Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic (极端的) experiment of Fredrick in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent. All the infants (婴儿) died before the first year. But clearly there was more than a lack of language here. What was also missing was good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously influenced.

Today no such serious lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. However, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again.

Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence (顺序) and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and utters vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple conmmands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from his parents’in style rather than grammar.

Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’s brain, compared with the brain of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a teddy-bear with the sound pattern “teddy-bear”, and even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language for the mixture of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.

But speech has to be induced and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother   recognizes the signals in the child’s babbling (含糊不清地说) and smiling, and is sensitive to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.

Empathy (共情) is one of the most important skills a teacher can have, but it is not always easy to respond to student behaviour with empathy. However, when you demonstrate to students that you understand and respect their feelings, you build mutual trust and friendly relationship.

According to new research, teaching children in a way that encourages them to empathize with others improves their creativity and may lead to a variety of other beneficial learning outcomes. The findings are the result of a year-long University of Cambridge study with year 9 Design and Technology (D &T) students (ages 13 to 14) from two inner London schools. Pupils at one school spent the year following curriculum-required lessons, while students at the other school used a set of engineering design thinking tools to improve students’ ability to think creatively and empathically while solving real-world problems.

Both sets of pupils were assessed for creativity at both the start and end of the school year using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking: a well-established psychometric test (心理测试). The results showed a statistically significant increase in creativity among pupils at the intervention school, where the thinking tools were used. At the start of the year, the Creativity scores of pupils in the control school, which followed the standard curriculum, were 11% higher than those at the intervention school. By the end, however, the situation had completely changed: Creativity scores among the intervention group were 78% higher than the control group.

Nicholl, Senior Lecturer in Design and Technology Education, who trains teachers studying on the University’s D & T PGCE course, said, “Teaching for empathy has been difficult despite being part of the D &. T National Curriculum for over two decades. This evidence suggests that it is a missing link in the creative process, and vital if we want education to encourage the designers and engineers of tomorrow.” Nicholl added, “When I taught Design and Technology, I didn’t see children as potential engineers who would one day contribute to the economy; they were people who needed to be ready to go into the world at 18. Teaching children to empathize is about building a society where we appreciate each other’s thoughts. Surely that is something we want education to do.”

In most countries, cigarette packages display images or texts that warns smokers of the increased risks of heart attacks, cancer and so on that accompany lighting up. Many of these risks are associated with the inhalation of tobacco smoke through the mouth. But what is less often spotlighted is the effect smoking can have on the surface of the eyes.

Smoking has been tied to age-related blindness and severe vision loss worldwide. But these changes occur in inner regions of the eye. Now researchers have discovered how cigarette smoke and aerosols (气溶胶) from heated tobacco devices also kill cells in the eye’s most exposed layer: the cornea (眼角膜).

In the new study published online in September, Otsu and his colleagues reported that the compounds in cigarette smoke kills cells in a critical outer layer of corneal tissue called the corneal epithelium (角膜上皮).

The researchers exposed lab-grown corneal epithelium cells to cigarette smoke extract — a solution (溶液) that contains most of the ingredients inhaled by cigarette smokers. They found that after 24 hours of exposure, more cells died in the containers compared with cells that were not exposed to smoke or tobacco. Taken together, these signs indicated that exposing corneal cells to the tobacco products had caused a form of cell death.

It starts when compounds in the tobacco products make contact with the corneal cells, which leads ferritin (铁蛋白) inside the cells to start breaking down and releasing stored iron, Otsu explains. Some of this iron stays together and reacts to produce chemicals that can harm cells. Normally the cells’ repair systems can cope with these chemicals, but when too many accumulate, they damage fats in cells, triggering the cells to die.

Because the study involved cell cultures rather than live human eyeballs, the researchers are not yet able to say how quickly smoking or heated tobacco products damage a person’s corneas. The next steps will involve conducting animal experiments and testing the impact of vaping products on corneal cells, Otsu says.