You may have noticed sudden, brief twitching (抽动) at some point while your dog was sleeping and wondered if he was dreaming or even expressing some type of discomfort.

These involuntary movements only occur during dream states and usually don’t last long. So is twitching just a normal part of dreaming, or are there times when you should worry?

Dogs sleep an average of 12-14 hours each day. While they sleep, a dog’s brain processes information and experiences from the day through dreams. Twitching is often related to active dream cycles in the brain.

According to research by psychologist Stanley Coren, an average-size dog will dream about every 20 minutes, and these dreams will last about a minute. Larger breeds have fewer dreams that last longer—about every 45 minutes for 4 minutes. The opposite is true for smaller breed dogs; they will dream about every 10 minutes for up to 30 seconds.

Dogs experience the same dream stages as humans, including non-rapid eye movement (NREM), short-wave sleep (SWS), and rapid eye movement (REM). During the REM state, a dog’s eyes move around behind their closed eyelids, and the large body muscles are turned off so the dream is not physically acted out. The amount of twitching depends on how much these off switches cramp (阻碍) muscle movement.

If your dog sleeps next to you, he may unintentionally disturb your sleep with his sudden body movements. However, it is often advised not to awaken a dog that is twitching in his sleep unless he is clearly uncomfortable.

A bad dream or night terror could be the cause of these involuntary movements, and they may wake up frightened. Try to avoid touching them so they don’t bite you as a result of being shocked and panicked. Instead, gently call your dog’s name until they respond. Speak calmly and tell them that they are safe and secure after they wake up. While they appear to be pretty active in their sleep, dreaming dogs may be slow to awaken.

The research company OpenAI has recently released ChatGPT, a language model that can construct remarkably well-structured arguments based on simple cues provided by a user. The system which uses a massive source of online text to predict what words should come next is able to create new stories in the style of famous writers, write news articles about itself and produce essays that could easily receive a passing grade in most English classes.

That last use has raised concern among academics, who worry about the possibility of an easily accessible platform that, in a matter of seconds, can put together essays as good as -- if not better than -- the writing of a typical student.

Cheating in school is not new, but ChatGPT and other language models are totally different from the hacks(雇佣文人)students have used to take a shortcut in the past. The writing these language models produce is completely original, meaning that it can’t be distinguished by even the most advanced plagiarism(剽窃)software. The AI also goes beyond just providing students with information they should be finding themselves. It organizes that information into a complete narrative.

Beyond potential academic honesty issues, some teachers worry that the true value of learning to write -- like analysis, critical thinking, creativity and the ability to structure an argument -- will be lost when AI can do all those complex things in a matter of seconds.

“We might know more things but we never learned how we got there. We’ve always said that the process is the best part and we know that. The satisfaction is the best part. That might be the thing that’s removed from all of this. Actually, I don’t know what a person is like if they’ve never had to struggle through learning. I don’t know the behavioral implications of that,” said Peter Laffin.

“Whenever there’s a new technology, there’s a panic around it. It’s the responsibility of academics to have a healthy amount of distrust, but I don’t feel like this is an undefeatable challenge,“ Sandra Wachter, technology researcher, said.

A study of adults suggests that the negative effects of alcohol consumption grow stronger with each additional drink, and cutting on the final drink of the evening could greatly improve brain health.

“There is some evidence that one additional drink in a day could have more impact than any of the previous drinks that day. Cutting back on that final drink of the night might have a big effect in terms of brain ageing,” said Dr. Remi Daviet, the study’s first author. The study found that the more a person drinks, the smaller their brain. And the link between alcohol consumption and reductions in brain volume grew stronger if the level of alcohol consumption is greater.

Previous work has shown links between alcohol consumption and brain health. But it was unclear whether moderate levels of drinking had an impact — some had even suggested that light drinking could be beneficial. The NHS recommends not drinking more than 14 units a week on a regular basis, although it states there is no safe level.

The latest study used MRI scans from more than 36,000 adults in the UK Biobank, which allowed the relationship between drinking and brain health to be examined in greater detail. The research showed a negative association between even one drink a day and brain volume. In 50-year-olds, increasing average drinking from one alcohol unit（half a pint of beer）a day to two units was associated with changes in the brain equal to ageing two years. It gets worse the more you drink. It’s believed that alcohol has a negative impact on the brain, leading to the loss of grey matter and the structure of white matter connection being hurt. “Our study doesn’t randomly assign people to drink, this wouldn’t be moral to do,” said Dr. Reagan Wetherill, a co-author.

The authors hope to look at whether drinking one beer a day is better than drinking none during the week and then seven on the weekend.