Recently, while out walking my dog Jack, I encountered a blond woman walking her dog. I stopped to chat and she responded amiably. As soon as we had ended our chat and I was walking on, I realized that the woman I had approached was a complete stranger, not one of my neighbors.

Face blindness, is a neurological condition resulting in trouble identifying human faces. Neurologist-author Oliver Sacks famously introduced this condition in his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks wrote about his own severe face blindness in a wonderful article in the NewYorker. Up to 2.5 percent of people are born with face blindness.

Acquired face blindness may be caused by head trauma, strokes or tumors. Face blindness occurs in many people like me with Alzheimer’s disease, even in the early stages. Although my cognitive impairment is still mild, I have been having increasing trouble recognizing faces, even of people I know well. Many of my neighbors are hard for me to recognize until I hear their voices or see the dog they are walking.

The ability to accurately identify other people by recognizing their faces is important to our social, emotional and cultural behaviors. Our brains appear to learn how to recognize the faces of other people of our race during childhood. A study in 2019 showed that there is a critical period for this learning. Children learn how to recognize faces of the group they are raised with,up until about age 12. White children will become adept at distinguishing white face. Similarly, an Asian child raised in an Asian country without exposure to white faces will not be able to distinguish white faces. This learning process slows down and then is gone by age 12.

My best option may be to pay closer attention to the dogs. Even for me, pets are easy to identify because of shape, size, color of coat and sometimes behavior. Next time we pass on the street, we’ll be strangers no more.

For the past three months, Riley Horner, a teenage girl from Illinois, has been waking up every morning thinking it's June 11. What's worse, her memory resets every couple of hours, so she can't even remember things she did or people who she met that day.

Riley's troubles began after she got accidentally kicked in the head by a teenager who was crowd-surfing during a dance. She was taken to the hospital, but doctors there only diagnosed her with a concussion (脑震荡) and sent her home with walking sticks. Tests showed no brain bleed or anything else out of the ordinary, but Riley's family soon noticed that there was something wrong with her. It was like her brain was stuck in the past and refused to make any new memories.

Riley's symptoms have baffled doctors, as they couldn't even find out what's wrong with her, let alone try to fix it. The teen's mother Sarah said that at first doctors told them that Riley's memory might get better as time passed, but it's been three months and her condition has not improved. Now they're saying that she could stay like this forever, which is something Riley's mother cannot accept.

The young girl has been struggling to deal with her condition, but even the simplest of things are really difficult under the circumstances. She always carries detailed notes with her at school, so when her memory resets every couple of hours, she can go over the things she needs to know, like how to find her locker. Almost everything Riley has experienced since June has been wiped clean from her memory.

“We need somebody that knows a little bit more because she deserves better. I mean she wanted to be in the medical field and now she can't even hold a job if she wanted to,” Riley's mother said. “We hope she will get help from certain experts and recover sooner or later.”

WASHINGTON(Reuters)-People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer(胰腺癌),an unusual but deadly cancer,researchers reported on Monday.

People who drank mostly fruit juice instead of sodas did not have the same risk,the study of 60,000 people in Singapore found.

Sugar may be to blame but people who drink sweetened sodas regularly often have other poor health habits,said Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota,who led the study.

“The high levels of sugar in soft drinks may be increasing the level of insulin(胰岛素)in The body,which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth,”Pereira said in a statement.

Writing in the joumal Cancer Epidemiology,Biomarkers & Prevention,Pereira and colleagues said they followed 60,524 men and women in the Singapore Chinese Health Study for l4 years.

Over that time,140 of the volunteers developed pancreatic cancer.Those who drank two or more sweetened soft drinks a week had an 87 percent higher risk of being among those who got pancreatic cancer.

Pereira said he believed the fndings would apply elsewhere.

“Singapore is a wcahhy country with excellent heahhcare.Favorite pastimes(消遣)are eating and shopping,so the findings should apply to other western countries,”he said.

But Susan Mayne of the Yale Cancer Center at Yale University in Connecticut was cautious.

“Although this study found a risk,the finding was based on a relatively small number of cases and it remains unclear whether it is a causal(因果的)connection or not。”said Mayne.

who serves on the board of the journal,which is published by the American Association for Cancer Research.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer,with 230,000 cases globally.In the United States,37,680 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in a year and 34,290 die of it.