahead of you．Whether you’re trying to focus on a task in an open work office, trying to study at university，or practicing yoga in a park and trying to ignore stares from strangers，the Focus Cap can help．

To be honest，this whole project sounds like a joke，but the Focus Cap does have its own website where people interested in this unusual accessory can actually sign up for updates on when it will go on sale．Greblin claims it will cost 30 euros($37) plus shipping．

A horse named Nunki died in Bahamian forest in July 2015, marking the end of the Abaco Island horse. But thanks to 21^st-century technology, the extinction may be temporary. Two years on, Milanne Rehor, head of the Wild Horses of Abaco Preservation Society, has received approval from the Bahamian government for an ambitious plan: using Nunki’s DNA to clone the species back into being.

How horses came to the Abaco Islands remains a mystery, but their root can go back to the horses brought by Spanish explorers to the Americas 500 years ago. No Abaco Island horses were born after 1999. When Nunki died, the species disappeared.

“When you get down to the point where there are no more individuals alive of a species, cloning is your only chance,” says Katrin Hinrichs, a vet at Texas A&M University. Cloning extinct animals can work, though it comes with limitations.

Upon Nunki’s death in 2015, Rehor had a vet collect tissue and send the sample to a Texas cloning laboratory, ViaGen.

Cloning is hardly guaranteed, but it is possible. Hinrichs warns, however, that cloning will not save the Abaco Island horse in the long run. Even if it is too late to bring back a herd of pure Abaco Island horses, there’s still value in preserving Nunki’s genes.

Because clones keep genes alive, and cloned horses can breed（繁殖）naturally, “cloning offers an amazing opportunity to improve the gene pool of gene-limited species,” says Hinrichs, Saving Nunki’s genes could one day add outside genetics to a herd that is facing an evolutionary bottleneck. The precise benefits Abaco genes could give aren’t known, says Gus Cothran, a vet at Texas A&M University. However, when Cothran compared the Abaco Island horse’s DNA against a database of horse species, he found it had preserved its Old World genes, Thus, Cothran says, saving the genes is worth the effort. “It’s an insurance policy. You’re trying to keep insurance policy. You’re trying to keep something that you may need in the future, but you don’t yet know that you need it.”

Larger brain size linked to longer life in deer

The size of a female animals’ brain may determine whether they live longer and have more healthy offspring (后代), according to new research led by the University of Cambridge.

The study, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal, shows that female red deer with larger brains live longer and have more surviving offspring than those with smaller brains. Brain size is passed down through the generations. This is the first extensive study of individual differences in brain size in wild mammals and draws on data comparing seven generations of deer.

Across species of mammals, brain size varies widely. This is thought to be a consequence of specific differences in the benefits and costs of a larger brain. Mammals with larger brains may, for example, have greater cognitive abilities that enable them to adapt better to environmental changes or they may have longer lifespans (寿命) . But there may also be disadvantages: for instance, larger brains require more energy, so individuals that possess them may show reduced fertility (繁殖力). 

The researchers, based at the University of Cambridge’s Zoology Department and Edinburgh University’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology, wanted to test if they could find more direct genetic or non-genetic evidence of the costs and benefits of large brain size by comparing the longevity (长寿) and survival of individuals of the same species with different sized brains. Using the skulls of 1,314 wild red deer whose life histories and breeding success had been monitored in the course of a long-term study on the Isle of Rum, they found that females with larger endocranial volumes (脑腔容量) lived longer and produced more surviving offspring in the course of their lives.

Lead author Dr Corina Logan, a Gates Cambridge Scholar, says, “The reasons for the association between brain size and longevity are not known, but other studies have suggested that larger brains are a consequence of the longer-lived species having longer developmental periods in which the brain can grow. These hypotheses (假设) were generated from cross-species correlations; however, testing such hypotheses requires investigations at the within-species level, which is what we did.”

Dr Logan adds, “We found that some of the cross-species predictions about brain size held for femalered deer, and that none of the predictions were supported in male red deer. This indicates that each sex likely experiences its own set of trade-offs (权衡，协调) with regard to brain size.” The study also showed that females’ relative endocranial volume is smaller than that of males, despite evidence of selection for larger brains in females.

Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, who set up the Rum Red Deer study with Fiona Guinness in 1972 and initiated the work on brain size, points out, “The reason that this kind of study has not been conducted before is that it requires long term records of a large number of individuals across multiple generations and data of this kind are still rare in wild animals.”