Best activities for this weekend on Long Island

Looking for activities on the weekend? We’ve rounded up the best concerts, fairs, parties and cultural events going on in Nassau and Suffolk.

The acrobatic performance

Traditional Chinese acrobatics and circus arts go hand and hand at a performance of “Cirque Mei,”8 p.m. Saturday at the Patchogue Theatre. Collective bicycle skills, foot juggling with umbrellas, ladder balancing, and hoops diving will be performed. Tickets must be reserved in advance.

INFO 631-207-1313, patchoguetheatre.org

ADMISSION $69

The return of Elvis

The“King of Rock and Roll”is in the spotlight once again during “Elvis Seen Unseen,” at NYCB Theatre at Westbury, 8 p.m. Sunday. The concert features never-before seen video footage of Elvis Presley, live music performed by the TCB band.

INFO 516-247-5200, thetheatreatwestbury.com

ADMISSION $50

The book signing

The award-winning actress and one of the hosts of “The View,” Whoopi Goldberg comes to Huntington to sign her new book, “The Unqualified Hostess,” 7 p.m. Friday. The book gives her personal advice including tips on entertaining, setting a unique table, and decorating for guests. Visitors must buy the book at Book Revue to get on the signing line.

INFO 631-271-1442, bookrevue.com

ADMISSION Free; $35 plus tax for the book

The Drip Painting workshop

The Drip Painting family workshop for ages 4 — 12 teaches children how to express their feelings creatively through art, 10:00 — 11:30 a.m. Saturday. Meet at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, 830 Springs Fireplace Rd., for the workshop. Everyone leaves with a masterpiece of their own.

INFO 917-502-0790, imaginearted.com

ADMISSION $40

Some 15 years ago, Ross Willard volunteered with a food program in Harrisburg, Pa.. He found children riding bicycles with brakes that didn’t work. The retired railroad manager saw the importance of safely riding for children, so he began repairing bicycles on street corners.

Over time, more and more people came to have their bicycles repaired. Mr. Willard opened his first shop in 2007 and three years later he founded his own company Recycle Bicycle Harrisburg. The all-volunteer nonprofit organization has been offering service for residents in the community. Regular visitors include children and their parents, as well as halfway house residents seeking to perform community service hours while also building their own bikes.

The organization has a do-it-yourself philosophy: Although there is no charge for any repairs, or even bicycles, most visitors (except young children) are tasked with making their own repairs with the assistance of volunteer trainers.

Since its founding, Recycle Bicycle has distributed thousands of donated bikes to the Harrisburg community-averaging about 900 per year in the past decade. He’s known as “Mr. Bicycle,” around the Pennsylvania capital. He estimates that the organization repairs some 3,000 bikes a year.

Sitting in the organization’s shop space, he discusses the volunteerism and sense of service that were imprinted on him as a child by his parents. This led to a strong belief about fixing problems that one finds in the community.

As levels of carbon dioxide - CO₂ - in the atmosphere have been rising in recent decades, Earth has been warming. That’s because as a greenhouse gas, CO₂ traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere. That warming is one symptom of climate change. And it has the potential to affect food in many ways. Data now show that rising levels of CO₂ also can affect how nutritious a crop will be. Some of those data were reported last year in Annual Review of Public Health. Indeed, it noted that several studies have come to this conclusion.

Samuel Myers is an environmental health scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. He was part of a team that has studied the potential effects of climate change on nutrition. In one 2014 study, his group looked at six major food crops: wheat, rice, field peas, soybeans, maize (corn) and sorghum. They exposed plants to different amounts of CO₂. Some got levels of between 363 and 386 parts per million (ppm), which were typical at that time. (CO₂ levels have since risen.) Other plants were exposed to more of that greenhouse gas as they grew — 546 to 586 ppm. Such levels are expected to develop within the next 50 years or so.

After harvesting the plants, the researchers measured their levels of vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. And plants grown with more CO₂ were less nutritious. Most people depend on cereal crops, such as wheat and rice, to meet their dietary needs for both zinc and iron. If crop levels of such nutrients fall, people may face an even greater risk of falling ill.

Scientists don’t yet know why CO₂ impacts levels of these nutrients. But the new findings suggest scientists may want to try breeding new varieties of crops that are less affected by CO₂. That way people will still get the most benefits from their greens and grains.

We’ve all been told to dress warmly or we’ll catch cold. But science says the common cold is caused by the virus, not the weather. Actually, according to researchers at Yale University, there just might be something to this old wives’ tale.

For decades, researchers have known that the virus replicates (复制) more readily in cooler environments, such as the nose, rather than at the warmer core body temperature. The reason for this, explains Ellen Foxman, an assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine, long remained a mystery. Scientists didn’t know whether the virus itself worked better at colder temperatures, or the immune system worked worse. “No one could find anything,” she says.

Then Foxman and her colleagues studied what’s called the born immune system, which is present in every cell, and how it responds to various temperatures when the virus is present. In the lab, they examined airway cells from mice and found that the immune system produced fewer chemical substances called interferons at lower temperatures, allowing the cold virus to flourish.

In a study published this year, they found supporting results in human cells: At the warmer core body temperature, born immune systems that block viral growth are more active, and can stop and kill viruses. Now the team is trying to better understand the defenses the body uses to prevent the virus.

While wearing a scarf around your nose to warm it up might help prevent a cold, Foxman recommends washing your hands so you don’t pass the virus to your eyes, nose, or mouth in the first place. “If the virus isn’t in your nose, it can’t cause infection,” she says.