Suppose you are out shopping and come across an old friend who starts telling you a story that seems to be dragging on and on. You want to seem interested, so you offer the occasional “Oh” or “I see”. To your surprise, though, this person angrily stops and says, “Sorry if I’m boring you!”

Where did this come from? Clearly, your body language must have let out your inner feelings. The idea that verbal (口头的) and nonverbal messages can conflict was the inspiration for a recently published study from Yale University’s Lueylle Armentano.

To test the role of verbal-nonverbal mismatch on emotional communication, Armentano and her partner created experimental conditions to see what happens when someone asks for help from strangers. The research team created videotapes of a fellow Yale student expressing nervousness in his words, bodily gestures, or both. The bodily gestures included running his hands through his hair, grabbing his arm, and facially expressing uneasiness. The key question was whether the other participants, another 82 Yale students, would believe the student and provide the help he was requesting. They needed to give their responses.

Turning to the findings, those nonverbal cues (提示) of nervousness had a greater impact on helping behavior than the verbal cues. Surprisingly, helping behavior was the highest when verbal expressions of nervousness were low but nonverbal cues were high.

Recognizing that your body language can outweigh your words means that you need to be mindful of what your body is doing when you’re interacting with others. Generally, when someone is speaking to you, you want to look like you’re interested. Not only should you maintain eye contact, but you should keep your body still and face toward the other person.

New research published late last month suggests that the ice loss in Antarctica is accelerating , particularly in East Antarctica, the largest ice sheet.

The results indicate that “as a whole, Antarctic may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea level rise”, write the US-based research team in the paper, which was published in the science journal Nature Geoscience.

By using satellite data, the researchers at University of Texas estimated a total ice sheet loss of 190 gigatons（十亿吨）(1 gigaton equals to 1 cubic kilometers of water) a year in Antarctica from April 2002 to January 2009, with an error of 77 gigatons.

And during the same period in East Antarctica , the report says, the rate of ice loss was 57 gigatons a year, with an error of 52 gigatons, mostly in coastal regions.

“If you examine the data between January and September this year, which we haven’t published yet, it’s more evident that East Antarctica is increasingly losing ice along the coastal regions,” said the lead author Dr Jianli Chen, a Chinese-American scientist with the Center for Space Research at the University of Texas.

The number itself is not that critical, as 57 cubic kilometers’ ice loss might only result in about 0.1 millimeters of sea level rise. However, what matters is that “we started seeing changes in East Antarctica,” Chen said. “In the future, the trend of ice loss may become more significant.”

Visually, the undergoing change in this largest ice sheet in the world is still subtle, according to co-author Don Blankenship, a glaciologist（冰河学家）at the University’s Institute for Geophysics（地球物理学）, who is currently conducting a field study in East Antarctica.

“We now know that there are actually rocks beneath the ice, and the bottom of the ice is below the sea level. So the ocean can actually penetrate（渗入）the center of the ice, warm it up and then more ice is going to the ocean,” Blankenship said.

Who is Li Ziqi? For 7 million watchers on YouTube and 20 million micro bloggers on Sina Weibo, that’s an easy question to answer. She holds an account to show her videos about the detailed cooking process of various kinds of traditional Chinese food.

She and her team are fond of showing the whole process from the field to the table. For example, in her video about spicy tofu, she starts with harvesting the soybeans, grinding them into powder (粉末) and making the powder into tofu, and then cooks it. In another video about soy sauce (酱),she shows how to plant the soybean in the field.

Yet recently a question about her has become hot on micro blog: “Are Li Ziqi’s works a kind of cultural export?” Many argue that her videos are about daily life, and therefore she is not a symbol (象征) of Chinese culture. In fact, Chinese culture has many aspects and very few people dare call themselves to be a “symbol” of it. Li has never said anything about that. Of course, through her videos Li lets the world know that Chinese people love good food and are good at making art out of even simple materials (食材). She lets the world see one of the most important aspects of the Chinese people — how they live their daily lives, and it is these that have won the hearts of her global audience.

Her videos have fewer words or conversations, and at first they were without any English subtitles (字幕) or English headlines, yet they attracted English readers. That shows the beauty of the Chinese culture in every detail of daily life. It is unnecessary to doubt whether Li’s videos are cultural export or not. She just lets the world know and love Chinese culture.