【推荐1】Whether to put soda machines in community school

There is a discussion among members of our school district. It is about putting soda machines in community schools. Those in favor point to the money the schools will receive. Others think it is unhealthy for students.     1    

We at the Rocky Ridge Town Center believe that there is a way for both sides to come to an agreement. Why not allow schools to have machines that sell bottled water?     2     Schools will receive money to provide the best possible education to students. Students will be encouraged to drink more water.

Water is known to provide many health benefits. The bodies of human being are made up of 60% water. A child who does not drink adequate water may feel tired. He or she may also have headaches.     3     Also, there is no sugar and fat in water. It will not cause toothache. It will not cause weight gain either. Water helps the bodies and minds of students work at their best. Students need to drink enough water every day. Having water machines at schools increases the chances that they will.

    4     It should not be the drink that is sold in schools. Water is the drink the schools should sell. Students need to be encouraged to drink water. Drinking water helps them to stay in the best health possible. Water contributes their ability to learn. Having more chances to drink water in school is healthy for students. It can help students have healthier lifestyles.

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【推荐3】Changing the wording about expiration dates (保质期) on food items of easily going bad — which is currently unregulated (缺乏监管) and widely variable — could help reduce food waste, according to a new Cornell University study.

This work results from the “wild west” landscape of food date labels which is expected to be driven, to a large extent, by manufacturers’ (制造商) strong wish to sell more products. It is important for both the government’s decisions regarding date labels and the market impacts of reducing food waste.

A survey of consumers found that certain wording — “best by,” as opposed to “best if used by,” for example — had the possibility to reduce food waste, but that result differed depending on the type of food in question. The easier food is to go bad, the more likely it is to be thrown away.

“There are no practical rules about food date labels in the U.S. If you go into the yogurt section at a U.S. grocery store, you would see various date labels — ‘use by’, ‘best by’, ‘best if used by’, ‘fresh by’, or ‘sell by’, etc. Some consumers might smell the food to see if it is still good, while others might just look at the date label and drop it,” said Rickard, leader of the study team. “And the truth is that these date labels are not food safety dates; they’re just food quality dates.”

The 15 food items selected for the survey, including bread, cookies, chicken, packaged salad greens and canned soup, all typically use date labels with different wording variations. Survey results showed an increase in throwing intentions with the “use by” and the “sell by” date label, inferring that food with these date labels was more often thrown and replaced. So they think that the word “use” spoke more directly to the food safety impact of consuming food past the date listed on the package, and could therefore lead to an increase in food waste. However, the wording “best by” seemed to refer only to food quality beyond a certain date and led to less waste.

【推荐2】Dandelion (蒲公英) seeds can travel for miles before finally floating down and settling somewhere new. Researchers recently discovered how the plants decide to spread. “We noticed that the dandelion parachute (降落伞) is closed in foggy mornings but then open again when the sun is up during the day,” according to Naomi Nakayama, a researcher of bioengineering. “The dandelion uses a bunch of hairs to improve air drag and aid its flight. Unlike insects or birds, they don’t need any energy input to fly a long distance- even hundreds of kilometers—they simply catch the wind.”

Researchers discovered the parachutes open and close using what they say is like an actuator (触动器), a device that changes energy and signals into movement. But this actuator doesn’t use any energy. The middle of the dandelion’s parachute is able to sense the amount of humidity (湿度) by absorbing water molecules (分子) in the air. Using signals about humidity information, they either open their parachutes and fly off or they close them and stay where they are.

“The center of the parachute changes its shape, moving the hairs altogether in harmony,” Nakayama says. “It’s basically a sponge made of no-longer living plant cells, which are arranged in a tube empty inside. The inner side and the outer side swell with water to different degrees, and that drives the movement.”

Knowing what causes dandelions to spread their seeds could help scientists learn how they deal with climate change. They say understanding the response could help researchers design new soft robots, which are those made from flexible materials that imitate soft bodies. “How plants move their body parts are different from animals and a simple, localized expansion could be enough to move arms,” Nakayama says. “Movement of a few arms has been achieved, but this is the first of many arm actuators. It is simple in design, so there is a lot of space for biomimicry (仿生学)”.

【推荐3】A major new facility to pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere has started operating in Iceland. Experts say the new technology could eventually play an important role in reducing greenhouse gases.

The plant in southwest Iceland is the biggest of its kind. It is able to capture 900 tons of CO₂ every year but it needs heat and electricity to work. It is using energy produced from waste and is built on the roof of a waste incineration (焚烧) plant, and through the burning of rubbish, energy is generated.

Human-sized fans are built into a series of boxes. They take CO₂ out of the air, catching it in sponge like filters (过滤器). The filters are exploded with heat, freeing the gas, which is then mixed with water and pumped (用泵输送) into deep underground caves, where over time it turns into dark-gray stone. Pumping CO₂ into the ground is just one way to deal with it.

The makers are also selling the gas to be used again. The CO₂ can be captured just a few 100 miles away. It is pumped through an underground pipeline directly into a greenhouse.

Vegetables and plants love CO₂ and higher concentrations of the gas within the greenhouse improve the growth of plants.

By 2050, humanity will need to pull nearly a billion metric tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year through direct air capture technology to achieve carbon neutral goals.

The plant in Iceland will be able to capture 4,00 metric tons annually—just a small amount of what will be necessary， but one that Climeworks, the company that built it, says can grow rapidly as efficiency improves and costs decrease.

“This is a market that does not yet exist, but a market that urgently needs to be built,” said Christoph Gebald who co-founded Climeworks. “This plant is really the blueprint to further increase the size and really industrialize.”

【推荐1】Kjell Inge Roekke is a billionaire owner of an oil company from Norway. As a young man, he was a high school dropout who moved to the US to become an ordinary fisherman. Now he is the tenth-richest man in his country. Worth two billion dollars, he plans to give much of his money away and is starting with cleaning up our oceans. In the Pacific Ocean, there is an island called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is twice the size of the continental United States. It consists of nothing but small pieces of plastic and the dead bodies of sea life and birds. The billionaire is buying a state-of-the-art ship. With the latest equipment on board, the ship will remove five tons of plastic from our oceans daily.

Kjell started his business empire building industrial fishing boats. He believes he owes his fortune to the ocean and wants to pay the debt back. “I want to give back to society the majority of what I’ve earned. This ship is a part of it.”   said the seagoing man. Managed by the conservation organization WWF, the ship’s mission is to get the poisonous things out of the oceans.

It couldn’t come at a better time. Earlier this year a killer whale washed up on a UK shore was poisoned by man-made chemicals. The whale called Lulu was the most poisoned on record. It was 20 years old and had never reproduced because her body had been badly damaged.

Kjell has given WWF complete control of the boat. The conservation organization is not comfortable with the practices of the Norwegian’s oil business. Yet in the struggle to save the environment, unlikely partners must work together. Without the world’s oceans, life on Earth wouldn’t exist.

【推荐3】As a woman who goes outside almost every day, I’m used to people looking at me for all kinds of different reasons. In certain cases, it can be harder to tell who’s looking where: on a crowded train, or across a packed bar. If you’re unsure if a person is noticing you, there’s a little trick that I have found to be very effective: It’s called mirroring.

In a 1999 study, psychologists defined mirroring as “nonconscious mimicry (无意识模仿)of the postures, facial expressions and other behaviors of one’s interaction partners”. It’s long been used as a strategy that successful people can employ strategically to show their engagement (参与度) during job interviews or at work. They believe when done on purpose, mirroring can help people understand each other’s ideas or feelings very well.

It’s a proven method. In an experiment, volunteers were asked for their opinions about a series of advertisements. A member of a research team mirrored half the participants, taking care not to be too obvious. A few minutes later, the researcher “accidentally” dropped six pens on the floor. Participants who had been mimicked were two to three times more likely to pick up the pens. The study concluded that mimicry had not only increased goodwill towards the researcher, but also contributed to an increased social orientation (取向) in general.

If you want to know how to figure out if a person is looking at you, just throw out some kinds of gestures and see who copies you. But not everyone uses mirroring to figure out who’s making eyes at who. My years of experience of analyzing the messages sent consciously and unconsciously by the human body has left me with particularly good powers of observation. However, the average person has not had the same chance to improve this skill.

Of course, once you’ve figured out who’s watching you, it’s up to you and the watcher to decide what happens next. Not everybody watches with intent or enjoys getting hit on in public, so knowing how to react properly is very necessary.

【推荐1】We all need waler to survive, but the general recommendation has been to drink more and more, with many guidelines now advising a minimum of eight glasses a day. Is there any evidence showing that this makes sense? The short answer is no. Studies looking at water intakes over 10 years in the elderly fail to show any benefits of extra water on kidney function or lifespan.

Clever marketing from bottled water companies has not only convinced us that we need to drink more water, but also that expensive bottled mineral water is somehow better for us. We now drink more bottled water than ever before, with the global industry growing rapidly at 10 percent a year. By 2025, the global market is estimated to be worth ＄215 billion. But research shows that tap water nowadays is perfectly safe, and with added fluoride （氨化物）, it is also good for our teeth. There have been studies showing that tap water contains traces of common pharmaceutical（制药的）drugs, but they have also found the same levels when testing bottled water. Although water in many areas contains chemicals,   the levels are too small to make a noticeable difference to our health.

Bottled water has devastating environmental costs, which is self﹣evident as there are already abundant reports on pollution caused by plastic bottles,   and no proven health benefits. And, does it taste better?Probably not. On the contrary, there are even blind tastings showing that tap water scores higher than most mineral water.

So, still hesitate when presented with both bottled water and tap water?Probably you should not now. My advice is to stick with tap water:   you will be reducing the global environmental cost of half a trillion plastic bottles piling up each year and taking a stand against the power of marketing.