Experts often tell students to center their efforts on a narrow field to get a job after school. But recent research into Nobel Prize winners suggests that wider interests are important.

One of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was 68-year-old Danish scientist Meldal. When describing his career, Meldal said he started as an engineer but changed to chemistry because he wanted to understand the world.

In a discussion with the Nobel Prize organization, he talked about his co-winner, Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University. He said, “She has such broad knowledge of both chemistry and biology and she knows how to use her knowledge in a clever way.”

Meldal’s experience and the way he sees things may come as a surprise to students. They might believe they have to center their work and school lives in one field to be successful. But a study from professors shows that is not always the case. They said that a large number of Nobel Prize winners can be described as “polymaths”, people who have many different interests in both their work and personal lives. This permits scientists to look for creative ways to solve problems. In fact, one important part of science is not discovering answers, but recognizing problems that need to be solved.

The researchers say that Nobel winners are nine times more likely to have experience in working with wood, metal or in the arts than most scientists. They pointed to a 2012 report about students who study two majors in college. Double majors are often more creative and more interested in starting their own businesses. Other researchers have found that having an outside activity like playing chess, performing music or creating art can help predict future success in a job.

The “diet” in diet drinks may be a false promise for some soda lovers. A study published recently in JAMA Network Open adds to the evidence that drinks made with sucralose (蔗糖素) may stimulate the appetite, at least among some people.

“We found that females and people with obesity (肥胖) had greater brain reward activity after consuming the artificial sweetener,” says study author Katie Page. “What was most surprising was the impact of body weight and biological sex. They were very important factors in the way that the brain responded to the artificial sweetener.”

Both groups also had a reduction in the hormone that inhibits (抑制) appetite, and they ate more food after they consumed drinks with sucralose, compared with after regular sugar-sweetened drinks. In contrast, the study found males and people of healthy weight did not have an increase in either brain reward activity or hunger response, suggesting they’re not affected in the same way.

Page and her team measured the response to diet soda in three ways. They used brain images of the 74 study participants to document the activation of parts of the brain linked to appetite. They used blood samples to measure blood sugar and hormones that can drive hunger. And they also tracked how much participants ate at a buffet table at the end of each study session.

“These results are consistent with patterns that we’ve actually seen in my lab in animal studies,” says Susan Swithers, a behavioral scientist at Purdue University.

“You are supposed to get sugar after something tastes sweet. Your body has been accustomed to that,” explains Swithers. But diet soda may lead to a disconnect. The sugar never arrives, and “that could decrease the body’s efficiency in metabolizing (新陈代谢) sugar the next time.”

Violent winter weather sweeping across large parts of the central and southern US has brought record-breaking cold temperatures, leaving the electricity cut off and at least 21 deaths.

The worst power outages were in Texas, where more than 4 million homes and businesses remained without power on Tuesday in subfreezing temperatures. Elsewhere more than 250,000 people also lost power across parts of Appalachia, and 4 million people lost power in Mexico.

The blackouts forced Harris county to scramble(争夺)to get more than 8,000 doses of Moderna's coronavirus vaccine into people's arms, after the county public health facility lost power and its back-up generator also failed. The conditions also delayed vaccine shipments. State officials said Texas, due to receive more than 400,000 doses this week, did not expect deliveries until at least Wednesday.

Associating climate change, normally connected with burning heat, with an unusual winter storm that has destroyed a wide part of Texas, most people find it seem so abnormal. But scientists say there is evidence that the rapid heating of the Arctic can help push cold air from the north pole much further south, possibly to the US-Mexico border.

This phenomenon has shown itself to a dramatic degree over the past month, with a splitting of the polar vortex（涡旋)helping cause huge flurries of snow in Europe as well as record cold temperatures in parts of the US used to milder winters.

There is no agreement among scientists over the interaction between Arctic heat and cold weather further south, which is called as a topic of “an active area of research”. Global heating is causing warmer winters, and record cold temperatures are now being clearly outpaced by record hot temperatures, but the complex interaction of climatic conditions still requires further investigation, to the great surprise of some among others, including some famous scientists.