People who grew up in the country have a better sense of direction and navigational (导航) skills than those raised in cities, a study said Wednesday.

To find out how childhood environment influences navigation ability, scientists looked at how almost 400, 000 people from 38 countries played a mobile videogame designed for neuroscience research.

Players of the Sea Hero Quest game had to navigate a boat to find checkpoints (边防关卡) on a map, according to the study published in the Nature journal.

Co-lead author Antoine Coutrot of the University of Lyon said research had previously shown that when mice grew up in cages with complex paths, “certain abilities in their brains, including sense of space, were also improved.”

However, humans were a little trickier to study because “we cannot lock them up in cages,” he told AFP. So the researchers used Sea Hero Quest which was created in 2016 to study Alzheimer’s disease and has since been played by nearly 4 million people.

Coutrot said people who grew up in the countryside scored better because “the countryside is a rather complex environment since it is very unorganized, with greater distances, meaning you have to memorize your route (路线).”

However, people raised in more complex cities such as Paris, Chongqing and Prague did much better than those from cities with orderly planned streets like Chicago, he added.

And adults can still improve their sense of direction later in life if they work at it. “It’s a bit like learning another language, which will be much easier if you learned it when you were young,” Coutrot said.

Data show that almost all children see a decline in their happiness when they make the step up to Key Stage Three, with self-reported happiness taking a significant hit. Information from more than 11,000 people showed the impact was universal and that children from all backgrounds, ethnicities and locations feel worse aged 14 than they do aged 11, with the change in school thought to be the driving reason.

Scientists asked children to rank on a scale of one to seven how satisfied they were with their schoolwork, appearance, school, family, friends and life as a whole. One was “completely happy” and seven was “completely unhappy”.

Statisticians crunched (压缩) the numbers down to a scale between -2 and 1, with the average happiness being a score of zero when a child was 11. However, by the time the child was 14, four in five teenagers had a score of below zero, indicating a widespread downturn in adolescent happiness. That decline is probably linked to the change to secondary school at age 11, according to the study’s authors.

Ioannis Katsantonis, a doctoral researcher at Cambridge’s Faculty of Education who led the study, said, “Even though this was a large, diverse group of adolescents, we saw a consistent fall in happiness.”

“One of the most striking aspects was the clear association with changes at school. It suggests we urgently need to do more to support students’ happiness at secondary schools across Britain.”

The study identified that a child’s friendships and school life were key in their level of happiness, with the move to a bigger school and the potential problems with making new friends having a damaging impact on how they felt.

However, the scientists report that children with higher self-esteem(自尊心) aged 11 lived through the storm of moving to secondary school better than those who had lower self-esteem.

This indicates that structured efforts to strengthen adolescents’ self-esteem, particularly during the first years of secondary school, could reduce the likely downturn in happiness and life satisfaction, the authors say.

In the age of social distancing, using robots for some health care interactions is a promising way to reduce in-person contact between health care workers and sick patients. However, a key question is how patients will react to a robot entering the room. Researchers from MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital recently set out to answer that question.

In a study, the team found that a large majority of patients reported that interacting with a health care provider through a video screen fixed on a robot was similar to an in-person interaction with a health care worker.

“We’re working on robots that can help provide care to ensure the safety of the patient and the health care workforce. The results of this study give us some confidence that people are ready and willing to join us. In a larger online survey carried out nationwide, we also found that a majority of respondents were open to having robots perform small tasks such as taking a nose swab (拭子).” says Giovanni Traverso, an MIT assistant professor and the senior author of the study.

After the COVID-19 pandemic began early last year, Traverso and his colleagues turned their attention toward new strategies to reduce interactions between potentially sick patients and health care workers. To that end, they created a mobile robot that could interact with patients as they waited in the emergency department. The robots were equipped with sensors that allow them to measure vital signs, including skin temperature, breathing rate, and pulse(脉搏) rate. The robots also carried an iPad for remote video communication with a health care provider.

The study suggests that it could be worthwhile to develop robots that can perform tasks that currently require a lot of human effort, such as turning a patient over in bed. These days, turning COVID-19 patients onto their stomachs requires several people. Doing Covid-19 tests is another task that takes a lot of time and effort from health care workers, who could be arranged for other tasks if robots could help.