A recent discovery shows that our dance style is almost always the same, regardless of the type of music, and a computer can identify the dancer with astounding accuracy. Over the last few years, researchers at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland have used motion capture (动作捕捉) technology — the same kind used in Hollywood — to learn that your dance moves say a lot about you, such as how active or anxious you are, what mood you happen to be in, and even how much you empathize (共情) with other people. Recently, however, they discovered something that surprised them. “We actually weren’t looking for this result, as we set out to study something completely different,” explains Dr. Emily Carlson, the first author of the study.

The 73 participants in the study were motion captured dancing to seven different genres: Blues, Country, Dance/Electronica, Jazz, Metal, Pop and Rap. The only instruction they received was to listen to the music and move any way that felt natural. “We think it’s important to study phenomena as they occur in the real world, which is why we employ a naturalistic research example,” says Professor Petri Toiviainen, the senior author of the study.

The researchers analysed participants’ movements using machine learning, trying to distinguish between the musical styles. Unfortunately, their computer was able to identify the correct style less than 30% of the time. They were shocked to discover, however, that the computer could correctly identify which of the 73 individuals was dancing 94% of the time. “It seems as though a person’s dance movements are a kind of finger print,” says Dr. PasiSaari, co-author of the study and data analyst. “Each person has a unique movement signature that stays the same no matter what kind of music is playing.”Does this mean that face-recognition software will soon be joined by dance-recognition software? “We’re less interested in applications like surveillance(监视) than in what these results tell us about human musicality,” Carlson explains. “We have a lot of new questions to ask, like whether our movement signatures stay the same across our lifespan.”

Snoring (打鼾) is noisy breathing during sleep. It is a common problem among all ages and it influences about 90 million American adults. People most at risk are males and those who are overweight, but snoring is a problem of both genders, although it is possible that women do not present this complaint as frequently as men.

Snoring is often the loud or harsh sound that can occur as you sleep. You snore when the flow of air makes the tissue in the back of your throat vibrate (颤抖) as you breathe. The sound most often occurs as you breathe in air, and can come through the nose, mouth or both two organs. It can occur during any stage of sleep.

About half of people snore at some point in their lives. Snoring is more common among men, though many women snore. It appears to run in families and become more common as you get older. About 40 percent of adult men and 24 percent of adult women are habitual snorers. Men become less likely to snore after the age of 70.

Sleeping on your back may make you more likely to snore. You may snore when your throat or tongue muscles are relaxed. And substances (物质) that (an relax these muscles may cause you to snore. These include alcohol, muscle relaxants and other medicine.

Snoring can be a nuisance to your partner and anyone else nearby. You may even snore loudly enough to wake yourself up. Though, in many cases people do not realize that they snore. Snoring can also cause you to have a dry mouth when you wake up.

Light snoring may not disrupt your overall sleep quality. Heavy snoring may be connected with a risk factor in the heart disease, stroke and many other health problems. So never take it lightly.

Recent experiments by psychologists at the University of Pittsburgh shed new light on how we learn and how we remember our real-world experiences. The research, described in the March 12, 2024 online edition of proceedings of the National Academy of Science, suggests that varying what we study and spacing out our learning over time can both be helpful for memory.

“Lots of prior research has shown that learning and memory benefit from spacing study sessions out,” said Benjamin, a director of the Causal Learning and Decision-Making Lab at Pitt. “For example, if you cram the night before a test, you might remember the information the next day for the test, but you will probably forget it fairly soon,” he added. “In contrast, if you study the material on different days leading up to the test, you will be more likely to recall it for a longer period of time.”

But “spacing effect” has been based on the idea that what you are trying to learn repeats identically each time. Yet that is rarely the case in real life, when some features of our experience s may stay the same,but others are likely to change. For example, imagine repeat trips to your local coffee shop. While many features may stay the same on each visit, a new barista (咖啡师) may be serving you. How does the spacing effect work in light of such variation across experiences?

In two experiments, researchers asked participants to repeatedly study pairs of items and scenes that were either identical on each repetition or in which the item stayed the same but the scene changed each time. Researchers found that spaced learning benefited item memory. But they also found that memory was better for the items that had been paired with different scenes compared with those shown with the same scene each time.

“It is hard to provide clear advice for things like studying for a test because the sort of material can be so different,” Benjamin said. “But in theory our findings should be broadly relevant to different sorts of tasks, like remembering someone’s name and things about them and learning new vocabulary in a foreign language.”