Are you an open book, your face broadcasting every passing emotion, or more of a restrained poker face? Scientists at Nottingham Trent University say that wearing your heart on your sleeve (or rather, your face) could actually give you a significant social【C1】________.

The study is the first large-scale systematic【C2】_____of individual differences in facial expressivity in real-world social interactions. Across two studies【C3】_____over 1,300 participants, researchers found striking variations in how much people moved their faces during conversations.

【C4】_____, this expressivity emerged as a(n)【C5】__individual trait. People displayed similar【C6】_____of facial expressiveness across different contexts, with different social partners.

So what【C7】_____these differences in facial communication styles and why do they【C8】__? The researchers say that facial expressivity is【C9】__personality, with more agreeable and【C10】__individuals displaying more animated faces. But facial expressiveness also【C11】__into concrete social benefits above and beyond the【C12】__of personality. The researchers suggest that for agreeable folks,【C13】_____facial expressions may serve as a tool for building friendship and smoothing over conflicts.

Across the board, the results point to facial expressivity【C14】_____an “ affiliative function,” or a social glue that【C15】__liking, cooperation and smoother interactions. Expressivity was also linked to being seen as more “readable,“【C16】_____that an animated face makes one’s intentions and mental states easier for others to understand.

The findings【C17】_____the “poker face” intuition that a still, restrained behavior is always most advantageous. The results also underscore the importance of studying facial behavior【C18】__in real-world interactions to【C19】__its true colors and consequences. Emergent technologies like automated facial coding now make it【C20】_____to track the face’s volatile movements in the wild, opening up new horizons for unpacking how this ancient communication channel shapes human social life.

Last month Odysseus became the first American spacecraft to land on the surface of the Moon in more than 50 years. The mission, a collaboration between NASA and a private firm called Intuitive Machines, can be counted a partial success: the craft did send back images even though its landing did not go to plan. Things might have gone better still if it had not been so long since NASA last visited the Moon.

Most organisations do not routinely blast into orbit. But all organisations face the problem of storing and transferring knowledge so that newcomers know what’s what, lessons are learned from successes and failures, and wheels are not constantly being reinvented. An ageing workforce adds to the urgency of training inexperienced hires before the old hands leave the building.

Some knowledge is easier to codify than other. In the 1960s Corning, a glassmaker, had developed a particularly strong glass that was named Chemcor. Plans to commercialise this material faltered—among other reasons, it turned out that this was not a great windscreen for motorists to hit at speed—and Chemcor was put on the shelf. There it remained until 2005, when the firm started to wonder whether mobile phones might provide a use for Chemcor. In 2007 the boss of Corning took a call from Steve Jobs, who was hunting for the right kind of glass for a new smartphone. You presume that no one at Corning has since questioned the value of keeping good records.

The tougher task is capturing “tacit knowledge”. This is the know-how born of experience, which cannot easily be documented in the manuals and is not much thought about by those who have it. Working alongside experienced colleagues is the best way to transfer tacit knowledge but it is not always possible. Sometimes you only want your very best people working on something, especially if the stakes are high. The most valuable employees are usually the ones with the least time to mentor others.

Technology is both an answer and a barrier to the transfer of tacit knowledge. It is easier than ever to record and share the wisdom of older hands. Unfortunately, it is easier than ever to record and share the wisdom of older hands: the podcast episodes boom, the hours of unwatched training videos pile up. Watching someone on a screen is often less stimulating than hearing from them face-to-face.

Christopher Myers of Johns Hopkins University is a fan of informal storytelling as a way of passing on tacit knowledge. He spent time with the crews on an air medical transport team in America, whose jobs include flying patients by helicopter from the scene of an emergency to a hospital. Crew members routinely shared stories—on shift changes, at mealtimes and at weekly meetings—in order to learn how to respond to unusual situations.

Managers everywhere should think about how to capture tacit knowledge. That starts by recognising the importance of retaining workers. You can’t share experience if no one has any.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched billions of dollars over budget and over a decade late. The National Science Foundation’s Thirty Meter Telescope, currently entangled in controversy over its proposed site on Mauna Kea, is projected to cost $ 2.65 billion. Certainly, we will learn much about the universe with those instruments. But nothing comes without a cost, and bigger does not always mean better. Giant projects crowd out funding for smaller ones. JWST’s delays didn’t just push back that instrument, but every subsequent launch after that.

Astronomy has always had an abundant and lively tradition of small-scale observations making big impacts, and that tradition persists. The Event Horizon Telescope, which released the unforgettably beautiful images of the black hole shadows, received a mere $ 60 million in funding—a relative bargain. Even in the realm of space telescopes, where “cheap” is still half a billion dollars, many instruments have produced enormous scientific outputs for a fraction of JWST’s $ 10 billion price. The Kepler space telescope revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets for only $ 550 million. Bargains, by comparison.

Even within the expensive missions, the most important research is often performed by independent research groups grabbing small slices of time. In one recent paper, a team of astronomers used the Gaia spacecraft’s data to revisit the ages of a small group of young stars. That may not seem like the most critical of astronomical research, but pinpointing those ages is crucial to everything from understanding the start of the planet-formation process to cross-checking the age of the entire universe.

It’s tempting as a discipline to go bigger. Massive investments do indeed lead to science payoffs. But giant projects also require more, and more sustained, funding from government agencies. And they take extremely long times to come to fruition. The academics who benefit most from those arrangements are the permanent faculty, their careers safe regardless of these giant gambles. Meanwhile, young scientists can spend their entire, brief careers preparing for an instrument that won’t get built by the time they’re ready for the next step up the academic career ladder—and if it doesn’t pan out, they’ve got nothing left to stand on.

Smaller projects can be riskier. Young scientists can take more chances. They don’t need to hang an entire career on one. Small projects can look in the unexplored corners and hidden depths. Ironically, small telescopes and projects can find the things that the giant instruments can’t. There can be a lot of small surveys for the cost of a single giant campaign, and with many smaller projects, scientists don’t have to spend their time trying to get a small slice of the observing pie.

There will always be a need for large astronomy projects. But we should be careful that we don’t overbalance, and always keep in mind that in astronomy we have to allow ourselves to be surprised by the unexpected.

When on Friday the Hay Festival sacked the investment fund Baillie Gifford as its main sponsor, it was felt that a mighty blow had been struck against injustice. The decision was the result of a campaign that protested against the colour of Baillie Gifford’s money, seeing the company as part of a disaster-capitalist enterprise that profits from the destruction of the planet by investing in fossil fuels.

Moral clarity is a hell of a drug. Even if we take as unquestionable principles that fossil fuels are bad, and that literary festivals are an important good, this seems to be a rash and silly move. My iPhone is the fruit of exploitative labour and conflict minerals. Of course, to observe that everything is tainted does not mean that it’s unnecessary to take principled positions. But what is the end game here? If it is to cause investment funds to stop investing in firms that have any ethically questionable involvements, it fails.

Rather, the campaign has taken a fund that does some good things ( sponsoring the free exchange of views and ideas in festivals) and some bad things (owning shares in oil companies) and put a firm stop not to the latter but to the former. That may allow participants in the festival to feel personally uncontaminated by Bad Things, but it doesn’t do much to improve the world.

The campaigners behind this, Fossil Free Books, claim to want to drive fossil fuel money out of the literary and publishing world. That seems a weirdly narrow-minded and self-centered aim. The book world isn’t exactly one of the main channels through which such money flows in the first place. This is not a consumer boycott of the sort that hits a company in the wallet. Baillie Gifford will be richer, rather than otherwise, for not spending a small fortune on sponsoring literary festivals. If the hope was that the threat of refusing its sponsorship would cause this very large company to change its core business model, that was an arrogant one; and now their connection with the festival has been cut off, such influence as Hay had will anyway have vanished.

What if we said that any companies that invest in fossil fuels were to be punished for doing so by being forced to donate a percentage of their profits to good works: sponsoring a literary festival or a book prize, say? It’s hard to see how the current campaigners could be anything other than wholeheartedly in favour.

So is it the fact that Baillie Gifford does what it does voluntarily that irritates? Is the problem that by accepting its sponsorship Hay lets it ’ artwash ’or ’ green wash’ its ill-gotten gains? Well, yes and no. And will we now see the beneficiaries of Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship one by one cut off their noses to spite their faces? If so, that will do a great deal of damage to the literary culture of this country—and absolutely none at all to the fossil fuel industry.

Google announced last week that it would remove links to California news websites from search results. The company portrayed the move as a “test” to prepare for the possible implications if the California Journalism Preservation Act passes. Google’s announcement was clearly intended as a threat to news organizations and state lawmakers to stand down—or else. Specifically, Google could shut news organizations out of the world’s primary search engine, making their content difficult to find and imperiling their existence. It was also a show of force to lawmakers to let them know that attempts to regulate Google would not be tolerated.

Google has a near-monopoly on online search, accounting for 90% of the market, and many people find their news by conducting searches. Removing local news outlets from its search results means Californians will not be able to find important information about what’s happening in their communities and with their government. That undermines democracy, which relies upon an informed citizenry.

Given the power of Google and other major tech platforms, why would news outlets take on this fight? Because the status quo is unsustainable. News outlets rely on revenue from advertising. When people click on a link to view a story on a news website, the outlet gets a portion of the revenue from ads that appear next to the story. Google argues that it supports news operations by linking to stories, which helps drive traffic to news websites. That’s true. But it and other platforms increasingly cull facts from and post pieces of stories in response to search or to fill social media feeds, eliminating the need for people to click through to the news website. This means the company that pays to produce that news story won’t get the ad revenue associated with it.

Google, in particular, relies on news content for its search results. Yet the news outlets, whose reporters, editors and photographers produce those stories, are not being paid for the use of their work. That’s a major reason why so many newspapers, magazines and other news operations have been forced to lay off staff or shut down in the last few years.

The California Journalism Preservation Act was inspired by similar laws passed in Australia and Canada. It would establish a right for news companies to receive a “journalism usage fee” for their content. The bill would require news companies to spend at least 70% of the revenue on reporters and news staff. Details are worked on. There are still concerns, including how such a law could benefit big out-of-state news organizations at the expense of smaller local news operations. Those are problems to be solved but they shouldn’t stop negotiations or good-faith efforts.

That’s why Google’s decision to cut off California outlets now is so irritating—and it may have backfired. Senator Mike McGuire blasted the company, calling the move “clearly an abuse of power and demonstrates extraordinary arrogance.” Indeed, Google’s power flex demonstrates how much this one corporation controls access to information. If lawmakers weren’t concerned about that before, they should be now.

Back in 2012, former Harvard president Lawrence Summers questioned whether the “substantial investment” to learn another language was “universally worthwhile” given rapidly changing machine translation and the “fragmentation of languages” worldwide.

The subsequent years of globalization, mass migration, and geopolitical conflicts have proven Summers dead wrong.【G1】______________________________________And while English has continued to be the favored lingua franca in many parts of the world, other languages like Chinese and Spanish are increasingly chipping away at its dominance. English, long considered the primary language for business, has never been as universal or sufficient as conventionally believed.

The indifference, or resistance, among native English speakers to learning other languages is a recurring topic of finger-pointing and handwringring among globally aware policymakers. Across the English-speaking world, commentators denounce the “foreign language deficit” and the failure of countries to prepare young people for the global economy. Though U.S. students are enrolling in study-abroad programs in record numbers, most of them opt to take classes and even entire degree programs offered in English, a growing possibility especially in European universities.

On the other hand, enrollment in language courses, from elementary school through college, is steadily declining.【G2】_______________________________________Some have nearly eliminated their foreign language programs. The irony is that many universities are embracing an international mission, opening campuses abroad, recruiting students from other countries, and claiming to prepare citizens of the world. The apparent assumption is that the world speaks English.

That assumption rings hollow on the facts. Only one-quarter of the world’s population has some degree of competence in English. Even those who claim conversational skills often don’t operate at a high level of proficiency.【G3】______________________________________Beyond the limits this may place on their career and business opportunities, it can also make English-speakers more politically and culturally isolated, by leaving them unable to access how the world digests their politics or fully understand newsworthy developments abroad. Print and broadcast media—and increasingly web content too—speak in many voices and worldviews.

Unlike the Anglosphere, most of the world is at least bilingual, with English often in the mix.【G4】______________________________________Many people in these countries continue to choose adding English to their diverse linguistic repertoire. To what degree the decision to learn English is a matter of choice, chance, or a quick fix varies widely within and between countries. The same can be said for English speaking countries, where the study of languages as well as study abroad opportunities are unequally available depending on race and socioeconomic factors. A form of “elite multilingualism” with English as a key component is spreading worldwide and leaving many native English speakers on the sidelines.

It is not unreasonable to foresee another lingua franca pushing English aside someday.

【G5】______________________________________It’s a message the Anglosphere most needs to hear.

[A] And so monolingual English speakers cannot communicate with three-quarters of the world, nor can they tap into knowledge created in those languages.

[B] Although AI generated translation has become increasingly accurate, it lacks the essential human element and the cultural sensitivity that comes with learning a language.

[C] That is why today English has 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, far more than Mandarin Chinese at 1.1 billion, Hindi at 600 million, and Spanish at 550 million.

[D] Over time, mastering a language would become less essential in doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa, or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East.

[E] Rather than reveling in English’s dominance or tolerating it as a necessary evil, key decision makers should accept English as a core component of multilingualism and decisively move toward educating informed citizens who can transcend linguistic and cultural borders.

[F] Some higher education institutions have dropped foreign languages as a condition for admission or permit students to “test out” of coursework if they can demonstrate proficiency.

[G] That is true within E.U. countries, partly the result of migration and partly encouraged by education policies, as well as the vast store of intersecting languages in postcolonial countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

Science as an activity is not new; it is as old as humanity. But science as a profession is new; it first appeared in the 19th century.【T1】Prior to the 19th century, science was not something that a person “went into” to make a living, the way one might go into medicine, or law, or the clergy.

There were no institutions for training scientists, no ways of accrediting them, no (or almost no) paying jobs for them.【T2】The old universities in Europe and the new ones in America were dedicated just to the transmission of what was deemed to be knowledge, not the creation of knowledge. So, by today’s definition of a professional scientist—someone accredited as a scientist and paid to do it—there were no professional scientists.

There were just hobbyists and curious seekers—people like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton—coming up sometimes with seemingly crazy ideas.【T3】To devote much time to such adventures you had to be born into wealth, or have some other money-making job, or have a patron who would support you, perhaps because they found your ideas amusing.

In the American colonies, the first person who became famous for scientific discoveries was Benjamin Franklin. Now we think of him as a statesman who promoted the American revolution, but he achieved fame earlier as an amateur scientist. During that phase of his life, he supported himself and his scientific adventures through his work as a printer and newspaper publisher.

Even in the 19th and 20th centuries, much of the greatest scientific work was done by people who were not certified, professional scientists.【T4】An advantage of being an amateur in any field of endeavor is that you are not constrained by the dictates and beliefs that constitute professional boundaries or by the demands of an employer. You let your muse (if in the arts) or curiosity (if in the sciences) carry you where it will. The result is that you might produce nonsense, or you might, if you are very good or very lucky, produce what is later called genius.

It is noteworthy that all the great contributors to science were following passions that they developed in childhood. Childhood is a natural time for play, exploration, finding out what one loves to do.【T5】Sadly, in modern times, we are controlling children to such an extent, in schools and other adult-controlled settings, that we are seldom giving them time or opportunity to discover what they love to do and pursue it. Research has shown that young people growing up outside of forcible education in today’s world often develop passionate interests that they pursue with much success as careers in adulthood.