【推荐1】A Swedish company came up with a creative and cheap way to clean up its streets: to hire birds. Crows, especially, have been trained to collect cigarette butts (烟头) off roadways and put them in a machine that rewards the clever birds.

The pilot project called Corvid Cleaning comes from The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation and aims to lower the cost of street cleaning in the city of Sodertalje.

Founder Christian Gunther-Hansen thought crows would be the best choice because they are very clever. “They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance for them to learn from each other,” he told Swedish news agency TT. “At the same time, they have a lower risk of eating any rubbish by mistake”.

The birds are trained through a step-by-step process to pick up rubbish and place it into a machine that offers them food.

Tomas Thernstrom, a waste expert for the Sodertalje Municipality, said one of the most interesting things about the project was that crows could be taught to pick up cigarette butts but humans can’t learn not to throw them on the ground in the first place.

【推荐2】In recent years, researchers of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab are studying how environmental factors influence many Americans to unnoticeably eat too much. Many people wrongly believe that factors like hunger or boredom and depression are the main causes of overeating, but their research has shown otherwise. It is thought that we overeat if the food is good or if we’re really hungry. In reality, those are two of the last things that determine how much we eat.

In one experiment, the researcher placed jars of candies in workers’ offices for a month. Then, he moved the candies 1.8 m away. The office workers ate five more candies each day when the jar was closer to them, equaling an additional 125 calories a day. It does not sound too bad, but add that up over a year and you will have gained 5.4 kg. “If something is visible, every time we see it, we have to make a decision: to eat it or not?” the researcher explained.

In the other experiment, moviegoers were given five-day-old popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. The researcher found that moviegoers who had the larger buckets ate 53 percent more, despite its unpleasant taste. He believes that the distraction of the movie and hearing others eat the popcorn persuade people to keep eating.

The findings in other researches have shown that we tend to eat more when we use larger dishes, eat in front of the television, or dine with someone who eats a lot. Researchers of the lab advise a gradual approach in changing eating habits. People can cut a couple of hundred calories a day by doing things such as avoiding open food dishes at the office, using smaller serving bowls, sitting next to the slowest eater and being the last one to start eating.