Do patients of female doctors seem to live longer? Study after study has shown that it may be true. A recent study looked at the outcomes of male and female heart patients. It found that death rates for both women and men were lower when the doctor was female. Women treated by male doctors had the highest death rate.

The reason is that women doctors are more likely to listen to their patients. They are more likely to take their patients seriously than male doctors do.

Another study focused on listening. It found female doctors spent more time listening to patients than their male colleagues did. But taking time to listen comes with a cost. By the end of the day, the women doctors fell an hour behind in their schedules.

Does this make women “better" doctors? Well, yes and no. Listening skills are the key. It follows that listening leads to taking patients seriously. Listening is particularly important for the well-being of heart patients. Heart attack symptoms can be different in men and women. Chest pains, for instance, are less common in women who are having a heart attack. If there is no chest pain, doctors often leave out a heart attack. Male doctors are less likely to listen to female patients. They may be more likely to miss other heart attack symptoms.

Why do female patients do better when treated by female doctors? It may be that women patients feel more comfortable talking to female physicians. Or it may be that women doctors are more focused on the unique heart disease symptoms that can occur in women. It could be that women doctors are better communicators. Or women doctors may be better at picking up clues from female patients.

Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills, and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it. but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.

Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the worms of the greater wax moth can break down polyethylene （聚乙烯），which accounts for 40% of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms' chewing alone was not responsible for the poly ethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste （糊状物）and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass — apparently broken down by enzymes （酶）from the worms' stomachs. Their findings were published in Current Biology in 2017.

Federica Bertocchini. co-author of the study, says the worms' ability to break down their everyday food - beeswax — also allows them to break down plastic. "Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well," she explains, “The wax worm evolved a method or system to break this bond.”

Jennifer DeBruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes （肠道微生物）？

Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team's findings might one day help employ the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process - not simply "millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic.”

No one likes interruption. We are born to seek balance and order. No matter what it is that you are doing, being interrupted involves a forceful stop midway and then having to re-enter your previous state, sometimes with great difficulty.

Popular belief has it that interruption breaks the flow of your thinking and affects productivity negatively, and so it is advisable that you have an uninterrupted session of intensive work before your next break.

However, a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, might tell you otherwise.

The connection between interruption and memory came to her attention when she was dining in a restaurant. She noticed how the waitresses had an amazing memory of the detailed orders yet to be paid for, but scarce memory of the orders that were already completed.

Back in her laboratory, she conducted studies in which subjects were required to complete various puzzles. Some of the subjects were interrupted during the tasks. All the subjects were then asked to describe what tasks they had done. It turns out that adults remembered the interrupted tasks 90% better than the completed tasks, and that children were even more likely to recall the uncompleted tasks. In other words, uncompleted tasks will stay on your mind until you finish them!

In comparison to tasks that were already finished and ones that we haven't even started, half-done projects are given the priority in the mental to-do list our brains sketch out for us. Zeigarnik described this finding in her doctoral thesis (论文) in the late 1920s, which was later called Zeigarnik effect.

One possible explanation is that with interrupted tasks, we are desperate for their closure to reclaim a sense of balance. Finishing them also means that we can finally clear up the mental backlog (积压的工作) and give the space to more upcoming tasks.

Zeigarnik's effect can be found everywhere, especially used in media and advertising. Have you ever wondered why cliffhangers work so well or why you just can't get yourself to stop watching that series on Netflix?

Ernest Hemingway once said about writing a novel, "It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through." So next time, when you are interrupted, appreciate it and take advantage of it to promote your productivity.