With the Covid-19 virus sweeping the globe, the science on quitting smoking offers welcome news for smokers who want to build up their defenses in case they contract the virus. Though it may still take many months for a smoker's lungs to heal from damage caused by long-term smoking, your health can noticeably improve in the days and weeks after quitting in ways that could make a difference against the virus. Covid-19 creates an added sense of urgency, and there's enough reason to believe that quitting smoking during the pandemic（流行病）could increases your opportunities of fighting off the virus.

If you make the decision to quit, the cilia（纤毛）in your lungs are one of the first parts of your body to heal. These hair-like projections wave back and forth like a brush as air moves in and out of your lungs. They help your body fight off colds and infection. They also help clear mucus（黏液）, so if they're not functioning as well as they should, mucus can build up in the lungs. Your body's tendency to cough during an infection helps inspire the bodily process of clearing out mucus. That's vital in fighting the Covid-19 condition. The elderly are at a greater risk for too much lung fluid that often limits breathing following coronavirus infection because they don't have a strong enough cough to clear it up.

A second short-term gain from quitting smoking comes from reducing ongoing inflammation（炎症）in your body, which can make you infect Covid-19 more easily. Having your lungs in as good of shape as you can in case of a corona virus infection is key.

Besides lung-related issues, quitting smoking can also deliver healthy benefits to the heart that could help prevent possible heart attacks, which are another cause of death in Covid-19 cases. After you quit smoking, your blood becomes thinner and less possible to setting. Heart attacks are less likely. One reason this happens is because smoking makes it harder for the heart to distribute blood throughout the body.

Aren’t mobile phones, QQ, e-mails and WeChat supposed to help us communicate more easily? Sadly, that’s not always. One day, for example, when I was walking through the park with my friend, suddenly his mobile phone rang and he answered it—leaving me alone and cutting our conversation dead! In fact, the park was filled with such people talking on their mobile phones. They talked with other people without even looking at them, or stopping to walk their dogs. Clearly, people preferred talking on the phone to face-to-face contacting.

Why is it that the more connected we get, the more disconnected I feel? New communication technology seems to keep people away from each other. With e-mail over the Internet, we can communicate without seeing or talking to one another. With WeChat or QQ, you can have conversations without even meeting that person. Even some food stores are using self-scanner (自助扫描仪) so that you can check yourself out. As the contact between human beings becomes automated (自动化的), my feeling of being disconnected gets stronger. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against machines. I also own a mobile phone, a QQ, a WeChat and an e-mail account. Giving them up isn’t a good idea, because they are useful to have around. It’s just that when they keep us away from human contact, I begin to feel sad. More and more, I find myself answering e-mail instead of talking to people. The technology that helps keep us contact with each other is, in fact, making me feel more lonely.

What is to be done? Well, try to use less technology: no e-mailing people who live nearby, and no letting QQ and WeChat catch you all the time.

This question has fascinated behavioural scientists for decades: why do we give money to charity?

The explanations for charitable giving fall into three broad categories, from the purely altruisic (利他的)— I donate because I value the social good done by the charity. The “impurely” altruistic— I donate because I extract value from knowing I contribute to the social good for the charity. And the not-at-all altruistic— I donate because I want to show off to potential mates how rich I am.

But are these motives strong enough to enable people to donate as much as they would want to? Most people support charities in one way or another, but often we struggle to make donations as often as we think we should. Although many people would like to leave a gift to charity in their will, they forget about it when the time comes.

Many people are also aware that they should donate to the causes that have the highest impact, but facts and figures are less attractive than narratives. In a series of experiments, it was found that people are much more responsive to charitable pleas that feature a single, identifiable beneficiary(受益者), than they are to statistical information about the scale of the problem being faced. When it comes to charitable giving, we are often ruled by our hearts and not our heads.

The good news is that charitable giving is contagious—seeing others give makes an individual more likely to give and gentle encouragement from an important person in your life can also make a big difference to your donation decisions— more than quadrupling them in our recent study. Habit also plays a part— in three recent experiments those who volunteered before were more likely to do donate their time than those who had not volunteered before.

In summary, behavioural science identifies a range of factors that influence our donations, and can help us to keep giving in the longer term. This is great news not just for charities, but also for donors.