2023 is the Year of the Rabbit in China. All kinds of rabbits appear around the country’s shopping malls, parks and social media platforms. Here is something about three famous rabbits in China.

Jade rabbit (玉兔) is probably the most famous. Most people mention it when they greet each other. In China’s legend (传说), Chang’e lived with it on the moon. In fact, there were silk paintings with rabbits running on the moon in the Western Han Dynasty or earlier. Today, our first moon rover (月球车) is named “Yutu”. It’s sent onto the moon in 2013.

White rabbit is a kind of milk candies born in 1959. Many people send white rabbit to each other as festival gifts. Today it has been 64 and it’s still popular among young people. It has developed many different kinds of products, such as milk tea, ice cream and so on. It even has clothing, handbag and shoe products.

Lord rabbit (兔爷) is known as Tu’er Ye in Chinese. It’s a kind of clay (黏土) toy for Beijing children. It’s another kind of jade rabbit. It has a human body and rabbit’s ears and mouth. In the legend, Beijing made it to thank the god for helping them out of disease.

As Internet users become more dependent on the Internet to store information, do people remember less? If you know your computer will store information, why do you store it in your own personal memory? Experts are wondering if the Internet is changing what we remember. In a recent study, Professor Betsy Sparrow made some experiments (实验). She and her research team wanted to know how the Internet is changing memory.

In the first experiment, they asked two groups of people to put 40 unimportant facts into a computer. The first group of people understood that the computer would store the information. The second group understood that the computer would not store it. Later, the second group remembered the information better. People in the first group knew they could find the information again, so they did not try to remember it.

In the second experiment, the researchers gave people facts to remember, and told them where to find the information on the Internet. The information was in an exact computer folder (文件夹). Surprisingly, people later remember the folder location better than the facts. When people use the Internet, they do not remember the information. However, they remember how to find it. This is called “transactive memory (交互记忆)”.

According to Sparrow, we are not becoming people with poor memories as a result of the Internet. Instead, computer users are developing stronger transactive memories; that is, people are learning how to organize a lot of information so that they are able to get it at a later date. This doesn’t mean we are becoming either more or less clever but there is no doubt that the way we use memory is changing.

How do you know about the weather in this week? Is it rainy, cloudy, windy, sunny…? Do you know it by listening to the radio, by using the Internet or by watching TV? We can know it by watching some animals, too. They can know the change (变化) of the weather easily and do something to prepare (准备) for the bad weather.

It is easy for bees (蜜蜂) to know the change of the weather in a short time because they can “talk” to others by dancing and a lot of bees can live very well with each other. But do you know why bees don’t go out on rainy days? Because they may get hurt (受伤) in the rain. So now you may know this saying well, “If bees fly away, fine will be the day.”

We can also know the coming up of the rain by other animals. It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Learn more and know more from now on.