For some people, music is no fun at all. About four percent of the population is what scientists call “amusic.” People who are amusic are born without the ability to recognize or reproduce musical notes (音调). Amusic people often cannot tell the difference between two songs. Amusics can only hear the difference between two notes if they are very far apart on the musical scale.

As a result, songs sound like noise to an amusic. Many amusics compare the sound of music to pieces of metal hitting each other. Life can be hard for amusics. Their inability to enjoy music set them apart from others. It can be difficult for other people to identify with their condition. In fact, most people cannot begin to grasp what it feels like to be amusic. Just going to a restaurant or a shopping mall can be uncomfortable or even painful. That is why many amusics intentionally stay away from places where there is music. However, this can result in withdrawal and social isolation. “I used to hate parties,” says Margaret, a seventy-year-old woman who only recently discovered that she was amusic. By studying people like Margaret, scientists are finally learning how to identify this unusual condition.

Scientists say that the brains of amusics are different from the brains of people who can appreciate music. The difference is complex, and it doesn’t involve defective hearing. Amusics can understand other nonmusical sounds well. They also have no problems understanding ordinary speech. Scientists compare amusics to people who just can’t see certain colors.

Many amusics are happy when their condition is finally diagnosed (诊断). For years, Margaret felt embarrassed about her problem with music. Now she knows that she is not alone. There is a name for her condition. That makes it easier for her to explain. “When people invite me to a concert, I just say, “No thanks, I’m ‘amusic,’” says Margaret. “I just wish I had learned to say that when I was seventeen and not seventy.”

A multi-institutional team of researchers conducted the first study to evaluate how the duration of nightly sleep early in the semester affects first year college students’ end-of-semester grade point average (GPA), Using Fitbit sleep trackers, they found that students on average sleep 6.5 hours a night, but negative outcomes accumulate when students received less than six hours of sleep a night. The results are available in the Feb. 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sleep guidelines recommend teenagers get 8 to 10 hours of sleep every night. Many college students experience irregular and insufficient sleep.

David Creswell, the William S. Dietrich Ⅱ Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, led a team of researchers to evaluate the relationship between sleep and GPA．“Animal studies have shown how critical sleep is for learning and memory,” said Creswell.“Here we show how this work translates to humans.The less nightly sleep a first year college student gets at the beginning of the school term predicts lower GPA at the end of the term. Lack of sleep may be hurting students’ ability to learn in their college classrooms.”

The study evaluated more than 600 first-year students across five studies at three universities. The students wore wrist Fitbit devices to monitor and record their sleep patterns. The researchers found that students in the study sleep on average 6.5 hours a night.More surprisingly, the researchers found that students who receive less than six hours of sleep experienced a pronounced decline in academic performance. In addition, each hour of sleep lost corresponded to a 0.07 decrease in end-of-term GPA．

“Once you start dipping (下降) below six hours, you are starting to accumulate massive sleep debt that can impair a student’s health and study habits, compromising the whole system,” said Creswell.“Most surprising to me was that no matter what we did to make the effect go away, it persisted.”

On Thursday in an article published in Cell, a team of researchers reported a new kind of adaptation-not to air or to food, but to the ocean. A group of sea-dwelling people in Southeast Asia have evolved into better divers. The Bajau, as these people are known, number in the hundreds of thousands in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. They have traditionally lived on houseboats: in recent times, they've also built houses on stilts (支柱) in coastal waters. "They are simply a stranger to the land," said Rodney C. Jubilado, a University of Hawaii researcher who studies the Bajau.