Good news for people who have difficulty in remembering things. A memory technique invented by the ancient Greeks has recently been proved to be able to greatly improve ordinary people's memory ability. You may even become a memory champion if you practice hard enough.

This is according to a study published in the journal Neuron. Researchers fro

Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands found that memory champions aren't all that different to us. People with an average memory can greatly improve their memory ability by using what's known as the“ mind palace” method.

The method is the secret weapon (武器) of the fictional (虚构的) character Sherlock Holmes.

In order to do this, you need to picture a place you're familiar with, such as your living room. Then, you have to remember this place in as much detail as possible as this is your own mind palace.

Suppose you want to remember a shopping list. You can start by spreading out all the items around your living room in your mind. This means each item on your list is connected with a remembered place in your living room. You travel to that remembered place as you recall the list.

To explore the effects of this method on the brain, researchers gathered 51 participants with average memory levels and no previous memory training. After 40 days of daily 30-minute training sessions (一段时间), participants doubled the amount of words they could remember - they went from recalling an average of 26 words out of 72, to an impressive 62. Four months later, even without continued training, their recall performance remained high.

“Once you are familiar with these strategies and know how to apply them, you can keep your performance high without much further training,” Martin Dresler, assistant professor from Radboud University Medical Center, told the Daily Mail.

In addition, the training also affects the way our brain cells connect. After training, the way that the participants' brain cells connect began to be like those of memory champions compared to scans(扫描检查) taken before training. Researchers believe this could be responsible for their increased memory.

But what makes this research so fascinating is that it seems to prove that the talent to store things in your mind isn't down to genes. Dresler found there was no deference in brain structure between memory champions and normal people, which means memory champions are not born with different brains.

“They, without a single exception, trained for months and years using methods to achieve these high levels of performance,” Dresler told Science Daily.

It’s clear that more studies are needed to find out what's going on here, but the “mind palace” method might be your best bet to never forget an important name, date or appointment ever again.

If you are of the “no regrets” school of life, you might think that all this regret is a recipe for unhappiness. But that isn’t the case. True, letting yourself be overwhelmed by regret is indeed bad for you. But going to the other extreme may be even worse. To extinguish your regrets doesn’t free you from shame or sorrow; it consigns you to make the same mistakes again and again. To truly get over our guilt requires that we put regret in its proper place.

As uncomfortable as it is, regret is an amazing cognitive feat. It requires that you go back to a past scenario, imagine that you acted differently to change it, and with that new scenario in mind, arrive at a different present — and then, compare that fictional present with the one you are experiencing in reality. 【小题1】 You would remember your own pettiness and irritability, and then imagine yourself showing more patience, being kind instead of hurtful at key moments. Then you would fast-forward to today and see how your relationship could be flourishing instead of languishing.

【小题2】 Pink says they come in four basic varieties, and an instance of regret may involve just one or a combination. Wishing you’d been kinder to your partner is an example of a connection regret, in which you lament behavior that harmed an important relationship, such as spoiling a romance or neglecting your bond with relatives before they died.

Many connection regrets overlap with moral regrets, which can come about after you violate your own values. For example, you may pride yourself on being a loving person, and thus regret not living up to this image in the relationship you harmed. Moral regrets can also involve just yourself. 【小题3】

Pink’s other two categories of regrets involve life choices. Foundation regrets are those in which you did something that affected the course of your life in a way you don’t like. A classic example is wishing you had stayed in school. 【小题4】. They are all about inaction and forgone opportunities. This is what you feel when you kick yourself for not taking a chance, as in wishing you had just gone up to that attractive person and introduced yourself.

【小题5】 Regret is implicated in depression and anxiety, and excessive regret can adversely affect your hormones and immune system. In 2013, researchers asked one group of participants in an experiment to describe “your most burdensome regret” right before going to bed; this group took 61 percent longer to get to sleep than a group told to think about a typical day.

But regret doesn’t have to be left unmanaged. The trick is not to remove the bad feeling; it’s to acknowledge it and use it for learning and improvement. Instead of letting the specter of your failed relationship make you miserable, by simply wishing it had tuned out differently you can be honest with yourself about what went wrong and use that knowledge to enjoy better relationships in the future.

A new study showed evidence of how coal burning which was caused by a volcanic eruption resulted in climate change in Siberia. It discovered the first direct evidence of how extensive burning of coal in Siberia caused the Permian-Triassic（二叠纪至三叠纪）Mass Extinction Event. Their study was published recently in Geology. The research team looked at the volcaniclastic rocks found in the Siberian Traps. These eruptions lasted for about two million years more. The mass extinction almost extinguished life on our planet around 252 million years in the past.

Researchers calculated the temperature of marine waters at the time extinctions were at their peak, and results showed that the planet was in an extremely high temperature level, with ocean and sea temperatures around the equator（赤道）over 104° F. Ecosystems and plant and animal species needed millions of years to establish a new balance and recover populations.

One assuming cause of the event involves massive coal burning, which led to extreme global warming and extinguished most life forms. The team set out to look for evidence of this theory and began to study the region of the Siberian Traps, where magma and lava （岩浆和熔岩）are known to have burned coal and wood.

In the Angara River, the team found high cliffs of volcaniclastic rocks that line the river for many hundreds of miles. They studied the structures for six years, travelling far and wide to collect rocks. More than a thousand pounds of rock samples were collected and shared with a scientific team.

Upon analysis, they found strange parts that seemed to be burnt wood and coal.

Similar events also occur today, with human burning of coal and other fossil energies. The team leader Elkins — Tanton says this is an extra incentive （动 因）for us to act now. Indeed? taking action may prevent or at least slow another mass extinction event.