Suzanne De Young worked as a librarian and teacher for 35 years in northern Minnesota, but she’s now retired and has lived in West St. Paul for five years. She kicked off spring 2021 by creating a Little Free Seed Library. Her yard is already a gardener’s paradise, but she shared that love by offering up literally thousands of seeds to her neighbors.

Suzanne visited Petaluma Seed Bank, which gave her the idea of the seed library. “It’s a lighthouse for the gardeners. Besides varieties of seeds,the bank also provides sustainable products,gardening tools and expert advice. And I see the value of sharing seeds.” she said.

All the seeds had to be sorted and dried. She bought small envelopes, labeled them, and put the dried seeds in them. She had hundreds of envelopes filled with seeds. She found the old mailboxes and then painted them. The containers inside holding the envelopes were from cookies.

Suzanne has many people stop and talk to her about the project and she hopes to bring the neighborhood together through the seed library. It has warmed her heart to see parents and children stop and look through the seeds. The Little Free Seed Library has been a destination for the past month. It had positive reactions and remarks from her neighbors. They were amazed to see how doing something so simple as collecting seeds could stimulate conversation about plants and wider environmental issues.

“Gardening is seeing life. Plant the seed, water it, and watch it grow. It is a fun activity that doesn’t cost anything except for some time.” she told people who picked up seeds from the seed library.

Scientists recently announced the world’s tiniest remote-controlled robots. Small enough to sit on the side of a penny, the robots can be controlled by a laser (激光). The scientists say one day robots like these may be able to work in areas too small for tools.

Last week, researchers at Northwestern University revealed details on several tiny robots they have created. The tiniest is shaped like a crab and is just half a millimeter (about 1/50 of an inch)wide.

The crab is made up of different layers. The layers give the material two positions that it can be in. When the stiff (坚硬的) glass layer is softened, the rubbery layer bends the material. But when the stiff layer hardens again, it snaps back to its old position. The scientists call this “shape-memory”.

The trick to getting the stiff glass layer to soften is to warm it up with a laser. Because the robots are so tiny, their parts heat up and cool down very quickly. By warming up different parts of the robots, the scientists can make them move in different ways. The researchers say their robots can crawl, walk, turn, and even jump.

The robots aren’t super speedy. But given their tiny size, they’re also not too slow. It takes the crabs about 20 seconds to cover 1 centimeter (26 seconds to cover half an inch).

Right now the robots aren’t all that useful. All they can do is move, and they need to be in a place where lasers can shine on them to do that. But the scientists say these robots are an important step toward creating more helpful tiny robots.

The researchers say that one day tiny robots like these might be able to work in very small spaces. It’s possible that they could travel inside the human body to help deal with medical problems.

Using similar building methods, the scientists created a number of different robots, including ones that looked like worms, beetles, and crickets. John Rodgers, one of the scientists, says that their methods allow them to “build walking robots with almost any sizes or 3D shapes.”

We live in a world of countless reminders, and constant push notifications (通知). Every service seems to be competing for our attention all the time. As it turns out, all this distraction may come at a massive cost, but you don’t even realize it.

The findings from new research at Ohio State University were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Dozens of participants were given a simple-sounding task. Look at a screen of four colored squares. One will be outlined in white-pay attention to that one. After these squares flash on the screen for a mere tenth of a second, pick the color that you remember from a color wheel.

Despite the rapid speed of such work, the human brain excels (擅长) at this task. “People are quite good at this, surprisingly good!” says Julie Golumb, associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

They got quite good at it, to a point. Researchers threw a wrench by introducing an intentional distractor. Of the four squares, one would be outlined in white, but then another — the distractor — would be surrounded in white dots. Despite being instructed to ignore the distractor, subjects just couldn’t help it. Most of the time, they still recalled the color. But about20% to 30% of the time, they actually reported the distractor color as the correct one, unaware of the error.

As Golumb emphasizes, findings like these are a big deal. We’ve long known balancing too many tasks can slow down our thinking. But the fact that it can literally recolor our memories should give us pause, because there’s not a fundamental difference between colored squares and real versus fake news headlines on social media．

“If you’re trying to pay attention to multiple things, you’re not going to be as good at if it were one at a time,” she says. “We’ve known for a long-time multitasking might slow you down, but our research shows, it’s not just you might be slowed down; it might affect what you’re perceiving in the moment.”