Good friendships seem to be especially helpful for the heart. A three-year Swedish study of more than 13,600 men and women found that having few or no close friends increased the risk of having a heart attack by about 50 percent. A two-year study of more than 500 women with suspected coronary artery(冠状动脉) disease showed similar results. Women who reported the lowest levels of social support were twice as likely to die during the study. The women who enjoyed close support were not only more likely to be alive after two years, they also had lower rates of high blood pressure and were less likely to have excessive fat.

As reported in the Journal of the National Medical Association, friendships and other types of social support can help relieve stress, a well-known contributor to heart disease. Among other things, stress can encourage inflammation (炎症) in arteries. The research is still not very mature, but some studies have found that people who enjoy close support from friends and family generally have fewer inflammatory chemicals in their blood. The link between social ties and inflammation seems to be especially marked in older people.

When stress does appear, friends can encourage healthy reactions. People who lack strong social support tend to have dramatic and potentially dangerous reactions to scary situations. Their hearts pound and their blood pressure soars. But friends can help keep the heart on a more even keel. A study published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine found that young men and women discussing rough patches in their lives had a lower pulse and blood pressure when they had a supportive friend at their side.

Finally, friendships may help encourage a heart-healthy lifestyle. As reported in Current Opinion in Psychiatry, people are more likely to eat fruit and vegetables, exercise regularly and quit smoking if they have a network of friends and family.

Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children. Who are able from a young age to gather their own food.

In the laboratory, chimps don’t naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random — he just doesn’t care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.

Human children, on the other hand are extremely cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate a achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of expensive with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an worried adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.

There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive skills, at least when compared with chimps.In tests conducted by Tomtasell, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.

The cure of what children’s minds have and chimps’ don’t in what Tomasello calls what. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.

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Major trends that may affect education systems

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which promotes policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world, has been looking at the future of global education. Its head of education, Andreas Schleicher, has been talking about some major international trends affecting education systems around the world.

One trend is the widening gap between rich and poor. In OECD countries, the richest 10% have incomes 10 times greater than the poorest 10%. This inequality is a challenge for schools who want to offer equal and fair access to education for everyone.

Another trend is the rising wealth in Asia. It’s suggested that a large rise in the middle-classes in countries like India will increase demand for university places. Andreas Schleicher asks the question “What values will these newly wealthy consumers want from their schools?”

Increasing migration will also have an impact on education systems. Mobility results in more culturally diverse students eager to learn and develop good life for themselves. But that can be challenge, too, as Andreas Schleicher asks: “How should schools support pupils arriving from around the world? Will schools have a bigger role in teaching about shared values?”

Funding pressure is another issue: as our demand and expectation for education rises and more people go to university, who’s going to pay for it all? The rise in dependency on technology is another concern. What should students learn when many of their talents can be reproduced by machines? And how reliant should we be on learning from the internet?

These are just some of the issues the OECD is highlighting. But they remain irrelevant for hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest children who don’t even have access to school places or receive such low-quality education that they leave without the most basic literacy or numeracy.