Many people list hiccups(嗝)as one of the most annoying problems which are associated with human being. For a group of people, continuous hiccups can seriously harm the quality of life. In the year 2017, the question “what causes hiccups?” was the most searched medical question. That’s how much of an issue these hiccups are and it also reflects that this problem is so widespread in our daily life.

Dr. All Seifi, a professor of the University of Texas, was tired of the traditional methods which are used to dispel hiccups, like drinking water or varying breathing techniques. He then came up with the idea that a straw(吸管)could help interrupt hiccups. The straw, which goes by the marketing name HiccAway, requires more power than regular straws in order to draw up liquid. Drinking with this straw can lower the diaphragm(隔膜)while first opening it and then closing it. Doing so stimulates the nerves at the same time, allowing the brain to reset and stop the hiccups.

Dr. James Alvarez of the University of Texas gathered 249 volunteers to use the straw and report back their results. About 92% of the participants said that HiccAway helped their hiccups go away. When it comes to effectiveness, this straw received a score of 4.58 out of 5. About 90% of participants marked it as more effective than traditional home methods. A majority of the participants reported several occasions when they always suffer from hiccups, while about 11 reported daily hiccups issues, and 53 reported that they suffered from hiccups weekly. The frequent sufferers reported back success rates that were consistently as high as people who didn’t suffer from them as often.

The one issue is that hiccups are an issue where placebo effect(安慰作用)could likely come into play. A lot of people swear by solutions that do not end up working for others. It is not clear how this trial could be conducted in a more scientific way.

A paper published on November 15 in Current Biology suggests that a patch (小块) of cells developed for identifying human faces, the fusiform face area (FFA), is up and running in infants (婴儿) as young as two months old.

Rebecca Saxe, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her colleagues scanned 42 infants ranging in age from two to nine months using a special functional magnetic resonance (磁共振) imaging (fMRI) helmet designed specifically for babies. Data from 16 of the infants had to be thrown out because it is extremely difficult to keep them happy, still and awake for long. For the 26 remaining infants, the scientists compared activity in visual areas of the brain while they watched 2.7-second video clips that described faces, body parts, landscapes, and other objects. Results showed more activity in the areas of the brain's visual system that are specialized for recognizing faces, bodies and scenes than areas for other observed objects.

"There's every reason to think that babies are born expecting and looking for their most important social partners, Saxe says." Something in their brain makes them interested in faces actually before they've had any experience with faces at all. Babies look toward face-like images from hours after birth."

Other researchers are not convinced by Saxe's conclusions. "I don't believe that there are face patches present at birth," Livingstone says. He views experience and learning are essential for the development of the FFA.

To Kalanit Grill-Spector, a psychology professor at Stanford University, the most exciting part of the new paper is not about this question of learned versus inborn development. "I think the study is kind of attempting to address this question, but it doesn't really provide a perfect answer one way or another. What impressed me is the amount of babies that they've scanned and with a lot of new innovations in baby fMRI," she says. "That's going to push the field forward."

You never see him，but they're with you every time you fly. They record where you are going, how fast you're traveling and whether everything on your airplane is functioning normally. Their ability to bear almost any disaster makes them seem like something out of a comic book. They're known as the black box.

When planes fall from the sky，as a Yemeni airliner did on its way to Comoros Islands in the India Ocean June 30，2009，the black box is the best bet for identifying what went wrong. So when a French submarine detected the device's homing signal five days later，the discovery marked a huge step toward determining the cause of a tragedy in which 152 passengers were killed.

In 1958，Australian scientist David Warren developed a flight-memory recorder that would track basic information like altitude and direction. That was the first mode for a black box. Which became a requirement on all U. S. commercial flights by 1960. Early models often failed to bear crashes，however，so in 1965 the device was completely redesigned and moved to the back of the plane-the area least subject to impact-from its original position in the landing wells（起落架舱） The same year，the Federal Aviation Authority required that the boxes，which were never actually black，be painted orange or yellow to aid visibility. Modern airplanes have two black boxes：a voice recorder，which tracks pilots' conversations，and a flight-data recorder，which monitors fuel levels，engine noises and other operating functions that help investigators reconstruct the aircraft's final moments.