【推荐2】Although we’re often told that procrastinating (拖延) in college is harmful and that leaving our assignments to the last minute can lead us to feel more stressed, I like to wait before starting any assignment, since I tend to overthink and want to make it perfect. When I procrastinate, it’s not out of laziness, but rather, a desire to be efficient.

In an op-ed, Adam Grant, a professor of management and psychology, explored the connection between performance and procrastination habits, and cited an experiment conducted by one of his former students. In the study, procrastinators’ ideas were found to be 28% more creative than the ideas of those who didn’t procrastinate. As it turns out, procrastination might help generate creative ideas — which may explain why some students perform well at the last minute.

While procrastination might work well for some students, it may lead to increased levels of anxiety for others. One college student, Amanda, says, “If I procrastinate or struggle with assignments, it affects my mental health by making me feel trapped and anxious.” Not only can procrastination cause anxiety for students, but trying to finish an assignment in a hurry can also negatively impact their grades — and lead them to make small, careless mistakes — which can lead to even more anxiety.

It’s important to point out that there’s a difference between casual procrastination and chronic (长期的) procrastination. Chronic procrastination, distress over academics, or lack of motivation can often lead to more serious mental health outcomes such as anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. If you struggle with managing schoolwork to the point where it affects your grades and interpersonal relationships over a long time, you might have to visit your school counselor or the academic resource center.

Everyone has different styles of working and managing their time, and when it comes to procrastinating in college, it’s always good to reflect on whether it’s helping or hurting. Figuring this part out can take a while, so make a note of how you’re completing your assignments and start writing down how you feel. Prioritize self-care whether you start your assignment the week before its due date or the day before.

【推荐3】Charles Darwin, famous for his theory of evolution(进化)by natural selection, was a well-known biologist.

The Cambridge University Library in the UK contains a huge collection of Darwin’s documents that includes a pair of small notebooks known as the Tree of Life notebooks. They went missing over two decades ago, but a nameless person returned them to the library recently—wrapped in plastic and placed inside a pink gift bag. The notebooks reappeared with a simple printed message—“Librarian. Happy Easter. X.”

The notebooks got their nickname from Darwin’s 1837 hand-drawn sketch(草图)of his Tree of Life concept, which shows a branching tree as a metaphor for his ideas around evolution. The sketch is both simple and significant. ”They may be tiny, just the size of postcards, but the notebooks’ impact on the history of science, and their importance to our world-class collections here, cannot be ignored,“ says librarian Jessica Gardner.

The notebooks suffered a lot after they were removed from a secure room in 2000 so they could be photographed. The photography project was completed, but a routine check in early 2001 found the notebooks weren’t where they were supposed to be.

At first, the librarians thought the notebooks had simply been misplaced, but a series of searches over the years turned up nothing. A new search in 2020 included a deep dive into the boxes in the Darwin collection. ”However, this failed to locate the notebooks, leading to the conclusion that they had likely been stolen," the library says. In 2020, the library issued a public appeal for the return of the notebooks, which seems to have paid off.

To celebrate the notebooks’ return, the library displayed them in July in a free exhibition called Darwin in Conversation. We may never know where the notebooks spent their time away, but they should be back for good.

【推荐1】The World Health Organisation has produced a report predicting that 9.8 billion of us will be living on this planet by 2050. Of that number,72 percent will be living in urban areas. Presented with this information, governments have a duty to consider how best to meet the needs of city residents.

Take New York City, a place where I frequently meet up with other researchers in my field. Luckily for me, I do not need to navigate the crowded streets. Admittedly my experience of the urban lifestyle here is limited to the hotels I stay in, and the blocks within a three-kilometre walk. But whenever I leave my room in search of a store providing fruit or anything with nutritional value, none can be found. New York has made great advances in redeveloping its museums and arts centres, but authorities must recognise that people’s basic needs must be met first.

Sometimes these basic needs are misunderstood. In some urban areas, new residential developments are provided with security features such as massive metal fences in the belief that these will make residents safer. There is little evidence that such steps make a difference, but we do know they make residents feel unwilling to go outside and walk around their neighbourhood. This adds up to a feeling of being cut off from others.

So where are planners and developers going wrong? Inviting a group of locals to attend a consultation event is the conventional method for discovering what a community might want. The issue here is that it often attracts the same few voices with the same few wishes. Successful development is taking place in many urban areas around the world. There is no better way for city planners to do this than to visit these places in person.

【推荐2】Over the next few years, we can expect logins to get much less annoying, as all of the major tech players are now on board with a new technology designed to eventually replace the humble password called the “passkey”.

And that could mean that we do away with passwords altogether. The way passkeys work is by turning your phone into something a bit like a wallet, which you can use to store membership cards to all of your apps and services. When you need to log in to a website, you’ll just have to tap a button on your phone and your passkey wallet will flash the right credentials (证件), letting you in without any trouble. And even if you’re logging in to a device that doesn’t have access to your wallet, when you type in your email address, the website will send a message to your phone to check your credentials.

Once passkeys are commonly accepted and widely used, they won’t just save us from having to remember passwords but, perhaps counterintuitively, logging in with a passkey will actually be significantly more secure than typing a password.

This is because it takes advantage of a technology called “public key” cryptography (密码术), which is one of the building blocks of the internet and is how computers have securely communicated with other computers for decades.

With a password, the website has to ultimately contain a database of everyone’s passwords to check against when you login. But with a passkey, when you create your account on a website, it will effectively create a brand new padlock and key. The website will keep the padlock — and only your phone will have the key.

Passkeys are going to make our digital lives even more secure, because they help guard against two common forms of digital attack.

First, it guards against data leak or leakages — situations where hackers or people who try to break into computer systems gain access to a database of passwords.

This is because, unlike most people who repeat their passwords, each passkey is unique. This means that even if the pizza delivery place is hacked, it won’t give away the same password that you use for your emails.

And secondly, passkeys make things much harder for “phishing” scams — when a website tries to trick you into thinking that it is really your bank’s website or similar, it can steal your login details.

These scams will no longer work as well, because passkeys have another mathematical trick up their sleeve: they’re always changing.

When you log in and your digital wallet has to send over an unlock code, the code it sends will only be valid or useful for a few seconds at a time — so even if a hacker does get hold of your key very briefly, 30 seconds later it will turn useless anyway.

So, next time you feel frustrated that you can’t remember your password, don’t worry too much. It won’t always be like this!

【推荐3】Within the environmental movement, the question often arises whether global warming can be mitigated (缓解) by planting more vegetation. The idea is that the plants will consume carbon dioxide (CO2) that is causing the warming, while producing oxygen for us to breathe. This is acceptable on condition that global warming is indeed caused in some way by CO2 in the air.

However, actual scientific debate on the issue has shifted away from CO2 as the probable cause, especially after the findings that the temperatures changed 800 to 1000 years before carbon dioxide changed. In other words, CO2 levels are an indicator of temperature change, not a cause.

While there is nothing we can do to control the global climate, there is still a lot we can do to improve our local climates. Land use is the biggest decisive factor of local temperature and air quality. On clear days, the temperatures in big cities can be 5.6 degrees Centigrade higher than in the countryside around them. This is because the concrete (混凝土) of sidewalks and buildings and the asphalt (沥青) of roads take in sunlight and transform it into heat. Some get so hot, one could cook an egg on them! These vast surfaces of man﹣made stone also store lots of heat, which they radiate (散发) all night long. Just before sunrise, when the earth should be its coolest, roadways are still warm to touch.

If vegetation was blocking the Sun from the sidewalks and roads, the vegetation would absorb the sunlight, fueling the plants’ oxygen-making engines, and the rock would stay at surrounding temperatures. The easiest and most obvious choice is trees, particularly wide-reaching trees like the oak. Another possibility, especially outside the city centre, could be vine-covered trellises (棚架).Covering rooftops with grasses or other short vegetation reduces a building’s cooling cost as sharply as having trees or trellises that provide shade for windows does.

The reason why vegetation does not warm the air like rock does is that plants take water from the ground and evaporate (蒸发) it through their leaves. The Sun’s energy isn’t radiated as heat — it is used to change water into water vapor. The evaporative cooling works so well that the leaves stay 5.6 to 8.33 degrees Centigrade cooler than they would have been without water. While we can’t improve global climate, increased vegetation can help cool local climates.