Does the Body Burn Fat When You Are Hungry?

Your body stores fat as a way to help protect you against starvation if you can’t take in enough food. However, your fat reserve isn’t the first place your body goes for food. Instead, it reaches out for sugar for energy. 【小题1】

Hunger is normally a reflection that your body has used up energy from recent food you ate and has moved onto getting energy from sugar in your blood. 【小题2】 The more sugar you take in, the more fuel your body has to use before it reaches out to the fat stores. If your body doesn’t have enough sugar to supply the energy it needs, it begins to burn fat when you’re hungry instead.

Missing meals and going hungry can change your metabolism (新陈代谢) so it stores fat instead of burning it. 【小题3】 However, if you skip meals for several days and severely lower your calorie (卡路里) intake, your body begins to store as much fat as possible.

【小题4】 Your body burns up sugar stored in your system and begins to burn fat as you continue to exercise. However, exercising when you’re hungry won’t help you burn fat faster. A recent study shows that the body burns the same amount of fat regardless of whether you are hungry when you exercise.

Staying hungry all day won’t necessarily help you burn fat, but cutting calories is key to losing weight. 【小题5】 Snack (吃点心) in between meals to keep your metabolism working all day, which helps it burn more fat than if it’s allowed to slow down when it’s not meal time. Snacking in between meals can help you control your meal sizes at meal time.

A study from the University of California, Davis is the first to document personality in golden-mantled ground squirrels, which are common across the western US and parts of Canada, The study found the squirrels show personality for four main aspects: boldness（大胆）, aggressiveness, activity level, and sociability. The findings suggest that understanding how an animal’s personality influences the use of space is important for wildlife conservation.

The fact that ground squirrels have personalities may not seem surprising. But the scientific field of animal personality is relatively young, as is the recognition that there are ecological consequences of animal personalities. For instance, bolder, more aggressive squirrels may find more food or defend a larger area, but their risky behavior may also make them easily hurt by predators（捕食者）or accidents. Lead author Jaclyn Aliperti conducted the study while earning her PhD in ecology at UC Davis.

Scientists have been studying golden-mantled ground squirrels at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado for decades. It was established as a long-term study site more than 30 years ago by Aliperti’s advisor, Dirk Van Vuren. Aliperti drew from this powerful data set for her study, while also starting a series of experiments there over the course of three summers to observe and quantify the squirrels’ personalities. Overall, the study, published in the journal Animal Behaviour, found that bolder squirrels had larger core areas where they concentrated their activities. Bold, active squirrels moved faster. Also, squirrels that were bolder, more aggressive and more active had greater access to habitats, such as rocks. The location of the habitat is important because it can provide a belter point for observing and evading predators. Interestingly, habitat is also associated with sociability.

“Animal personality is a hard science, but if it makes you relate to animals more, maybe people will be more interested in conserving them,” said Alipcrti.

Seven out of the eight planets in our solar system were named after Greek or Roman Gods. You’re living on the only exception to that rule.

The word “earth” has roots in the Old English term “eorþe”. Eorþe had multiple meanings like “soil”, “dirt”, “ground”, “dry land” and “country”. Yet the story didn’t begin there. Old English is the earliest known stage of what became our modern English tongue. Used until about 1150 C.E., it evolved from a parent language that scholars call “Proto-Germanic”. The German that’s spoken today is part of the same linguistic family. “Earth” and “eorþe” are therefore related to the modern German word “Erde”. Not only is this the German language’s name fox our home planet, but it can also be used to refer to dirt and soil.

Our dear Each has relatives in some other languages, too, For example, there’s the Old Saxon “ertha”, the Old Frisian “erthre” and the Dutch word “aarde”. All these likely originate from a Proto-Germanic term that was never recorded. Nevertheless, linguists have been able to go back and reconstruct this mystery word. Spelled “ertho” in scholarly texts, it’s always marked by an asterisk (星号). This asterisk acknowledges the lack of written confirmation that the word was really used.

Nobody knows when people started using words like “Earth” or “Erde” to refer to the planet as a whole and not just the ground they walked on. Back in 1783, German astronomer Johann Elert Bode named the seventh planet from our sun “Uranus” (after a Greek god). And though Pluto is no longer considered a planet, we know that 11-year-old Venetia Burney named it in 1930. But if a single person gave planet Earth its English name, his or her identity has been lost to the sands of time.

Still, it’s clear that while Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all started out as the proper names of ancient gods, “Earth” did not. That’s why our planet is sometimes called “the earth” with a lowercase (小写字母) “e”.