Men with shaved heads are perceived to be more masculine, dominant and, in some cases, to have greater leadership potential than those with longer locks or with thinning hair, according to a recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Some executives say the style makes them appear younger — or at least, makes their age less evident — and gives them more confidence than a comb-over or monk-like pate.

Wharton management lecturer Albert Mannes conducted three experiments to test peoples’ perceptions of men with shaved heads. In one of the experiments, he showed 344 subjects photos of the same men in two versions: one showing the man with hair and the other showing him with his hair digitally removed, so his head appears shaved.

The study found that men with thinning hair were viewed as the least attractive and powerful of the bunch, a finding that tracks with other studies showing that people perceive men with typical male-pattern baldness as older and less attractive. For those men, the solution could be as cheap and simple as a shave.

New York image consultant Julie Rath advises her clients to get closely cropped when they start thinning up top. “There’s something really strong, powerful and confident about laying it all bare,” she says, describing the thinning or combed-over look as “kind of schlumpy.”

Social scientists believe storytelling made up 80 percent of the fireside conversations of our ancestors. The firelight talk might have started 400,000 years ago, but our brains are still excited for stories today.【小题1】. PowerPoint has replaced drawing pictures on a cave wall. But one thing hasn’t changed—our desire to hear interesting stories.

【小题2】. According to Princeton University neuroscientist Uri Hasson, a person who tells wonderful stories can actually plant ideas, thoughts, and emotions into a listener’s brain. The art of storytelling is your most powerful weapon in the war of ideas.

The most inspiring leaders in history were storytellers: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs.【小题3】: Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mark Burnett, and Sheryl Sandberg.

Many of the storytellers have changed the course of history. Some are business heroes. Some have inspired movements.【小题4】. They reach for the stars and inspire the rest of us to create our own moonshots. They have mastered the art of telling stories and enabled us to live better lives. Through artfully telling stories that inform and challenge, they build companies, drive the world forward, and make us feel like we, too, can achieve the impossible.

Storytelling is the fundamental building block of communication. In a world where people are provided with too many choices, the story is often the deciding factor in whom we decide to do business with.【小题5】. We tell stories to sell our ideas. We tell stories to educate students. We tell stories to motivate teams. We tell stories to encourage our children to reach their full potential. Learn to tell a story and your life and the lives of those you touch will be completely transformed.

Since English biologist Charles Darwin (1809 –1882) published On the Origin of Species in 1859, scientists have vastly improved their knowledge of natural history. However, a lot of information is still the subject of speculation, and scientists can still only make educated guesses at certain things.

One subject that they guess about is why some 400 million years ago, animals in the sea developed limbs (肢) that allowed them to move onto and live on land.

Recently, an idea that occurred to the US paleontologist (古生物学家) Alfred Romer a century ago became a hot topic once again.

Romer thought that tidal (潮汐的) pools might have led to fish gaining limbs. Sea animals would have been forced into these pools by strong tides. Then, they would have been made either to adapt to their new environment close to land or die. The fittest among them grew to accomplish the transition (过渡) from sea to land. Romer thought that tidal pools might have led to fish gaining limbs.

Romer called these earliest four-footed animals “tetrapods” (四足动物). Science has always thought that this was a credible theory, but only recently has there been strong enough evidence to support it.

Hannah Byrne is an oceanographer (海洋学家) at Uppsala University in Sweden. She announced at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Oregon, US, on Feb 15 that by using computer software, her team had managed to link Romer’s theory to places where fossil deposits (化石沉积) of the earliest tetrapods were found.

According to the magazine Science, in 2014, Steven Balbus, a scientist at the University of Oxford in the UK, calculated that 400 million years ago, when the move from land to sea was achieved, tides were stronger than they are today. This is because the planet was 10 percent closer to the moon than it is now.

The creatures stranded in the pools would have been under the pressure of “survival of the fittest”, explained the UK’s University of Bangor ocean scientist Mattias Green. As he told Science: “After a few days in these pools, you become food or you run out of food … the fish that had large limbs had an advantage because they could flip (空翻) themselves back in the water”.

As is often the case, however, there are others who find the theory less convincing. Cambridge University paleontologist Jennifer Clark, speaking to Nature magazine, seemed unconvinced. “It’s only one of many ideas for the origin of land-dwelling (陆地栖息的) tetrapods, any or all of which may have been a part of the answer,” she said.