Best Wine Club Gifts

Here are the best wine club gifts that you can give to yourself or your beloved ones this month.

To get started with Vinebox, you’ll just take a quiz on your favorite flavors and tastes. Then Vinebox will select 3 or 6 different brands of wines and send them straight to your door. Enjoy their surprise!

Cost: $ 27 a box

Just note that when you’re gifting a Winc subscription, the gift receiver isn’t going to get a box. Instead, it will be a Winc gift card that offers him a variety of choices.

Cost: You choose the amount that you want to gift.

From international to local wines, and all the way from sweets to 90+ point offerings, there’s an amazing wine club out there. For lovers of sweet wines, its Sweet Club series, which offers sweeter wines, like moscato d'asti and rieslings, is perfect.

Cost: $29-$79 a month.

You can choose between a red blend, a white blend, a rosé blend, or all three in their variety pack subscription.

Cost: Get the first 3 blends at only $27 for subscription, or $12 per blend.

It is a well accepted assumption that students come to colleges to get good grades and that they are usually too busy to do anything else.

But Connie Snyder Mick, an academic director of the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame, says it is just half of the truth. There are many volunteering centers like hers at the colleges and universities in the United States. Mick says these centers help students seek an experience that may not be directly related to a student’s academic progress, but that is still important.

Volunteering is not uncommon in higher education. Many college groups organize volunteer events for different causes. Officials in charge of student housing often organize such events to help build a sense of community. Participation in these kinds of activities is good for students, Mick says. For example, the busy nature of college life can create a lot of stress for students. Doing something completely unrelated to a student's studies can help calm them by putting their mind on other things.

For a more meaningful addition to their college experience. Mick urges students to visit centers like the one she heads. She says these centers exist to create volunteer opportunities that are more complex and meaningful than just a day spent cleaning a local park or raising money, for example.

Such volunteering centers often partner with local organizations that serve the people of the nearby communities. Even for students with little interest in building a connection with the local communities, there is still value in what volunteer centers have to offer, Mick says. She notes some opportunities can push students to use what they are learning in the classroom out in the real world and having that kind of experience can make a student appealing to employers in the years to come.

A research paper recently reported that the Chinese paddlefish (中华鲟) — one of the world’s largest freshwater fish — has been declared extinct.

Scientists say the Chinese paddlefish and its close relatives have been around for at least 200 million years. The species, reaching up to seven meters in length, survived unimaginable changes, such as the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. But there’s one phenomenon this ancient species, sometimes called the “panda of the Yangtze”, could not survive humans.

Their huge size and plentiful flesh made them a popular target for fishermen and a welcome addition to inner tables in China. In the 1970s, 25 tons of paddlefish were harvested per year on average.

But the construction of the Gezhouba Dam on the Yangtze forever changed the Yangtze River habitat of paddlefish, because it was constructed without a fish ladder or sideway and cut off the paddlefish from their only breeding (繁殖) grounds upstream. Populations of the fish continued to decrease after the completion of the dam in 1981, but nobody had yet figured out how terrible the situation was. As is often the case, there can be a significant delay between major disturbances and their consequence. The researchers say the fish had become functionally extinct by 1993, meaning there were not enough fish to meaningfully reproduce.

Pan Wenjing is an ocean expert with Greenpeace East Asia. She told The Associated Press the extinction of the Chinese paddlefish was “a huge loss” for nature. She said the development confirms that the Yangtze River is experiencing major environmental damage.

“The ecosystem of the Yangtze River is close to its breaking point due to human activity in past decades.” Pan said. “The paddlefish’s extinction should serve as a wake-up call to protect other freshwater species. Moving forward, we need to balance the needs of humans with the needs of life in rivers and seas. Humans should not live alone on this planet.”

Thousands of teenagers face rising lack of sleep and the number of admissions to hospitals has been increasing over the past six years. Rating it just behind obesity (肥胖症), anxiety and mental health, experts have described it the fourth hidden health disaster for teenagers.

Data from NHS Digital show that admissions with sleep disorders among those aged 19 and under have risen from 605,200 in 2013 to 940,290 in 2019, although sleep disorders in the other age groups have fallen noticeably at the same period of time. Mandy Gurney from Millpond Sleep Clinic, a private children’s sleep clinic in London, said that there was a 30% rise in sleep-related disorders among teenagers last year.

“It is a very worrying increase, especially if this rate keeps going up,” Gurney said. She added that prescriptions for melatonin, a hormone (荷尔蒙) the body produces naturally in reaction to darkness and helps prepare us for sleep, had also risen. “We feel that the rise in sleep problems is very much based on anxiety — school pressure, peer pressure and, in particular, social media addiction.”

Vicki Dawson, founder of the Children's Sleep Charity, said her organization was flooded by families’ calls seeking help. She said the rise in sleep disorders was partly due to the blue light from screens that suppresses the production of melatonin. “We are increasingly seeing families where both parents are out working, which means that traditional bedtime routines may be rushed or abandoned all together,” she said. “More often than not, children are left to the company of screens.”