【推荐1】When everything is going wrong, there's nothing like listening to a few bars of your favorite sad song. But why do we find pleasure in sad music? This puzzled two researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin in Germany who set out to explore our strong feeling for sad songs in a world where entire industries exist to help us remove sadness from our lives.

Their study — based on a survey of more than 770 people around the world and published this month in the journal, PLOS ONE — discovered sad music can create positive emotions, like peacefulness and kindness, and that choosing the tearful ballad on your music player offers three benefits.

The biggest turned out to be that sad songs allow you to feel sadness without any of its “real-life contexts.” In other words, you can safely explore what it's like to be a little blue without experiencing the great pain of losing a loved one, for example.

“Emotion control” was another important benefit. Many of those surveyed said that when they were in a bad mood (情绪), experiencing sadness through music made them feel better afterwards and provided an emotional improvement. That may be because the songs help them to express and let go of their emotions, researchers noted. “Sad music promotes and creates a space for reflection and reexamination of personal experiences, thoughts and feelings,” one of the researchers added

The benefit of “empathy” (同理心) made the listener feel good by allowing him to share the sadness of another human being through the song. When we're having social problems, like when we're feeling lonely, homesick or missing someone, the sad songs can offer comfort by showing someone else shares our state of mind, the study found.

So it turns out that Elton John was right: Sad songs do say so much.

【推荐2】Claire King says she would never have started going to the Glastonbury Festival if her friend who runs a food stand hadn't needed a hand a few years ago. “I thought it would just be all noise, and I never liked rock music.” Now she says she would pay her friend to allow her to work at her stand! “The tickets sell like hot cakes, so it's the best way of making sure I can get to the five-day festival in June,” she points out.

Nick Hendon likes going to the Cambridge Folk Festival, which takes place over a long weekend in summer at Cherry Hinton Hall. His favourite festival area is the Club Tent where members of the audience, as well as the invited artists, can get up and perform. “My wife usually takes part. She has a beautiful voice,” he says proudly.

Joan Mitchell does her best to get to the International Eisteddfod, a dance and music festival which takes place every year during the second week of July in Wales. The festival is also famous for the final Sunday Evening Gala Concert which usually has some of the biggest names in opera as guest performers. “I've seen Dame Kiri Te Kanawa9 James Galway and Montserrat Caballe, but no one could ever match Luciano Pavarotti. He was truly breathtaking!”

Graham Crosby tries to get to as many concerts as possible during the eight-week summer season of the Proms festival every year. The Proms is the largest classical music festival in the world. “The atmosphere is much more relaxing than that at other classical concerts. In fact, the audience sometimes behave more like rock fans, jumping up and down to the music, which is really exciting.”

【推荐3】A growing number of families in China are able to afford a piano and lessons for their children. By2016, the number of children learning piano in China exceeded 30 million and the number has risen by 10percent every year since. The piano used to be a rare foreign import in China; now four in five are made here. Much of this can be traced back to the tiny Chinese island of Gulangyu.

After the first opium war in 1842, foreign powers forced the emperor to permit their residents to live in several “treaty ports”. One of those was Xiamen. Gulangyu, which lies just a five-minute ferry ride offshore, was an international settlement. The foreign residents popularised the piano as an everyday amusement. There was soon hardly a family on the island that did not host or go to hear an evening recital (演奏会).

For decades the island has achieved longstanding fame: the largest number of pianos per person in China. The result was a stream of outstanding musicians. The island’s most celebrated musician is YinChengzong. In 1969 he arranged an earlier revolutionary cantata into the “Yellow River Piano Concerto”. It remains China’s most famous orchestral composition.

Where once Western classical music flowed into China, pianists and their works are pouring out. Of the 50 million children learning the instrument worldwide, as many as 40 million may be Chinese. The government lavishes money on orchestras, which now number over 80, and new concert halls. Demanding parents and cool young things fill them to hear the most talented pianists-among whom, in recent decades, have been Lang Lang, Li Yundi and Yuja Wang-play some beautifully judged Bach or fiendishly hard Rachmaninov. Although reports show that about 10 percent of learners born in the 1990s rarely touch the instrument after they have finished all the exams for amateur learners, most have made it part of their life.

【推荐1】From prehistoric (史前的) cave paintings to modern-day dog shows, humans’ love and fascination for animals has long remained. The following projects show you how humans are working to create a brighter future for animals.

Big Cats Initiative

This has the primary goal of stopping the decline in the population of big cats worldwide since 2009. In Africa, this means ensuring the monitoring and protection of species like lions and cheetahs, whose numbers have declined sharply over the last century. With the Initiative’s help, these species will continue to live in their natural habits, safe from illegal hunting, environmental degradation (恶化), and other human influences. Find it on: Explore Kruger National Park.

Polar Bears International

Climate change has threatened the world’s polar bear populations: As the planet warms, these creatures risk losing more of their icy habitat than ever before. This project works to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause the melting of the Arctic sea ice upon which polar bears depend, and to raise awareness about the plight (困境) of this beautiful animal. Find it on: Canadian Polar Bear Experience.

Vembanad Wetlands Conservation Program

Since 2005, the program has worked to protect the habitat of plants and animals in the wetlands of Vembanad Lake in India. The organization also teaches and monitors sustainable fishing practices there; travelers will learn from fishermen how fishing practices are carried out in a way that does no damage to these important waters. Find it on: Iconic India.

Sea Turtle Conservancy

Sea turtles depend on seagrasses. When these grasses die, the turtles a replaced at serious risk. This has a cyclical effect: seagrasses, like regular grass on land, depend on regular “mowing” to continue growing, and without turtles to feed on it, the grass itself stops thriving, which threatens hundreds of other species who use seagrasses for shelter. Find it on: Explore Costa Rica.

【推荐3】Earth is a big place, but size isn’t everything. The planet’s richest ecosystems are in rapid decline, forcing us to acknowledge countless creatures worldwide are running out of room.

85% of all species on the IUCN Red List are endangered due to many forms of habitat loss, from complete deforestation to less obvious effects of pollution and climate change. Every species needs a certain amount of habitat to find food, shelter and mates, but for a growing number of animals, the space where their ancestors found those things is now overrun by humans. As habitats decline, animals also grow more vulnerable to secondary dangers like disease or conflict with people.

According to many scientists and conservationists, the best strategy to avoid a dramatic loss of biodiversity is to set aside half of Earth’s surface area for wildlife. That might sound like a big sacrifice at first, but upon closer inspection, it’s still an incredibly sweet deal for us: One species gets half the planet, and all other species must share the other half. This idea has been around for years, confirmed in programmes like the WILD Foundation’s “Nature Needs Half” campaign, but it has gained more different opinions recently. And it may now have one of its most forceful arguments yet, thanks to a 2016 book by well-known biologist E. O. Wilson titled Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.

Half-Earth, therefore, isn’t so different from today’s Earth. We’re already doing many of the right things, as Wilson recently told the University of California-Berkeley’s Breakthroughs magazine. We still have a few big biodiversity zones left, and others that could still recover. We just need to protect as many wilderness areas as we can, fill in gaps wherever possible and do no further harm. “I’m sure we can go from 10% to 50% coverage, land and sea,” Wilson says. “It could be large reserves that still exist, like in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia, in the taiga, the major wilderness areas of Congo, in Papua New Guinea, the Amazon—these can be made inviolate reserves; they can be pieced together.”

【推荐1】“Giraffenap” has been created by a Japanese company and is intended to allow the user to take a rest while standing when you feel tired or sleepy with the aim of improving performance at work.

Rather than relying on coffee and endless yawns to try and make it through the workday, Koyoju Plywood Corporation declared about the “Giraffenap” that the nap box will allow you to “be refreshed” in just 20 minutes.

Giving in to your sleepiness and taking a 20-minute nap will apparently help improve your performance by recovering from tiredness, reducing stress, restoring memory and concentration, and improving creativity. A study by NASA has found that pilots who took a 26-minute nap experienced a 34 percent improvement in performance, and a 16 percent improvement in reaction time. “As a new way to take a break, we will provide a space where you can take a nap while standing in the office,” the site explains.

But why does it have to be standing? Well, the site explains that the research by Hokkaido University showed that sleeping while standing allows you to reach a sleep state in which you breathe lightly, so when you wake up you can feel the effect of a nap without having to sleep too much, and you can quickly return to work without feeling dizzy. Plus, making the box vertical (垂直的) rather than horizontal means that it takes up half as much floor space and makes it less likely that your boss will say there just isn’t room. The box also comes equipped with a fire extinguisher, smoke detector, and LED lighting for safety, and it blocks out sound from the outside to ensure a calm, sleep-worthy environment.

Now, I know what you’re thinking—wouldn’t you just fall down if you tried to sleep while standing? Well, not with Giraffenap’s design. The box is equipped with four points to support the body at the head, butt, legs and feet, meaning you can relax in the box while still remaining upright.