【推荐1】To describe the sorrow of bookstores is to join the dirge-singing chorus. Everyone knows the tune: sales at bookstores have fallen because buyers are ordering books online or downloading them to e-readers. Bookstores may be great places to browse and linger, but online is where the deals are. In the latest chapter in the Borders legend, the bookstore chain has agreed to sell its assets（资产）for $215m to Direct Brands, a media-distribution company owned by Najafi, a private-equity firm, which would also assume an additional $220m in liabilities（债务）. This will serve as the opening bid for the company’s bankruptcy-court auction（拍卖），scheduled for July 19th.

Whatever happens at the auction will decide the fate of the bookseller, which has already closed more than a third of its stores. Because Direct Brands is an online and catalogue-based distributor of music. DVDs and books, some think that a deal with Najafi will do little to keep the remaining bookstores open. Rather, the company will probably see value in the Borders distribution network and liquidate（清算）almost everything else. Regardless, the story doesn’t look good for store employees and their shrinking customers.（The company, which employs more than 11,000 people, has racked up more than $191m in losses since seeking bankruptcy protection in February, according to the Wall Street Journal.）

Nashville, Tennessee, is still facing several bookstore closings, including a Borders and the more beloved Davis-Kidd. The result, as reported in the Nashville Scene, is an“object lesson in how truly awful it is to live in a town where used bookstores and the pitiful offerings of Books-a-Million are all we have.”The problem, however, is that no one seems willing to buy full-price books anymore. Campaigns to get people to buy books from their local bookstores—such as“Save Bookstores Day”on June 25th—miss the point. While there is a demand for real bcicks-and-mortar places to gather, drink coffee and read new books, such places can’t exist if the market can’t accommodate them.

Besides coffee, access to Wi-Fi and yoga mat, what will people pay for to enable a bricks-and-mortar bookstore? Could independent stores charge membership fees, which grant access to books at slightly lower prices? Would a corporate-sponsorship model work? Perhaps bookstores could become tax-subsidized（补贴税收的）places where people can browse and linger, but only borrow the books for limited periods of time—what the hell, let’s call them libraries.

At any rate, the market is squeezing out a meaningful public space. It will be interesting to see what fills the void（真空）these bookstores leave behind.

【推荐2】It has been four years since the Flashfood App was set to hit Canadian grocery stores and make it easier for shoppers to buy soon-to-expiry (保质期) food at a discount. Much to my delight, I heard it advertised recently on a radio station and figured it’s time for an update, especially since people became more aware of food waste’s role in the climate crisis.

The first thing I did was download the App. I hadn’t done it before because it was limited to a few locations, but now it’s all over Canada. I could see immediately that many brands of yogurt are all marked down 50 percent. Users pay for the food using the App, and then pick it up at a marked location in the store. There is no need for you to worry about them actually being bad.

It makes sense for retailers to get behind this App because it offers a win-win situation for everyone involved. Flashfood sells 75% of the products made available through its App while saving consumers an average of 50% on those grocery items, and it has 300 000 active users right now. That number is expected to grow naturally as Flashfood partners with more grocers.

“As a food retailer, we are in the business of providing food, not wasting it. The Flashfood program allows us to provide our customers with a convenient and environmentally sustainable (可持续的) way to purchase food. Loblaw sells 77% of the items it puts on Flashfood, moving an average of ＄800 to ＄1000 worth of goods weekly at each of its largest stores,” said Gord Chem, senior VP with Loblaw’s Real Canadian Superstores.

I love looking for discount deals at the grocery store and always keep an eye out for the hot pink clearance stickers. But it’s always random, and I never know what I’m going to get from week to week. The appeal of Flashfood is that I can see what’s available, pre-purchase it, and leave it off my shopping list.

【推荐3】Do you like shopping? For shopaholics in the UK, the place to head to used to be the “high street”. It was the place where you could find familiar fashion brands and essential everyday items in the centre of a town. But change in our shopping habits has taken its toll on the British high street.

News about shops losing money and shutting is now common. Some city-centre department stores have closed and even long-established retailers (零售商) have reported profit slumps. According to a recent survey, a record 2,481 shops disappeared from UK high streets last year — up by 40 percent.

As the BBC’s Emma Simpson writes, things have become a lot harder for traditional retailers in recent years. They have faced rising costs from wages, business rates and the requirement to introduce Europe’s new data law. But the biggest threat has come from online shopping. She says “Consumers now spend one in every five pounds online — and if businesses are seeing 20 percent fewer sales on the shop floor, as well as their fixed costs rising, then profit margins will be squeezed.”

While some of us like to window shop — browsing for things to buy, only to purchase them online at a discount — the fact is that, overall, shoppers are making fewer visits to high streets. Eventually, town centres could become like ghost towns. If people aren’t out and about shopping, they won't use other services, like cafes, restaurants and cinemas, which leads to job losses. The high street has also suffered from the arrival of big shopping malls, which offer a retail experience under one roof, with free parking, away from the bad weather!

Meanwhile, back on the high street, some shops still exist. Analysts have said it's those that have moved away from traditional retailing that are surviving. These include beauty salons, nail bars and independent coffee shops — but are these kinds of shops enough to keep the British high street open for business?

【推荐2】Train yourself, save a life

On Friday afternoon, a male passenger with a heart attack on Beijing’s Line 2 subway died about one hour later. That’s the third heart attack death in 10 days that aroused public attention, with the other two being actor Godfrey Gao and Xu Yong, a senior journalist at Xinhua News Agency.

They are only three of the 550,000 people in China who suffer from sudden cardiac (心脏的) shock every year, of which only about I percent are saved. Actually, many more of these victims could have been saved if Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR心肺复苏) are popularized. When someone suffers a heart attack and falls unconscious, people nearby have a good chance of saving him with CPR.

CPR is really not so hard to learn. All one needs is to learn how to observe and decide if a person is unconscious, where to press on the patients chest, and how to blow air through the mouth and into the lungs. Besides that, public facilities such as airports, high-speed railway stations, and big subway stations could install the Automatic External Defibrillator (AED自动体外除颤器), a device that proves effective and easy to use in saving the lives of people suffering heart attacks. All one needs is to pick it up and follow the instructions.

Unfortunately, neither of the two is popular in China. According to data, the total number of AEDs in China is slightly higher than 2,000, of which most are located in metropolises, such as Beijing and Shanghai. On CPR, less than I percent of adults can master the skill, while many have never heard of it.

Both need improvements to save those 550,000 lives every year. The cost of installing AEDs might be high, and it does take time and resources to train more people in CPR, but it is really worth the effort because every life counts and should be saved in an emergency. It’s time to train everyone and equip more public facilities to save more lives.

【推荐3】Are you the kind of person who hated school? Or are you more like Michael Nicholson, who can’t stop learning? He currently has 30 degrees including 22 master’s and a doctorate!     1     The word comes from Greek with “phil” meaning “a lover of” and “math” meaning “learning”.

Humans are all philomaths to an extent – our brain is born to be curious. We want to learn and understand, partly to make sense of the world but also because of something called neoteny. This is a term that refers to the teenage characteristics of some animals, including humans, being preserved into adulthood. One of these traits is neuroplasticity, which helps our brains stay flexible.     2     While creatures like monkeys can’t do this and only learn during their adolescence.

But for every person who loves learning, there are plenty who can’t stand it.     3     Why is this? Educational anthropologists have suggested that if a concept or idea is too complex or dull, it becomes harder to link old and new ideas together.     4     This negative experience of education at school may lead to people avoiding learning opportunities in later life.   

    5     Evolution has made us lifelong learners, so take advantage of your biology and discover your inner philomath. Who knows what you could achieve?

【推荐1】Researchers have found, for the first time plants letting out sounds when they are stressed. According to a study a team of scientists recorded tomato and tobacco (烟草) plants producing sound frequencies which humans cannot hear in stressful situations—such as when they experienced a lack of water or their stems (茎) were cut.

Previous research has shown that plants respond to stress by producing several visual and chemical signals. For example, stressed plants may differ in color and shape compared to unstressed plants. Meanwhile, some are also known to let out things in response to drought (干旱) or being eaten.

The latest study, meanwhile, is the first to identify plants making sounds which can be detected over a distance. The team detected the tomato plants made 35 sounds an hour on average when they were exposed to drought conditions, while the tobacco plants produced 11. When the stems of the plants were cut, the tomato plants made 25 sounds an hour on average and the tobacco plants produced 15. As a comparison, unstressed plants made less than one sound per hour on average, according to the study.

The team say that while they only tested tomato and tobacco, it’s possible that other plants could also produce sounds, adding that the latest findings could have an influence on agriculture. “Plant sound production could offer a new way for monitoring crops water state—a question of key importance in agriculture”, the authors wrote in the study more precise irrigation can save up to 50 percent of the water cost and increase the production.

“In times when more and more areas are exposed to drought due to climate change, while human population and consumption keep increasing, effective water use becomes even more important for food security”, they said “Our results, showing the ability to distinguish between drought-stressed and control plants on the basis of plant sounds, open a new direction in the field of precision agriculture.”

【推荐2】Have you ever said to a friend “That rose’s smell is really sweet!”, only to find that your friend can’t smell anything at all?

According to a study published in the journal PNAS in May, people have different abilities to recognize certain odors (气味) -- and it’s linked to different genes.

For the study, 300 people were placed among 150 jars with different odors. At a given time, they had to smell an odor and then rate the intensity (强度) and pleasantness of the odor on a scale from 1 (extremely weak/unpleasant) to 7 (extremely strong/pleasant). Before they left, the participants needed to leave a blood sample.

After comparing genes of the participants, researchers found all had different smelling abilities and that the differences between these abilities could be traced to certain genes.

According to The New York Times, human beings have nearly 400 genes that directly control receptors (器官) and influence the way these receptors become active.

“Odors ... turn on specific receptors, which then tells us if we’re smelling a flower, how strong we find it, and whether we like it,” said Casey Trimmer, a geneticist and the lead author of the study. “One small change in the gene for the receptor can change its shape and how well the odor fits, thereby changing the awareness of the odor.”

Though genes play a decisive role in our ability to smell, other factors, including attention, past associations and expectations, are important as well. For example, if we love the smell of roses, we are drawn to their smell and pay special attention to it.

But what does our different abilities to sense odors mean?

“Smelling the most important sense for the rest of the animal kingdom,” said Trimmer. Although, unlike other animals, humans aren’t any longer dependent on their sense of smell to find food or detect danger, smell is still a significant sense. There is also evidence that a reduced sense of smell is an early symptom of Alzheimer’s disease.