Every morning Hannah Griffiths and her workmates walked into the rainforest in the Maliau Basin in Bormeo, where they had set up a set of experiments to look at the ecological effects of small creatures: termites.

Termites get a bum rap in USA. They are thought to make the loss of billions of dollars each year because they bite up a huge number of woods. And they are responsible for something like 2 % of global carbon emissions, simply because of their huge populations and their like for biting through some special materials. People hate them and are trying to kill them.

But they play a key role in many natural ecosystems. Scientists have known for years that in tropical forests, termites eat up fallen leaves and dead wood. They help keep the fallen material under control. They let nutrients from the dead material back into the system to be used by other plants, insects, and animals. But scientists didn’t know exactly how important the insects were in keeping the forest healthy and functional, so they removed termites from a particular place in the forest and saw what would happen.

Hannah Griffiths and her workmates started their experiment. It chanced that the forest was hit by an extreme drought at that time. During the non-drought years, they saw there was wasn’t much difference between the normal places and the ones where they’d removed the termites. but during the drought, the effects were easy to see. What they found was unexpected: in the termite-rich areas, the soil stayed slightly wet, more trees sprouted, and the system was still full of activity during the long, dry period.

For Griffiths, she thought that they could pick out the real importance of termites to the system only because they accidentally studied termites during the drought. She pointed out, An “And that rings alarm bells in my head,” she said, “because it makes me think: what else don’t we know? If we start damaging biological com munities, what will happen? And what if a species dies out?”

Do you know full confidence in your memory? Look at the two pictures and choose the one which you think is correct. Then check with the answer.

Answer: The one on the right is correct. Pikachu never had a black tail in any of its various versions. Its yellow tail does have brown fur at its base, but there is no sign of black fur on its tail. There has been a discussion about whether it is shi or si in the sentence. “Thus when Heaven is about to confer a great office on any man…”

Most people voted si as what they learned at school. However, People’s Education Press (PEP), a leading publisher of Chinese textbooks, claimed on Oct. 26 that all its textbooks say shi. Supporters of si feel shocked and say they’ve experienced the “Mandela Effect”—the situation in which a large number of people believe that an event happened when it didn’t.

Many people believed that former South African president Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s in prison. However, Mandela was alive and well, finally passing away in 2013. US researcher Fiona Broome created a website to detail her discovery of this public phenomenon (现象), coining the term which has been in use till now.

Some often joke that our memories have been changed by a strange force. In fact, psychologists have looked into the reasons for the Mandela Effect, as reported on the US-based website Verywell Mind.

For example, your mind may fill in gaps missing in your memory to make more sense of it, which is called confabulation (虚构症). However, try not to feel bad—this is not lying, but rather remembering details that never happened.

The Internet may be another reason why we tend to have Mandela Effect events, as the news we read can be false from the beginning. In 2018, Science Journal published a study of over 100,000 news stories discussed across Twitter. It showed that false news can spread faster and reach more people than the truth. As a powerful way to spread information, the Internet might be the main reason for falsehoods to enter our minds.