The Chinese giant salamander (中国大娃娃鱼) is not cute. Weighing as much as an adult human, it has brown skin, a giant mouth and mistrustful eyes. It is also one of the world’s most endangered species. And yet unlike the giant panda, the giant salamander rarely makes the news. Why do some animals strike a chord with (引起同情) humans while others draw little more than disgust?

“One of the biggest factors is ‘cuteness’. Physical characteristics such as big eyes and soft features remind us of human babies,” said Hal Herzog, professor atWest Carolina University. “The salamanders are a vital part of their ecosystem. Yet, like rats and snakes, the main instinct (直觉) they inspire in humans is disgust. ”

According to Graham Davey, professor at the University of Sussex, we learn to criticize certain creatures at a young age. “Babies are not born with disgust. It’s probably passed socially, culturally and within families. Some animals are disliked due to their resemblance (相似) to primary disgusting things, while others are perceived—rightly or wrongly—to pose a direct danger to the beholder. In terms of threat to humankind, disease and illness are bigger than being attacked by an animal,” Davey said. This might explain why most of us don’t find lions and bears unpleasant—they are covered with the same type of soft fur that coats toys for children, even if it might be better to avoid one in real life.

As with most things, popular culture has a huge effect on how society regards animals. Whereas the movie “Free Willy” prompted a wave of sympathy for the protection of endangered killer whales, “Arachnophobia” only made more people hate spiders.

Not that favoring certain cute or cool species is necessarily a bad thing for conservation. When we protect an iconic species, we protect their habitat and therefore all the organisms within it also benefit. But such species can become a victim of their own popularity. One recent study suggested that a “virtual” presence of wild animals such as elephants and tigers—be that on computer screens or T-shirts—can fool people into thinking they are more common in the wild than they really are.

Three men have had a big influence on modern sound and communication technologies.We started with the beginnings of computer-generated music.

Max Vernon Mathews has been called the father of computer music.He created electronic tools so that people could use computers, as musical instruments.He had a huge influence on the development of electronic music and how it is written, recorded and played.In 1957, Max wrote the first: computer program, Music,to enable a computer to create sound and play it back. The computer was so slow that it would have taken an hour to play the piece of music. in seventeen seconds.For that reason,Mathews moved the work to a tape player, which could be sped up to play the music at a normal speed.

Mathews continued creating other versions of the Music program.He became interested in how computers could help musicians outside recording studios.The Groove program he developed was the first computer program made for live performances.

Norio Ohga

Sony Corporation official Norio Ohga helped to develop, the compact disc in the late 1970s.

He pushed for CDs to be larger, and with a longer playing time.He wanted them to hold seventy-five minutes so that they could store all of Bcethoven's Ninth Symphony on one disc.This way, listeners could enjoy the musical work without any break.The compact disc changed the electronics industry and the way people listened to music.

Hubert Joseph Schlafly was an electrical engineer who helped change the way actors, politicians and other people speak on television.In 1950, he and two other men developed the teleprompter.One co-worker, Fred Barton, was an actor.He had an idea for a tool that would help television actors read their lines without having to memorize them.The first teleprompter involved a person who turned a long plece of paper printed with tall letters, As the actor read the lines, another person would, move the paper ahead on the device.Later versions used television screens to show the words that were to be read.

Pinocchio may be just a children’s fairy tale, but Spanish scientists at the University of Granada recently investigated this so-called “Pinocchio effect” and found that our noses don’t grow when we tell a lie, but actually shrink a bit.

Dr. Gómez Milán and his team developed a lie detector test that used thermography (体温计) to tell if people were lying and found that whenever participants in their research were being untruthful, the temperature of the tip of their nose dropped up to 1.2℃, while the temperature of their forehead increased up to 1.5℃. Scientist also found that drop in temperature at nose level actually caused it to slightly shrink, although the difference is undetected by the human eye.

“One has to think in order to lie, which rises the temperature of the forehead,” Dr. Gómez Milán explained the findings. “At the same time, we feel anxious, which lowers the temperature of the nose.” For this study, researchers asked a number of 60 students to perform various tasks while their temperature is scanned by technology. One of these tasks required making a 3 to 4 minutes call to their parents or a friend and telling a significant lie. Participants had to make up the lie themselves during the call. Interestingly, this lie detector picked up the temperature difference in 80 percent of the test subjects, which is a better rate of success than that of any modern lie detector.

“With this method we have achieved to increase accuracy”, said Dr. Gómez Milán, who added that law enforcement interviewers could one day combine other lie detection technology with thermal imaging to achieve better results.