【推荐1】The federal school lunch program for 30 million low-income children was created more than half a century ago to combat malnutrition (营养不良). A breakfast program was added during the 1960s, and both attempted to improve the nutritional value of food served at school.

More must be done to fight the childhood obesity epidemic, which has caused a frightening peak in weight-related disorders like diabetes, high-blood pressure and heart disease among young people. The place to start is schools, where junk food sold outside the federal meals program — through snack bars and vending machines — has pretty much canceled out the benefits of all those efforts.

Federal rules that govern the sales of these harmful foods at school are limited and have not been updated for nearly 40 years. Until new regulations are written, children who are served healthy meals in the school cafeteria will continue to buy candy drinks and high sodium snacks elsewhere in school.

Many states’ school districts have taken positive steps, but others are likely to resist, especially districts that sell junk food to finance athletic programs, extracurricular activities, and even copier expenses.

Those districts should take note of a study released in 2009 in West Virginia showing that the budgetary costs of switching from sodas to healthy drinks such as fruit juice, milk, and water were very little. Even if the switch costs money, so be it. The school should not be trading their students’ health to buy office supplies.

Over the last five decades, the obesity rates for adolescents have tripled. Unless there is decisive action, weight and inactivity-related disorders will bother a steady larger proportion of the work force and replace smoking as the leading cause of premature death.

【推荐2】The spread of Western eating habits around the world is bad for human health and the environment. These findings come from a new report in the journal Nature.

David Tilman, a professor of ecology at the University of Minnesota, America, examined information from 100 countries to identify what people ate and how diet affected health. He noted a movement beginning in the 1960s. He found that as nations industrialized(工业化), the population increased and earnings rose, more people began to adopt what has been called the Western diet.

The Western diet is high in sugar, fat, oil and meat. By eating these foods, people began to get fatter and sicker. David Tilman says overweight people are at greater risk of non-infectious diseases like diabetes(糖尿病) and heart disease.

Unfortunately when people adopt this Western diet, they are going to have these health problems, especially in developing countries in Asia. China is an example where the number of diabetes cases has been jumping from less than one per cent to 10 per cent of the population as they began to industrialize over a 20-year period. And that is happening all across the world, in Mexico, in Nigeria and so on.

And, a diet bad for human beings, is also bad for the environment. As the world's population grows, more forests and tropical(热带的) areas will become farmland for crops or grasslands for cattle. We are likely to have more greenhouse gases in the future from agriculture than those coming out of all forms of transportation right now.

Mr Tilman calls the link between the diet, the environment and human health “a trilemma”: a problem offering a difficult choice. He says one possible settlement is leaving the Western diet behind.

【推荐1】Many people go to school for an education. They learn languages, history, politics, geography, physics, chemistry and mathematics. Others go to school to learn a skill so that they can make a living. School education is very important and useful .Yet, no one can learn everything from school. A teacher, no matter how much he knows, can not teach his students everything they want to know. The teacher’s job is to show his students how to learn. He teaches them how to read and how to think. So, much more is to be learned outside school by the students themselves.

It is always more important to know how to study by oneself than to memorize some facts or a formula. It is actually quite easy to learn a certain fact in history or a formula in mathematics. But it is very difficult to use a formula in working out a math problem. Great scientists before us didn’t get everything from school .Their teachers only showed them the way. Edison did not even finish primary school. But they were all so successful. They invented so many things for mankind. The reason for their success is that they knew how to study. They read books that were not taught at school. They would ask many questions as they read. They did thousands of experiments. They worked hard all their lives, wasting not a single moment. Above all , they knew how to use their brain.

【推荐2】Living with your parents has its advantages… at least when it comes to raising your kids—their grandkids. Because two new studies add to the evidence that grandmothers can improve the survival of grandchildren. That is, unless Grandma’s too old or lives too far away.

Humans are unusual in that women live long past the age at which they stop having babies. “We don’t really see that in nature. Most of the organisms (生物) will reproduce up to their very last moment,” says Patrick Bergeron, a teacher at Bishop’s University in Quebec. This increase in post-reproductive longevity (寿命) is often explained by the so-called “grandmother effect (效应)”.

To explore the “grandmother effect”, Bergeron and his researchers examined nearly 200 years’ worth of French-Canadian population records from the 17th and 18th centuries. At the time, life was hard. In some years, a third of the kids were not even making it to one year of age. But the researchers found that having a grandmother still alive was an advantage. Families with grandmothers alive were larger by about two and the survival of these grandchildren to age 15 was much improved.

This good effect was only seen when the grandmothers lived nearby, which suggests that grandmothers help by playing an active role in their grandchildren’s lives.

Unluckily, that role is harder for them to achieve as they get older, which brings us to the second study. Researchers at the University of Turku in Finland used church records from the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that the advantages connected with having a grandmother on hand depended on her age. Once grandmothers hit 75, the grandchild survival advantages disappeared. In other words, it was better for grandchildren to have no living grandmother at all than it was to live with an old one or one that was in poor health. So a healthy grandma helps make for a healthy grandchild

【推荐3】A study has found that warmer waters off North America's West Coast caused many kinds of sea life to move farther north than ever before.

The study was a project of scientists from the University of California, Davis. The scientists examined waters off the coast of Northern California in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The researchers say they recognized a local of 67 species（ 物种）between 2014 and 2016, during what was described as a "marine heat wave". Marine heatwaves were explained in the study as "period of extreme sea surface temperatures lasting for days to months". The 2014-2016 heatwave is thought to be the largest ever recorded. The warn water later moved south toward California.

The warmer water were partly a product of El Niño conditions during the same period, researcher noted. El Niño develops when winds off the coast of South America weaken. This enabled warm water in the western Pacific to move eastward. El Niño often causes ocean temperatures in the area to rise between 2 to 4 degrees Celsius, the study found.

The researchers reported that 37 of the 67 species they studied had never before been observed so far north as California. These creatures are native to an area hundreds of kilometers to the south, mainly around Baja California in Mexico. A few were even found north of California, off the state of Oregon. The northward travel of so many different sea creatures was considered "unprecedented"（史无前例的）by the researchers. Among the species found in the study were a meat-eating sea slug that hunts other sea slugs, a sea snail "butterfly" and purple-lined jellyfish. Another unexpected visitor was the pelagic red crab, which researchers said had only been found in areas off the coast of Mexico.

Scientists involved in the study believe the findings can provide valuable information for knowing future sea life reactions to warming oceans.