【推荐2】In this country, we’re blessed with All 4, which gives us unlimited access to the shows from all Channel 4 TV channels. I love its free-to-air video-on-demand service. It is really a joy: I’m currently puzzling my way through a very dark spy series called Guardian of the Castle. I really love watching it.

The only limitation of All 4 is that the film or the show stops every 15 or so minutes and some ads appear. And here’s the thing: you cannot fast-forward them! It’s incredibly annoying.

As a kid, I used to like watching ads on TV; I think I even started recording them. I remember asking my confused parents if they used a particular camera, simply because in the ad there was a nice cartoon face on the camera. I fell out of the love with ads after an art lesson in middle school. My art teacher, Mr. Courts, said something about them just being a way of getting us to buy things we didn’t really want or need. He had a point. I never felt the same way about them again.

Now, it is very painful for me to watch them in the middle of an exciting spy series. During the three ad breaks, I forced myself to sit through the other night. There was a Lloyds Band ad featuring a black horse racing alongside delighted people to the sound of a Beatles track. It made me want to tie my TV to the tail of a galloping (飞驰的) horse, so I could never watch anything of the sort ever again. However, on the other hand, I know that All 4 offers free service just because it makes profits (利润) from ads. As a big fan of All 4, I have to get rid of my dissatisfaction and tolerate (忍受) its limitation since it really offers me films and shows I like.

【推荐1】Urban agriculture, the practice of farming within the restrictions of a city, is becoming increasingly popular and is viewed as a sustainable alternative to big industrial farms. By some estimates, between 20% and 30% of the global urban population engages in some form of urban agriculture. But until recently, its carbon footprint remains understudied.

Using data from 73 low-tech city farms, community gardens and personal plots of land, Newell and his team compared the average carbon emissions of food produced at low-tech urban agriculture sites to those of conventionally grown crops. The team found that because of urban gardens’ relatively low yields, along with the energy used in constructing the planting beds, big-city spuds (马铃薯) were significantly more carbon-intensive than commercially grown ones. This held true even when the researchers factored in emissions from transporting commercially grown produce to often distant grocery stores. That doesn’t mean that growing vegetables in big cities is totally bad, however. “Urban farming is great, ” if imperfect, says Carola Grebitus, a food choice expert. It can be a powerful tool for job creation and education, she says, and a good way to introduce fresh produce to urban “food deserts” where healthy fruits and vegetables are hard to come by. Community gardens can also provide a place to connect with nature, and the added green space can reduce the risks of heat and flooding.

Conscious of these benefits, Newell’s team highlighted several ways to make urban agriculture more sustainable. One option is to be selective about what crops are grown. For instance, tomatoes grown in the soil of open-air urban plots had a lower carbon intensity than tomatoes grown in conventional greenhouses. Another strategy is to rely on existing constructions. Include old structures into a new garden’s design instead of taking down old buildings. Finally, take the local climate, water quality and soil into account. Growing plants that are ill-suited to an area requires more water, energy and pesticides (杀虫剂), all of which affect the environment.

【推荐2】When children complain "It’s not fair!" they’re not just doing it to be annoying—their brains prefer equality in the doling out of everything from candy to money.

Researchers at California Institute of Technology used an MRI to look at how the brain processes rewards. They were looking at how the brain reacts to "inequality aversion", or not liking it when things aren’t fair.

What they found was that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum-both associated with reward in the brain-reacted strongly to inequality even when the inequality was in their favor.

"It could have worked out in the opposite way, such that these reward processing regions might only have responded in a self-interested way and the reason that people showed inequality aversion in the lab is because they wanted to appear fair but in reality they only cared about themselves," says Tricomi, a professor of psychology.

The researchers gave some participants $50 while others began with nothing. Then, while they were in the MRI, they were presented with a series of possible money transfers. Sometimes they would be given more money; sometimes another person would get more. As the subjects thought about this money transfer, the researchers looked to see how their brains reacted.

As they’d expected, people who started out "poor" in the experiment had the strongest brain reaction when they were given money, and didn’t really react when money went to the "rich" person.

But in a surprise finding, the "rich" participants reacted just as strongly to the "poor" person getting money as they did when they themselves got money.

"Their brains weren’t simply wired for self-interest, but for fairness all around," says Tricomi.