Babies don’t learn to talk just from hearing sounds. They are lip (嘴唇) readers too. It happens during the period when a baby’s babbling (咿呀声) slowly changes from unclear voices into that first “mama” or “dada”. The babies have to find out how to shape their lips to make the sounds they are hearing, according to developmental psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led the study.

Clearly it doesn’t take them too long to understand the movements that match basic sounds. By their first birthdays, babies start changing back to look you in the eye again. It offers more clues that quality face-time with babies is very important for speech development more than, say, turning on the latest baby DVD.

But Lewkowicz went a step further. He and his student Amy Hansen Tift tested nearly 180 babies, groups of them at ages 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 months. How? They showed videos of a woman speaking in English or French to babies of English speakers. They found that when the speaker used English, the 4-month-old babies gazed (凝视) mostly into her eyes. The 6-month-old babies spent equal amounts (数量) of time looking at the eyes and the mouth. The 8-month-old babies and 10-month-old babies studied mostly the mouth. At 12 months, attention started changing back toward the speaker’s eyes.

But what happened when these babies are used to English heard French? The 12-month-old babies studied the mouth longer, just like younger babies. They needed the extra information to understand the new sounds. That fits with research into bilingualism (双语) that shows babies’ brains adjust (调整) themselves to tell the differences between the sounds of their first language over other languages in the first year of life.

The continued lip reading shows the l-year-old babies clearly still are fit for learning. Babies are so hard to study, says Duke University cognitive scientist Greg Appelbaum, who found the research so fantastic that he wants to know more.

A．	B．
C．	D．

Do you know the two lovely mascots? You may know the five “Fuwa” dolls from the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. On September 17 of this year, another two lovely mascots first showed on TV. Now, let’s see who they are.

Look at the panda! It looks like an astronaut. It wears an ice shell and looks fat, so we call it “Bing Dwen Dwen”. White is the colour of ice and snow. “Bing Dwen Dwen” likes ice sports very much and is good at them. That’s why it is the mascot of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.

Do you think the red mascot looks like a lantern? The lantern’s name is “Shuey Rhon Rhon”. When the Chinese New Year comes, people always make or buy red lanterns. Red is the color of hope and good luck, so people think their dreams will come true in the new year. “Shuey Rhon Rhon” can give players hope and help them do well in the 2022 Beijing Winter Paralympic(残奥会).

Many people in different countries like the two mascots very much, and they show their love for them on the Internet.

Moon’s Reservoirs

How much water is there on the Moon? This is a question we have tried to answer for many years. A group of scientists from China and the UK found that the Moon may have water “reservoirs (水库)”, according to Nature Geoscience.

Over a large amount of years, asteroids (小行星) have hit the Moon, causing the soil to melt and fly into space. It is then cooled down and falls back to the Moon, forming beads (珠子) of glass. The Chang’e-5 probe, which returned to the Earth on December 17, 2020, brought back a total of 1,731 grams of rocks and soil from the Moon, including glass beads, reported Xinhua.

The international research team looked into 32 glass beads. They found that about one ton of glass beads may contain 0.5 kilograms of “water”. “This ‘water’ wasn’t a liquid but instead took the form of hydrogen (氢) in the glass beads, which can easily be turned into the water we can use,” one of the study authors told Science and Technology Daily.

Researchers estimated that the water contained in the glass beads could probably reach to as much as 270 trillion kilograms. “It’s a lot more than we thought,” the author added.

The study said the hydrogen in the glass beads may come from the Sun as part of solar winds. The glass beads have many small holes which can absorb (吸收) hydrogen from the wind.

This finding would be a “really big deal” for space exploration, as humans plan to settle on. the Moon in the future, a space scientist told ABC News.

① The Moon soil falls back to the Moon.        ② The Moon soil cools down.

③ The Moon soil flies into space.        ④Asteroids hit the Moon.

⑤ The Moon soil melts.