A new study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology found that performing acts of kindness can heal depression and anxiety. 123 young participants from all works of life were divided into three groups. Two of the groups were equipped with techniques often used in dealing with depression: planning social activities or cognitive (认知的) reassessment. Members of the third group were instructed to perform three acts of kindness a day for two days out of the week.

Participants followed their instructions for ten weeks. The findings showed that participants in all three groups showed an increase in life satisfaction and a reduction of depression and anxiety symptoms (症状). “These results are encouraging because they suggest that all three study methods are efficacious at reducing anxiety and improving satisfaction,” the study’s co-author David Cregg said.

However, the group performing acts of kindness led to improvements not seen in the two other groups. “The acts of kindness still showed an advantage over both social activities and cognitive reassessment by making people feel more connected to other people, which is an important part of well-being.” The acts of kindness technique was the only means tested that helped people feel more connected to others.

“Social connection is strongly associated with well-being. Performing acts of kindness seems to be one of the best ways to promote those connections,” Cregg said. The authors noted that just participating in social activities did not improve feelings of social connection in this study. “There’s something specific about performing acts of kindness that makes people feel connected to others. It’s not enough to just be around other people, participating in social activities,” said co-author Jennifer Cheavens.

Some of the acts of kindness that participants later said they did include baking cookies for friends, offering to give a friend a ride, and leaving notes for roommates with words of encouragement. “Something as simple as helping other people can go above and beyond other treatments in helping heal people with depression and anxiety,” Cregg added.

“The dangerous thing about lying is people don't understand how the act changes us,” says Dan Ariely, behavioral psychologist and Duke university. Psychologists have documented children lying as early as the age of two. Some experts even consider lying a developmental milestone, like crawling and walking, because it requires sophisticated planning, attention and ability to see a situation from someone else's perspective to manipulate them. But, for most people, lying gets limited as we develop a sense of morality and the ability to self-regulate.

Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene says, for most of us, lying takes work. In studies, he gave subjects a chance to deceive for monetary gain while examining their brains in a functional MRI machine, which maps blood flow to active parts of the brain. Some people told the truth instantly and instinctively. But others opted to lie, and they showed increased activity in their frontal perietal (颅腔壁的) control network, which is involved in difficult or complex thinking. This suggests that they were deciding between truth and dishonesty — and ultimately opting for the latter. For a follow-up analysis, he found that people whose neural rewards centers were more active when they won money were also more likely to be among the group of liars — suggesting that suggesting that lying may have to do with the inability to resist temptation.

External conditions also matter in terms of when and how often we lie. We are more likely to lie, research shows, when we are able to rationalize it, when we are stressed and fatigued to see others being dishonest. And we are less likely to lie when we have moral reminders or when we think others are watching. “We as a society need to understand that, when we don't punish lying, we increase the probability it will happen again,” Ariely says.

In a 2016 study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience Ariely and colleagues showed how dishonesty alters people's brains, making it easier to tell lies in the future. When people uttered a falsehood, the scientists noticed a burst of activity in their amygdala. The amygdala is a crucial part of the brain that produces fear, anxiety and emotional response — including that sinking, guilty feeling you get when you lie. But when scientists had their subjects play a game in which they won many by deceiving their partner, they noticed the negative signals from the amygdala began to decrease. Not only that, but when people faced no consequences for dishonesty, their falsehoods tended to get even more sensational. This means that if you give people multiple opportunities to lie for their own benefit, they start with little lie which get bigger over time.

It tastes like flowers. It smells like a campfire.What is it? It is a $6,000 bottle of Petrus Pomerol wine that spent a year on the International Space Station.

Researchers in Bordeaux are examining the twelve bottles of wine as well as 320 pieces of grapevines that returned to Earth in January. They say the wine and grapevines are part of a longer-term effort to make plants on Earth better resist climate change and disease.

Alcohol and glass are not usually permitted on the International Space Station. Each bottle was packed inside a special steel container during the journey. At a special tasting this month, 12 wine experts tried one of the space-traveled wines at the Institute for Wine and Vine Research in Bordeaux. They tasted and smelled the wine alongside a similar bottle from the same year that had stayed on Earth. The tasting was blind and the experts did not know which wine they were drinking.

Nicolas Gaume, the head of Space Cargo Unlimited, arranging the experiment, said the experiment studied the effects of the lack of gravity on the wine and vines. “I have tears in my eyes,” Gaume told The Associated Press about the experiment.

Jane Anson is a wine expert and writer who said the wine that remained on Earth tasted "a little younger than the one that had been to space."

The small pieces of vine not only survived the journey but also grew faster than vines on Earth, unaffected by limited light and water. Such information could help create a way to grow grapes or to make wine in space. Chemical and biological study of the wine’s aging process could also help scientists develop stronger, healthier vines on Earth. It is expected that it would take a decade or more to lead to practical, or actual uses.