To take the apple as a forbidden fruit is the most unlikely story the Christians ever cooked up. For them, the forbidden fruit from Eden is evil(邪恶的). So when Columbus brought the tomato back from South America, a land mistakenly considered to be Eden, everyone jumped to the obvious conclusion. Wrongly taken as the apple of Eden, the tomato was shut out of the door of Europeans.

What made it particularly terrifying was its similarity to the mandrake, a plant that was thought to have come from Hell(地狱 ) What earned the plant its awful reputation was its roots which looked like a dried-up human body occupied by evil spirits. Though the tomato and the mandrake were quite different except that both had bright red or yellow fruit, the general population considered them one and the same, too terrible to touch.

Cautious Europeans long ignored the tomato, and until the early 1700s most of the Western people continued to drag their feet. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well-known farmer wrote that the most interesting part of an afternoon tea at her father's house had been the "introduction of this wonderful new fruit--or is it a vegetable? ""As late as the twentieth century some writers still classed tomatoes with mandrakes as an "evil fruit".

But in the end tomatoes carried the day. The hero of the tomato was an American named Robert Johnson, and when he was publicly going to eat the tomato in 1820, people journeyed for hundreds of miles to watch him drop dead. "What are you afraid of? "he shouted. "T"ll show you fools that these things - are good to eat! Then he bit into the tomato, Some people fainted. But he survived and, according to a local story, set up a tomato-canning factory.

When pups are between 2 and 3 months old, their mothers will abandon them for any number of reasons. With no mother to watch out for them, infant(婴儿) mortality of pups under one year skyrockets(飞涨) to around 90%. So, only about 10% of motherless, homeless pups survive.

Without mothers, how are these abandoned pups supposed to survive? For the study, researchers Clive Wynne at Arizona State, Nadine Chersini at Utecht University, and Nathan Hal at Texas Tech University brought in 51 college students and asked them to rate the attractiveness of headshots(头部特写) of puppies at different ages.

The pups peaked at different ages, but they were all ranked likable between six to eight weeks, since newly abandoned pups are competing with each other for human heartstrings(怜悯), evolution says they should be most likable around 6 and 11 weeks. This is around the time they are weaned (断奶) and let go of by their mothers.

There are a few characteristics that humans find particularly adorable across species: big, forward-facing eyes, floppy and unstable limbs (肢), and a soft, rounded body shape. We’re also keen to scream when animals have large heads in comparison to their bodies, and this reaction goes back to evolution.

Called kinderschema (婴儿萌), these qualities are also apparent in human babies and necessary for their survival. The characteristics activate the decision-making part of the brain to encourage you to protect and nurture the baby. At the same time, the brain’s pleasure center releases dopamine (多巴胺). With these two reactions, your brain makes you want to protect the baby and rewards you for doing so. With your protection, the baby can survive.

A successful move of 21 eastern black rhinos (犀牛) to a new home of a grassy plateau that hasn’t seen them in decades will give them space to live and help increase the population of the critically endangered animals. It was Kenya’s biggest rhino relocation ever.

The rhinos were taken from three parks that are becoming overcrowded to the private Loisaba Conservancy, where rhinos were wiped out by poaching (偷猎) decades ago.

The 18-day exercise involved tracking the rhinos using a helicopter and then shooting them with tranquilizer darts(麻醉飞镖). Then the animals—which weigh about a ton each—have to be loaded into the back of a truck for the move. Disaster nearly struck early in the relocation effort, when a tranquilized rhino fell into a river. Workers held the rhino’s head above water with a rope to stop it from drowning while the tranquilizer drug took effect, and then the rhino was freed.

Some of the rhinos were transferred from Nairobi National Park and made a 300-kilometer trip. Others came from two parks closer to Loisaba.

Rhinos are generally animals enjoying being alone and are at their happiest in large living areas. As numbers in the three parks where the rhinos were moved from have increased, wildlife officials decided to relocate some in the hope that they will be happier and more likely to increase. David Ndere, an expert on rhinos at the Kenya Wildlife Service, said their reproduction rates decrease when there are too many in a territory.

Kenya has had relative success in recovering its black rhino population, which dipped from around 20, 000 in the 1970s to below 300 in the mid-1980s because of hunting, according to conservationists, raising fears that the animals might be wiped out completely in the country. Kenya now has around 1, 000 black rhinos, the third biggest population behind South Africa and Namibia. There are just over 6, 400 wild black rhinos left in the world, all of them in Africa, according to the Save the Rhino organization.