Feeling sad or upset? Don’t turn to a cheerful comedy. A sad movie may be just what you need.

A team of scientists at Ohio State University, US, has found that sad movies can make people happier. They published their study in a magazine called Communication Research. Scientists asked 361 college students to watch a sad movie called Atonement (《赎罪》). The movie tells the story of two lovers who are separated and at the end die during World War II. Before and after the movie, the students answered questions testing how happy they were with their lives. They also answered questions from the scientists before, after and three times during the movie to measure different emotions, including sadness.

Results showed that overall, people felt better after watching the movie. Scientists believe this is because the movie made them think about their own lives and relationships. Their lives, compared to those of the unlucky lovers on the screen, were full of hope. “I want to live my life to the fullest, and this movie has made me think a lot,” one student wrote.

Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, the leader of the study, explained that negative moods make people more thoughtful. “Positive emotions are generally a signal that everything is fine, you don’t have to worry, you don’t have to think about issues in your life,” she said, “but negative emotions, like sadness, make you think more critically about your situation. So seeing a sad movie may make you sad, but that will cause you to think more about your own close relationships and appreciate them more.”

Honeybees are great dancers, but they don’t just do it for fun. Scientists have long known that honeybees wiggle their bodies. It is their way of sharing information.

When a bee starts dancing, it steps forward. At the same time, it wiggles side to side. It keeps doing this while it moves around. They dance just like number eight and scientists call this the “waggle dance”. It helps other bees find food. The bee’s position tells them which way to fly. The more a bee wiggles, the farther away the food is. The longer it repeats these moves, the tastier the food is.

Now a new study shows that honeybees don’t have these dance skills when they are born. Young bees learn them by watching the older bees. In March 2023, scientists from the University of California, San Diego, wrote these findings in a scientific magazine.

The study finds that bees can learn by imitating (模仿) each other. This is called “social learning”. Many animals learn in this way, like monkeys and birds, but most of these animals have bigger brains. Bees have much smaller brains.

To know how bees learn the waggle dance, scientists recorded videos of honeybees in a lab. They compared two groups of young bees which were 10 days old. In the first group, young bees could watch older ones dance. In the second group, young bees could not watch older dancers. They found that the ones in Group 1 were better dancers while the ones in Group 2 were not good at the waggle dance.

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It is not possible to tell the importance of forests in just a few words. Forests affect (影响) our daily lives in so many ways, even in the busy noisy city center. Just think about your life today: Do you have your breakfast? Read a newspaper? Turn on a light? Travel to work on a bus or in a car? Do your homework? Write on your notebook? Clean your hands with a tissue?

Forest products are used int our daily lives. All the activities above have something to do with forests. Some are easy to point out—fruits, paper and wood are from trees. Others are less obvious—they help make daily products like medicine. They not only help make our lives more convenient, but also make our Earth more beautiful and comfortable.

Forests help protect the sea, and the Earth is in good health because of them.

However, we are losing them. Over the past 50 years, about half the world’s forests have been lost. The most important reason for that is people’s activities like polluting the environment and cutting down trees.

When we destroy forests, we not only lose the trees. All the animals in the forests will also lose their homes. As this goes on, it’ll be harder and harder for us to survive on the Earth.