A little creativity each day can go a long way towards happiness and pleasure in our daily life.

The researchers followed 658 people for about two weeks and found that doing small, everyday things like cooking and baking (烘焙) made the group feel more relaxed and happier. By following diaries kept by the study subjects, the researchers found that besides feeling happier, people who worked on little creative projects every day also felt they were “flourishing”, a term that describes the feeling of personal growth. That could mean that the good feeling that comes with pulling the freshly-baked bread out of the oven could carry over into the next day, making that baker more likely to keep on with their little acts of creative cooking.

This isn’t the first time researchers have connected making food with good feelings. In recent years, cooking and baking have been explored as a tool to help people deal with things like nervousness and worry.

“When I’m in the kitchen, preparing things like sugar or butter I needed or breaking the exact number of eggs, I am in control,” said baker John Whaite with mental disorder (心理障碍). “That’s really important as a key sign of my condition is a feeling of no control.”

“For people like Whaite, baking can help them by providing small tasks to focus on. To put together a good meal, cooks have to be continuously in the moment, adding seasonings (调味品) and tasting their food to make sure everything will come out alright, all of which can be helpful methods of treating some forms of mental illness,” wrote Huma Qureshi.

A lot of us turn to baking when we’re feeling low. Some of us even start baking because they are ill and need something simple to focus. Baking may not be a be-all-and-end-all cure (最佳疗法) for mental illness, but anyone in need of lifted spirits should consider it.

“Inspector Sands to the control room, please.” If you ever hear that at a British train station, don’t panic. But you might appreciate knowing that this is a codeword meant to inform staff that there is an emergency somewhere in the building. The idea is to avoid causing alarm among commuters(通勤者), but still get the message out to those trained to deal with the problem.

The subject of secret codewords like this was raised this week on Reddit, and the discussion has attracted thousands of examples. But what codewords and signs are really out there in the wild?

A good place to start is hospital emergency codes. These are often colour-coded, and one health centre in Canada has published its list online. “Code red” announces a fire, “code white” indicates a violent person while “code black” means a bomb threat is active. It’s been reported that hospital staff sometimes refer to the morgue as “Rose Cottage”, in order to avoid upsetting relatives of a patient who has recently died.

“I can see very good reasons for having these codes,” says Paul Baker, a linguist at the University of Lancaster. “It may be that people are unsure when they’re giving the code so there’s no point upsetting members of the public.”

Not all codes are alphanumeric(字母数字混合的). Some are visual, intended to be hidden in plain sight. As BBC Future discovered earlier this year, many banknotes feature a specific pattern of dots placed there to prevent people from photocopying money. Many copiers and scanners are programmed to spot it.

And finally, the spray-painted squiggles(扭曲的线条) you see on pavements in towns and cities all over the world are codes understood by construction workers and engineers. For example, in UK, different colours are related to different types of cable or pipe. Blue meant a water system while yellow indicated gas lines and green labelled CCTV or data wiring.

All of these codes have a purpose — to avoid causing panic, to transmit subtle signals in social groups, or to provide technical information quickly and easily. “People don’t like secrets, do they?” says Baker. “There is a drive to have as much information as possible — we do live in the information age,” he adds.

Goldfish have pretty boring lives, so maybe it’s a good thing they can only concentrate for nine seconds! But according to new research, humans are becoming like goldfish. Our attention span (时长) is getting shorter...and it’s all because of technology.

“We move quickly from one site to another on the web, ”says Doctor Ted Selker, a computer scientist from Massachusetts, “and we are losing the ability to concentrate.” With millions of websites to choose from, the attention span of the average internet user is just seconds. There are other digital distractions (分心) too: email, instant messaging and quickie movies on websites. Some people are worried about the effect on young people. “You need time to understand and think about what you read,” says Julia Wood, from London. “Young people search the net all the time and their brains become full of useless information but there is no time to make sense of it. I am trying to persuade my pupils to read more books, so that they concentrate on one subject for longer.”

Other teachers are trying more unusual methods to improve students’ concentration. Anne Savan, from Wales, was so worried about her students that she started playing Mozart during her science lessons. She says that it had an amazing effect: “The music made them calmer, and their concentration was much better.”

But not everyone believes that there is a problem. Ray Cole, an educational psychologist says: “On the web, young people learn to make quick decisions about what is and isn’t worth reading.

They might look at five unhelpful websites very quickly, before stopping and reading a sixth useful website more carefully. In a world with so much information available, this is an important skill.”