Well, well, well. It looks like robots are now coming for our beloved furry friends. According to a new study, animal robots may be just as effective, if not better, at providing therapeutic (治疗的) benefits to children as real pets. As someone who has both interacted with real dogs and robots, I can tell you that this is quite a bold claim.

Sure, robots may have some benefits over real dogs. They can work for longer hours and won't cause allergies (过敏) or pass on diseases. But can a robot give you that wet-nosed, tail-wagging, slobber-filled experience that a real dog can? I think not.

Now, I'm not saying that robots don't have their place in therapy. In fact, I can see how an animal robot could be helpful in certain situations where a real dog might not be possible. But let's not go replacing all the good boys and girls with robots just yet.

As for the study, it's interesting to see that while the kids said they loved real-life dogs better, they actually spent more time interacting with the robot. I can only imagine that it was doing some pretty impressive tricks, some robot dance or robot jokes maybe, to hold the kids' attention for that long.

In all seriousness, though, I do think it's important to consider the welfare of therapy dogs. Visiting hospitals can be stressful and tiring for them, and we should be exploring all options to make therapy experiences as positive and enjoyable as possible for both the animals and the patients.

So, while I may not be ready to trade in my furry friends for robots just yes, I am open to the idea of introducing animal robots into therapy programs. Who knows? Maybe one day we'll all have our own personal robot pets that can provide us with just as much love and companionship as the real thing. But until then, I'll stick with my trusty furry friends.

In the late 1960s, the anthropologist (人类学家) Edmund Carpenter arrived in New Guinea armed with mirrors, videos and Polaroid cameras, and a mission: to disrupt (扰乱) the minds of members of the Biami tribe, who had never seen full reflections or images of themselves. "After their first astonished response—covering their mouths and ducking their heads—they stood frozen, staring at their images." Carpenter's devices disturb that inner image, causing discomfort. But not for long. Within days, the villagers groomed (打扮) themselves openly before mirrors and began taking Polaroid shots of each other.

It's unclear if the People of Biami were really as unfamiliar with mirrors as Carpenter thought. But in any case, what's striking isn't how strange their reaction seems, but how related. Do you know how it feels when you make a pleasant remark in a lift, but nobody responds? Or when two people greeting each other misjudge whether to go for a handshake, a hug or a social kiss? That's the same awkwardness: "self-consciousness tinged (带有) with uncertainty", as Dahl defines it. Suddenly, I see I'm viewed not as a friendly conversationalist, but as a strange person who talks in the lift.

As awkwardness feels unpleasant, it's natural to want to overcome it. Dahl's initial motivation for writing her book Cringeworthy: A Theory of Awkwardness, was to get over her own awkwardness. But after a journey through various awkward experiences, she makes a persuasive case for celebrating it. We live in an era with more opportunities than ever to do so. But awkwardness breaks that false appearance, exposing the imperfect life behind it. It creates a strange kind of social bond—how much in common we have when seeing that behind the disguise —we're all just trying our best to seem perfect.

The awkward you, then, are the real you, the one without the defensive performance. Dahl even indicates that taking a friendlier attitude toward awkwardness might help us make the connections with people holding different ideas.

Today's world is not an easy adjustment for young adults. Key skill set for success is persistence, a characteristic that researchers say is heavily influenced by fathers. Researchers from Brigham Young University discovered that fathers are in a unique position to help their adolescent children learn persistence.

BYU professors Laura Padilla-Walker and Randal Day arrived at these findings after following 325 American families over several years. And over time, the persistence gained through fathers led to higher achievement in school.

"There are relatively few studies that stress the unique role of fathers, "Padilla-Walker said. "This research also helps to prove that characteristics such as persistence-which can be taught-are key to a child's life success. "

Researchers determined that dads need to practice an "authoritative" parenting style. Authoritative parenting is not authoritarian: rigid, demanding or controlling. Rather, an authoritative parenting style includes some of the following characteristics: children feel warmth and love from their father; responsibility and the reasons behind rules are stressed children are given an appropriate level of autonomy(自主权).

In the study, about 52 percent of the dads exhibited above-average levels of authoritative parenting. A key finding is that over time, children raised by an authoritative father were significantly more likely to develop persistence, which leads to better outcomes in school.

This particular study examined 11 to 14-year-olds living in two-parent homes. Yet the researchers suggest that single parents still may play a role in teaching the benefits of persistence, which is an avenue of future research.

A NASA-funded study used satellite to search for penguin poops (粪便) in Antarctica: funny at first sight though it resulted in unique insights on the Adelie penguin's diet and its future as the climate changes. The findings published recently unlocked the secrets about the species that can provide an early-warning of threats to Antarctica's delicate ecosystem.

Researchers from Stony Brook University used satellite images to see if the Adelie penguin's diet has been changing in response to Antarctica's changing climate. Adelie penguin population has dropped greatly in some areas even as the global population increases. The satellite images cannot show the penguins individually, but their presence can be detected by the stain (污渍) left on the ice by their waste, called guano.

Male and female penguins take turns incubating (孵化) in the nest. The guano builds up in the same areas occupied by the nests. Heather Lynch, associate professor at Stony Brook, along with his team, used the area of the colony as defined by the guano stain to work back to the number of pairs. A global survey for Adelie penguins turned up 3.8 million breeding pairs. Also, the satellite data can detect the color of the penguin guano, ranging from white to pink to dark red. White guano is from eating mostly fish; pink and red would be from eating mostly krill (磷虾). The team found that while the Adelie penguin's diet did show changes from year to year, no consistent pattern was obvious.

"This was a big surprise, since the abundance and distribution of Adelie penguins has changed dramatically over the last 40 years and scientists had assumed that a change in diet might have played a role," said Casey Young flesh, a graduate student from the university. However, continued changes in the physical environment and a growing krill fishery in the region are likely to have an influence on penguin prey (猎物) and penguin population itself. "Tools like this will be important for the management of the Antarctic ecosystem, which is often considered among the most primitive areas in the world," said Young flesh.

Heat is the biggest end use for energy all over the world. It's also eritically important for survival in a country like Finland where the winter is long, cold and dark. And the recent move by Russia to cut off supplies of gas and electricity in response to Finland joining NATO has caused concern.

There is god news, however, that the world's fully first working sand battery has been installed in Finland. It is a device which can store sustainably produced heat for months at a time and can be used to keep homes warm in winter. That's why the new technology was developed by researchers there. Researchers believe it can solve the country's year-round crisis in power supply, which is a significant, issue for green energy.

The sand battery was installed in the Vatajankoski power plant that ruins the heating system for the houses in the area. It works by heating the sand, circulating the heat generated in the sand using a heat exchanger. Researchers used low -grade sand to charge the devices with heat from cheap electricity coming from either solar or wind energy. The sand battery can store energy and heat up to 500 degrees Celsius, which can be used to warm homes during winter when electricity is more expensive.

It is a cost-effective method because when the battery releases the hot air, it warms the water for the district heating system that is pumped around homes, offices, and the local swimming pool. Sand is an ideal material because it is cheap and readily available everywhere. While other inexpensive items like water can store heat, sand can be heated to much higher temperatures. The sand used is of the lowest quality so it cannot be used in construction thus making it a sustainable choice. Besides, sand-based batteries last longer than other batteries. According to a study, researchers obtained silicon using sand to create a battery that lasts three times longer than lithium-ion (锂离子) batteries.

"This innovation is a part of the smart and green energy transition. Heat storage systems can significantly help to increase intermittent (间歇性的) renewables in the electrical network, " said Markku Ylonen, co-founder of Polar Night Energy. "At the same time, we can make full use of the heat waste to keep the city warm.

Scientists have developed a new type of smart bandage that can signal the type of bacterial infection it's protecting, just like a traffic light, as well as release the right type of drugs on demand. The traffic light system works just like this: Green means no bacteria or a low concentration of bacteria, yellow means drug-sensitive (DS) bacteria responsive to standard antibiotics (抗生素) and causes antibiotic release, and red means drug-resistant (DR) bacteria that need extra help to be wiped out.

In testing the bandage on mice, the research team was able to successfully treat both DS and DR infections using the new method. However, the common methods of sensing resistance are limited by time, the requirement for professional personnel, and expensive instruments. Moreover, the abuse of antibiotics causes the accelerated process of bacterial resistance.

It's easy to see how a simple bandage and light could overcome some of these limitations. Treatment doesn't have to wait for a doctor to make a diagnosis, and the bandage can get the right sort of drugs applied at the earliest opportunity. What's more, the person wearing the bandage gets real-time feedback on what's happening with the infection, if there's an infection at all. The researchers say it offers numerous benefits over existing treatments that make use of light.

We've been seeing quite a few upgrades to the traditional bandage in recent years, thanks to advances in science-like the nanofibre mesh (纳米纤维网) that attracts bacteria and draws some of it out, speeding up the healing process. Then there's the novel bandage for treating burns, which stops bacteria from multiplying and lowers the risk of infection.

The more work that a bandage can do while it's protecting a wound, the better. Efforts to improve bandages continue and now we've got a bandage that not only releases antibiotics, but also tells the patient exactly what's going on too.

The arm bones of women who lived 7,000 years ago show a surprising level of strength—even higher than today's professional athletes. That's according to a first-ever study comparing prehistoric(史前的) bones to those of living people. The finding suggests a revision of history- the everyday lives of prehistoric women were filled with hard labor, rather than just sitting at home doing lighter tasks while the men struggled and fought for life.

"Before the study, there are no clear records describing how our ancient ancestors lived. It can be easy to forget that bone is a living tissue, one that responds to the difficulties we put our bodies through," said lead author Alison Macintosh. "Physical force and muscle activity both put pressure on the bone. The bone reacts by changing in shape, thickness and other aspects over time. "

Previous studies only compared female bones to contemporary male bones, the researchers said and that's a problem, because the response of male bones to stress and change is much bigger than that of women. For instance, as humans moved from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle constantly on the move to a more settled agrarian(农耕的) one, changes can be observed in the structure of the shinbone(胫骨)- and these changes were much more evident in men.

However, a comparison of the bones of prehistoric women to the bones of living female athletes can help us work out a more accurate picture of what those prehistoric women were doing. "By analyzing the bones of living people and comparing them to the ancient bones, we can start to explain the kinds of labor our ancestors were reforming," Macintosh said. What they found was that women's leg strength hasn't changed a great deal, but their arms used to be very powerful. Prehistoric women, the researchers found, had arm strength 11-16 percent stronger than those of modern rowers(桨手), and 30 percent stronger than those of non-athletes.

A large analysis looked at hundreds of factors that might influence the risk of heart failure and found one dietary factor in particular that was associated with a lower risk：drinking coffee.

The analysis included extensive, decades-long data from three large health studies with 21, 361 participants, and used a method called machine learning that uses computers to find meaningful patterns in large amounts of data.

"Usually, researchers pick things that they suspect would be risk factors for heart failure - smoking, for example - and then look at smokers vs nonsmokers, " said the senior author, Dr. David P. Kao at the University of Colorado. "But machine learning identifies variables(变量) that are predictive of either increased or decreased risk, but that you haven't necessarily thought of. "

Using this technique, Dr. Kao and his colleagues found 204 variables that were associated with the risk of heart failure. Then they looked at the 41 strongest factors, which included smoking, blood pressure and the consumption of various foods. In all studies, coffee drinking was associated more strongly than any other dietary factor with a decreased long-term risk of heart failure.

Drinking a cup a day or less had zero effect, but two cups a day contributed to a 31 percent reduced risk, and three cups reduced the risk by 29 percent. There were not enough subjects who drank more than three cups daily to know if more coffee would decrease the risk further.

The study was not able to account for different types of coffee or brewing（冲泡）methods, or the use of additives like sugar or cream. Then should you start drinking coffee or increase the amount you already drink to reduce your risk of heart failure? "We don't know enough from the results of this study to recommend this," said Dr. Kao, adding that additional research would be needed.

What do you do when nobody is around to take your picture? You take a selfie(自拍照). But what about selfies in space? Last year, NASA astronaut(宇航员)Buzz Aldrin who famously became the second man to walk on the moon in July 1969, said that he took the first selfie in space during the Gemini Ⅻ mission in 1966.

"For me, it needs to be digital to be a selfie," argues Jennifer Levasseur, who is in charge of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. According to Levasseur, the idea of a selfie is directly linked to Internet culture and the human wish to interact(互动)on social platforms. "The thing that makes a selfie is sharing it," she says.

Still, astronauts have been carrying cameras aboard space vehicles since the 1960s, and they've taken plenty of pictures of themselves along the way. Astronauts had to pull the film magazines(胶卷暗盒)out and leave their cameras behind when they returned to Earth, because early space missions had a weight limit on the return trip.

A big change in space camera technology came after the sad loss of the space shuttle Columbus, which broke apart on its return to Earth in 2003. "Fearing that they would never be able to bring the film back from space and lose all that hard work quickened the pace for digital," Levasseur says.

Today, astronauts can have access to the Internet and social platforms in space and post true space selfies taken by digital cameras. Taking selfies and sharing them on social media is a way that astronauts in space can participate in the same activities people on Earth do every day. The first astronaut selfie that went viral(网红的)on the Internet was one by Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide in 2012.

An afternoon nap(午睡)is one of the joys of life, although too much napping could signal all is not well. In some cultures, people will have a daily nap—this is fine. The warning comes when people start sleeping during the daytime, when they did not sleep before. There is certainly a good reason to believe that daytime sleepiness—as in the Alzheimer's disease study—can be a marker of an underlying condition.

For most people, napping during the day is mainly a sign that you are not getting enough sleep at night, says Dr. Neill Stanley, a sleep expert. "If you feel sleepy during the day, you should think about taking a nap. That is what the body needs —it doesn't need to be kept awake with caffeine. It needs sleep. "The feeling we should notice is "sleepiness", he says. "It's not tiredness, which could be more psychological and linked to stress."

So how do you nap well? The key thing, says Stanley, is how long your nap lasts. Choose either a 20-or 90-minute nap. "When you fall asleep, you'll quickly go through the lighter stages of sleep into your first period of deep sleep. You don't want to wake up because that's when you wake and feel worse than you did before. "Napping for 20 minutes means you will wake up before you go into deep sleep; napping for 90 minutes means you'll complete a sleep cycle.

Once you factor in the time it takes to fall asleep—"Some people are better at napping than others but, "says Stanley, "a healthy adult will fall asleep in between 5 and 12 minutes. "—you can set an alarm, allowing a 30-to 40-minute period for a short nap, and up to two hours for a longer one.

A good time to nap is during the body's natural dip in the afternoon, between 2 p. m. and 4p. m. "You don't really want to be napping much past that because then you are going to be eating into your night-time sleep, "Stanley says. The point, he stresses, is to get good night-time sleep, which would ensure you probably don't need to nap at all.