【推荐2】I have seen how having an animal in your life can make things much better for all concerned. Here are some reasons.

A pet’s love never stops.

    1    . Even if you cannot return that unconditional love, just knowing that it is there will make your life better.

Caring for something other than yourself is emotionally healthy.

Giving and getting a little love, even if you have to say “sit down” 270 times a day, can take your mind off your troubles and help you to see what really matters.

    2    .

If you have a dog, you need to take it (and yourself) on walks. Dogs are happiest when they are walking. And it’s common knowledge that taking regular walks is also good for your heart and brain health.

Just the act of petting a creature lowers your blood pressure and helps you relax.

The next time you are feeling uncomfortable, I suggest going to your local shelter and giving some love to an animal there.     3    , but notice how you feel when the two of you are exchanging emotional energy. And don’t be surprised if you do adopt!

Saving a life will make yours better.

    4    , but what about the used ones? All my animals have been rescued, and they are as sweet as can be.

Maybe you think you don’t have enough room in your heart.

You may already have a family to love, and that is totally wonderful.     5     I know not everybody is an animal lover, but if you think you might be, don’t lose this chance.

【推荐1】On Thursday, scientists in Indonesia announced the discovery of a rare frog that has no lungs and takes breath through its skin. Researchers believe that the little animal could provide some information about how environment can cause some animals to change so greatly over time.

The frog was found in a faraway part of Indonesia during a scientific research last summer. The unusual animal is the world’s first know lungless frog species. Only a few amphibians have been found lungless.

David Bickford is a biologist at the National University of Singapore. He led the research team that discovered the rare frog. Its living environment has been polluted by chemicals from agriculture. “These are about the most ancient and bizarre frog you can get on the earth,” he says.

Bickford says it’s possible that the frog may have changed in order to adapt to the cold, fast moving and oxygen-rich rivers in which it lives. The biologist adds that his “extreme change” was probably necessary to reduce the frog’s ability to float. That way, it could keep itself from being swept down the mountain rivers.

Scientists say that the new discovery has made it more important to protect the frog’s river living environment. In the last few years, illegal tree cutting and gold mining have caused the once-clean waters to turn brown with pollution.

“The gold mining is completely illegal and small size,” Bickford says. “But when there are thousand of them on the river, it really has a huge effect. Very soon the frog will be out of the river.”

【推荐2】We are what we eat, and what we eat reveals something about what we are in return. So it shouldn’t be all that surprising that humans are now apparently eating plastic.

A small trial at the Medical University of Vienna found tiny pieces of it in the digestive systems of people from eight different countries. The study involved just eight people and doesn’t tell us what if any effect eating plastic was having on their bodies. We already knew fish were eating plastic. Did we really think it wouldn’t reach back up to the top of the food chain, that the consequences of our own actions couldn’t return to us?

This goes beyond cleaning up the oceans. Six of the eight subjects of the study ate sea not all of them did. Other possible theories involve drinking out of plastic bottle. eating food that’s been wrapped in plastic, or tiny plastic pieces floating in the air which then land on our food. But our environment is so filled now with plastic that it seems that we were going to absorb it somehow.

Does it actually matter? This study can’t answer that question, because all it tells us is that microplastics were found in human wastes. If it’s just passing through the body, then perhaps there’s no damage done. However, if there were evidence of plastics being absorbed and gathering in our internal organs, as some animal studies have suggested, that would potentially be a red flag.

Solving plastic pollution is nowhere near as simple as some campaigners make it sound. Switching away from plastic packaging to other materials would create other environmental dilemmas. Bottling liquids in glass rather than plastic makes them heavier which potentially means more trips to transport them, paper production has a bigger carbon footprint. Even if it were possible to stop using the stuff tomorrow, it would take up to 1,000 years for some of what’s being produced right now to break down.

But just because it’s difficult, it doesn’t mean we shrug our shoulders and do nothing. There is something genuinely mad about a society that is on the one hand crazy about the quality of the food we put in our mouths, and yet also mindlessly eats its own garbage. The war on plastic, it seems, just got personal.

【推荐3】In an effort to create more environmentally friendly vacations, Norwegian cruise operator (挪威邮轮公司) Hurtigruten is making a plan to power its ships using dead fish. This doesn’t mean that Norwegian cruise liners will be doubling as fishing ships; the dead fish will come from Norway’s good fishing industry, not as any sort of by-product of the cruise industry. But it s a plan that promises to make use of the leftovers and offcuts of the fishing industry to make shipping less wasteful.

So how do dead fish get transformed into fuel? Organic waste of any kind can be mixed to produce a type of fuel known as biogas (沼气). If it sounds smelly, well…it is, and not just because of the dead fish. Biogas can also have small amounts of hydrogen sulphide, a chemical compound, which can give it a bad egg smell. It’s not a particularly attractive process, but don’ t worry: those smells won’t be given off from your cruise ship’s exhaust. The raw materials in the biogas can be cleaned, which creates liquid biogas.

What others see as a problem, we see as a resource and a solution, said Daniel Skjeldam Hurtigruten chief executive. “By introducing biogas as fuel for cruise ships, Hurtigruten will be the first cruise company to power ships with fossil-free (无化石的) fuel”

Biogas is certainly cleaner than heavy oil, but it’s not exactly carbon-free. So while the plan might be a creative way of making use of organic waste, as well as helping to get rid of fossil fuels, it’s not a perfect solution. However, it’s at least a step in a better direction. And the company will also be stopping single-use plastics on its 17 cruise ships. It’s good to see change happening in a dirty industry.

【推荐3】The power and ambition of the giants of the digital economy is astonishing--Amazon has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.5bn，but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service，which doesn't have any physical product at all.What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate（复杂的）and finely detailed web of its users' friendships and social lives.

Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities，but it broke the promise almost as soon as the deal went through. Even without knowing what was in the messages，the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be.What political journalist，what party whip，would not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May's enemies are currently plotting？It may be that the value of Whole Foods to Amazon is not so much the 460 shops it owns，but the records of which customers have purchased what.

Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace，to be replaced by new abuses of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem，too. Competition law as presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is not obvious when the users of these services don't pay for them.The users of their services are not their customers.That would be the people who buy advertising from them---and Facebook and Google，the two virtual giants，dominate digital advertising to the disadvantage of all other media and entertainment companies.

The product they're selling is data，and we，the users，convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. Just as some ants farm the bugs called aphids（蚜虫）for the honeydew they produce when they feed，so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives yield. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed；Gmail keeps the spammers（垃圾邮件发送者）out of our inboxes. It doesn't feel like a human or democratic relationship，even if both sides benefit.