【推荐1】When the natural climate changes due to global warming, it can surely affect seals (海豹). The majority of them live in the Antarctic region but the ice is melting and their natural habitat can be seriously affected. These changes don’t take place overnight. They can be the result of many years of additional temperatures in the area. The seals then have to find ways to adapt.

Seals depend on the cool air currents to bring plenty of food for them. When the temperatures get higher there is less and less food and the seal population starts to get depleted. Mothers are not healthy enough to feed their babies. Many of them end up abandoned as the mothers have to leave to find their own source of food.

The fact that their desire to produce young can be changed and the warmer temperature is frightening too. It is also believed that the warmer temperature can allow different diseases and viruses to attack the seals. This is a huge concern as they can rapidly wipe out huge numbers of seals out there.

However, these changes in climate and temperature aren’t all bad for other species of seals. Scientists have found that those living in warmer climates are producing more young due to the changes. Research also shows that the females are moving further to find food and water. When they are out of the reach of the governing males, they are more willing to accept the moves of other males in the group.

This is good news too because it means that there will be more selection in the gene pool (基因库) for future generations. It can help the seals as a species adapt to change in their natural environment more easily.

The climate change problem for seals is directly linked to humans. When we take action to change what we let out into the environment, we will make positive changes for the seals. However, it is going to take a very long time to reverse (彻底改变) the effects of what has already been done.

【推荐2】Warmer temperatures are the new normal

Hotter weather appears to be here to stay,El Nino or not.That's according to the U.N. weather agency.It warned that the Paris climate accord（协定）last year shouldn't give way to complacency（自满）about global warming.

The World Meteorological Organization issued（公布）its annual climate report following a record-hot 2015.It drew people's attention to records already announced by different countries' weather agencies.The agency pointed out that 2015 was breaking records on the surface.It also broke records hundreds of meters deep in the ocean.

And the first two months of 2016 were even hotter.These months are so unusual that they "have sent shockwaves around the climate science community."That's according to David Carlson of the World Climate Research Program.

Climate scientists blame record high temperatures last year and this year so far on a combination of a super-sized El Nino.It is a natural warming of pans of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide.Another factor is a long-term global warming trend from the burning of fossil fuels（化石燃料）.

NASA said last month was 1.35 degrees Celsius (2.43 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than average.Of that,0.8 degrees (1.44 degrees Fahrenheit) comes from the long-term warming.And 0.25 degrees (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) comes from El Nino.The rest is from unexplained results.This was calculated by climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute in Germany and the University of New South Wales.

Even after the El Nino phenomenon becomes less strong in coming months,way above normal temperatures won't exactly go away,Carlson and others said.

"We're on a slope; sometimes the slope goes very steep,sometimes it's a little bit more shallow,but we're going upward,"Carlson said in a news conference."So the normal is going to be increases: It's going to be increased temperature,increased ocean heat content,loss of ice,we know all of these things."

Katharine Hayhoe is a Texas Tech climate scientist who wasn't part of the WMO team.But she agreed:"These records vividly show the destructive power of an El Nino on climate changes."

The WMO predicts warmer weather accompanied by pockets of both drier and wetter conditions,depending on the region,around the world.

WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas told reporters in Geneva that many people believe the climate issue is "solved...since we reached a nice agreement in Paris."But,he said,"We haven't changed our behavior yet."

【推荐1】No student of a foreign language needs to be told that gram mar is complex. By changing the order of the words and by adding a range of auxiliary verbs(助动词)and suffixes(后缀),we can turn a statement into a question, state whether an action has taken place or is soon to take place, and perform many other word tricks to convey different meanings. However, the question which many language experts can’t understand and explain is who created grammar?

Some recent languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. Since the slaves didn’t know each other’s languages, they developed a make-shift language called a pidgin. Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowners. They have little in the way of grammar, and speakers need to use too many words to make their meaning understood. Interestingly, however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it at the time when they learn their mother tongue. Slave children didn’t simply copy the strings of words used by their elders. They adapted their words to create an expressive language. In this way complex grammar systems which come from pidgins were invented.

Further evidence can be seen in studying sign languages for the deaf. Sign languages are not simply a group of gestures; they use the same grammatical machinery that is found in spoken languages. The creation of one such language was documented quite recently in Nicaragua. Previously, although deaf children were taught speech and lip reading in the classrooms, in the playgrounds they began to invent their own sign system, using the gestures they used at home, It was basically a pidgin and there was no consistent grammar. However, a new system was born when children who joined the school later developed a quite different sign language. It was based on the signs of the older children, but it was shorter and easier to understand, and it had a largerange of special use of grammar to clarify the meaning. What’s more, they all used the signs in the same way. So the original pidgin was greatly improved.

Most experts believe that many of the languages were pidgins at first. They were initially used in different groups of people without standardization(标准化)and gradually evolved into a widely accepted system. The English past tense—“ed” ending — may have evolved from the verb “do”. “It ended” may once have been “ It end-did”. It seems that children have grammatical machinery in their brains. Their minds can serve to create logical and complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.

【推荐2】Children moving from primary to secondary school are ill-equipped to deal with the impact of social media, as it is playing an increasingly important role in their lives and exposing them to significant emotional risk, according to a recent report by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England.

The report shows that many children in year 7 -- the first year of secondary school, when almost all students will have a phone and be active on social media -- feel under pressure to be constantly connected.

They worry about their online image, particularly when they start to follow celebrities on Instagram and other platforms. They are also concerned about “sharenting” -- when parents post pictures of them on social media without their permission – and worry that their parents won’t listen if they ask them to take pictures down.

The report, which was created with data from focus group interviews with 8 to 12-year-olds, says that although most social media sites have an official age limit of 13, an estimated 75 percent of 10 to 12-year-olds have a social media account.

Some children are almost addicted to “likes”, the report says. Aaron, an 11-year-old in year 7, told researchers, “If I got 150 likes, I’d be like, that’s pretty cool, it means they like you.” Some children described feeling inferior(差的) to those they follow on social media. Aimee, also 11, said, “You might compare yourself because you’re not very pretty compared to them.”

Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield is calling on parents and teachers to do more to prepare children for the emotional impact of social media as they get older. She wants to see the introduction of compulsory digital literacy and online resilience (适应力) lessons for students in year 6 and 7.

“It is also clear that social media companies are still not doing enough to stop under-13s using their platforms in the first place,” Longfield said.

“Just because a child has learned the safety messages at primary school does not mean they are prepared for all the challenges that social media will present,” Longfield said.

“It means a bigger role for schools in making sure children are prepared for the emotional demands of social media. And it means social media companies need to take more responsibility,” Longfield said.

【推荐1】In British Bristol, 70 English women at once entered into legal "marriage" with dozens of trees in protest (反对，抗议) against their being cut down. They "married" the trees in an attempt (试图) to prevent them from being cleared for construction (建造) of residential buildings worth £55 million in the forest. The British construction company has applied for the construction of 166 houses in Bristol, including luxury (奢华的) cottages. At the same time, the townspeople were especially angry at the fact that the application did not show the exact number of trees that are planned to be cut down. So, in order to attract the attention of the government, the activists organized an unusual wedding ceremony to save the forest.

The event took place at a park on Spike Island. The women who went there, dressed in wedding dresses, held photographs of the "suitors" in their hands. The celebration itself took place according to the classic storyline—with groomsmen and wedding vows (誓词). The organizer was John Tarleton, a professor at the Bristol Veterinary School, According to him, this action was supposed to suggest that tees are partners of people throughout their life.

The idea to hold such a ceremony came from Siobhan Kierans, who admitted that she came up with it by the story of women from the environmental movement Chipko, who chained (链在一起) themselves to trees in the 1970s to save them from destruction by logging companies.

The protesters said that Bristol needs trees more than luxury private housing. One of the "brides", Suzan Hackett, said, "To get married to a tree is a real honor. It's not a show. It's highly significant (important) and symbolic."

【推荐3】Average age is rising around the world—a demographic (人口统计) change that may pose a significant challenge to efforts to slow down climate change.

Hossein Estiri at Harvard University and Emilio Zagheni of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany, have found that energy use increases as we get older, and not just because we tend to get wealthier. An ageing population could mean a greater proportion of society with higher energy use, their study suggests.

They combined two decades, worth of data from thousands of US households and used this to build a model to reveal how energy use varied across 17 age groups between 1987 and 2009. They found that, on average, children’s energy consumption climbs as they grow up, before dipping slightly when they leave home. Consumption then rises again when people hit their 30s, before briefly dropping after 55, and then beginning to climb again. The study involved factors such as income, local climate and the age, type and size of a person’s home. The increase in energy use at various points in our lifespan (寿命) seems to be the result of life style and how our needs change as we age.

Why does demand grow so much in our 30s?“We need more of everything. More space, a bigger TV two fridges,” says Estiri. The study found that, in warmer parts of the US, energy use increases in people over the age of 65—probably as a result of increased use of air conditioning, This suggests that there is a feedback effect between climate change and an ageing population that will only make matters worse.

Heat waves have become more common in the US in recent years and are expected to become more frequent due to global warming. More older people using more electrical energy to keep cool as temperatures rise could add to emissions, and thus drive more warming until our energy supply becomes entirely fossil fuel-free.

“This confluence of population, ageing and climate change on energy demand is really important to start thin king about,” says Estiri. Benjamin Sovacool at the University of Sussex, UK, says the work shows the importance of demographics when it comes to cutting carbon emissions. Most modelling of climate change mitigation (减缓气候变化的模型) assumes people’s energy consumption either stays the same or only changes by a small amount over time.

“This study directly challenges that entire body of research by forcing it to fight with the temporality and complexity of the consumption of energy,” says Sovacool.

Catherine Mitchell at the University of Exeter, UK, says the research could have an important influence on policy makers. “What the paper says is that there is a lot of work about how buildings use energy, but probably not enough about how the people in them use energy,” she says.