There have been many headlines in recent years about the potentially negative impacts sports can have on athletes’ brains. However, a study by Northwestern University (NU) showed that in the absence of injury, athletes across a variety of sports, including football, basketball and hockey, have healthier brains than non-athletes.

The researchers examined the brain health of 495 Northwestern student athletes and 493 citizens. They delivered speech syllables to study the participants through earbuds (耳塞) and recorded the brain’s activity with scalp electrodes (头皮电极). They analyzed the ratio of background noise to the response to sound was relative to the background noise.

Athletes have a better ability to bring down background electrical noise in their brain to better process external sounds, such as a teammate yelling or a coach calling to them from the sidelines.

“No one would argue against the fact that sports lead to better physical fitness, but we don’t always connect brain fitness with sports,” said Senior author and profess Nina Kraus. He likens (比喻) the phenomenon to listening to DJ on the radio. “Think of background electrical noise in the brain like static (天电干扰) on the radio,” Kraus said. “There are two ways to hear the DJ better --- minimize the static or increase the DJ’s voice. We found that athletes’ brains use the first way to hear the ‘DJ’ better. A serious commitment to physical activity is beneficial to the nervous system, and perhaps, if you have a healthier nervous system, you may be able to better handle injury or other health problems.”

“The findings could motivate athletic interventions for those who struggle with hearing processing. In particular, playing sports may offset the excessively noisy brains often found in children from low-income area,” Kraus said.

People generally see themselves through achievements. In doing that, they end up caring more about their image than the reality of who they actually are. Rather than their work doing the talking, they end up defining themselves by external markers that they hope will earn them respect.

The problem with this is that it encourages both themselves and other people to judge their worth based on some relatively unimportant measure. For example, one day, their educational diploma may overshadow what they actually learned. Therefore, a better way to know a person, I think, is to ask a different set of questions: What motivates them? What makes them ache? What do they long for?

It’s in this spirit that I want to publicly share my values. They are the compass (罗盘) that guides my life. The kindest and most sincere thing I can do is to see, recognize, and understand another person before I make judgments. From there, I can learn to treat others appropriately, depending on the context, learning from my mistakes with time and experience. It’s just a reminder that life is hard for all of us, while at the same time accepting that it’s important we are all also held accountable for our actions.

I have learned that we are all deeply self-interested. I hope to be self-aware enough to check out of the power and status games. That means I’m not competing with anyone for a shiny object; I’d rather compete with myself. It’s about becoming so uniquely different that it would be an insult for me to measure myself against someone else. I believe if I do the work to be internally free from the pull of the power and status games, then I can add value to others based on my unique knowledge and experience.

If this resonates with (与……共鸣) you, I invite you to join me on this journey in understanding and relating to this complex world. It’s a wonderful mystery, and I think together we can better define it — not just personally, but also collectively.

Birders get nervous when they see landscapes covered in wind turbines (涡轮机). When the wind gets going, their blades (叶片) can turn around at well over 200km per hour. It is easy to imagine careless birds getting cut into pieces and wind turbines do indeed kill at least some birds. But a new analysis of American data suggests the numbers are negligible, and have little impact on bird populations.

Erik Katovich, an economist at the University of Geneva, made use of the Christmas BirdCount, a citizen-science project run by the National Audubon Society. Volunteers count birds they spot over Christmas, and the society gathers the numbers. He assumed, reasonably, that if wind turbines harmed bird populations, the numbers seen in the Christmas Bird Count would drop in places where new turbines had been built. Combining bird population and species maps with the locations and construction dates of all wind turbines, he found building turbines had no noticeable effect on bird populations.

Instead of limiting his analysis to wind power alone, he also examined oil-and-gas extraction (开采), which has boomed in America over the past couple of decades. Comparing bird populations to the locations of new gas wells revealed an average 15% drop in bird numbers when new wells were drilled, probably due to a combination of noise, air pollution and the disturbance of rivers and ponds that many birds rely upon. When drilling happened in migration centers, feeding grounds or breeding locations, bird numbers instead dropped by 25%.

Wind power, in other words, not only produces far less planet-heating carbon dioxide and methane than do fossil fuels. It appears to be significantly less damaging to wildlife, too. Yet that is not the impression you would get from reading the news. Dr Katovich found 173 stories in major American news media reporting the supposed negative effects that wind turbines had on birds in 2020, compared with only 46 stories discussing the effects of oil-and-gas wells.