【推荐1】I had been living with Dino and his family for ten days or so, who lived and worked in the rainforest. They were the “bad guys”, burning much of the western Amazon to tun it into cattle farms. They were also some of the nicest and warmest hosts. They are a family trying to survive in a very tough environment through hard work. Their view and understanding of the problems the Amazon faces are different from mine. I see the Amazon as an extraordinary valuable life that should be treasured and protected at all costs-the world needs it, and we all need it. However, the Dinos see the Amazon as a vast, lasting resource that feeds them. After talking extent win them, I realized their respect for it was as deep as my own: they just saw it very differently.

Cattle farming in the Amazon is perhaps mainly responsible for the fires we are seeing now. It is an industry of cutting forest, burning it and turning it to cattle farms. Fires spread throughout the Amazon every year as a result of that practice. Putting cattle on the land means replacing trees with animals that produce damaging levels of greenhouse gases. This is just about the most stupid thing humans can do.

One morning after a fire, I returned to the land. I felt as though I had seen the blue smoke from those blackened tree trunks that remained upright, which are memorials to human stupidity.

The problems the Amazon faces are perhaps more complex now than ever before, but they are curable. We need to decide where and how we appoint and apply values based on sensible economic models that favor both the farmer and the forest. One of the issues facing the Brazilian Amazon now is a loosening of rules by the current administration which has opened up more land for deforestation(毁林) and burning. This could be disastrous, both for the Amazon and the rest of the world.

【推荐2】People asked to imagine how flooding or droughts would affect particular people or places were more likely to engage in environmentally friendly actions．

Many people view climate change as a distant threat． But having them imagine the tangible （有形的） consequences of resulting droughts or floods may help change this idea and encourage proenvironmental behavior， a new study suggests．

Researchers asked 93 college students to read a report on temperature anomalies （异常），floods and other climate change-related events that have affected the island． The scientists then asked 62 of the participants to write down three ways in which such phenomena might impact their future lives． Half the people in that group were instructed to imagine such situations in detail． The remaining 31 students did not complete either the writing or imagining steps， acting as a control group．

All the participants then rated their ideas of climate change risks by responding to questions such as "How likely do you think it is that climate change is having serious impacts on the world？" They used a scale from 1 （"very unlikely"） to 7 （"very likely"）． The average score was higher among subjects who had been asked to envision detailed situations than among those who had not． The results were later confirmed in a second experiment involving 102 participants．

Participants in the first experiment who had imagined the effects of climate change were more likely to say they would use air conditioning in an energy-saving manner． In the second experiment， nearly two thirds of people in the visualizing （想象） group signed up to help clean a beach， compared with 43 percent in the nonvisualizing one． And when offered a choice of a vegetarian （素食主义的）or nonvegetarian lunch box， nearly half the visualizers selected the environmentally friendlier meatless choice-compared with about 28 percent of the nonvisualizers．

The researchers did not track people to see if they behaved differently in their day-to-day lives-something further studies should examine， says study co-author Wen-Bin Chiou． Moreover， the research ''should be done again in other places with other populations，" says Robert Gifford， a professor of psychology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia， who was not involved in the work．

The findings could be applied to raise public concern about climate change， Chiou says． For example， he suggests that news reports about the phenomenon could include vivid descriptions of its effects on people，s lives and ask readers to imagine experiencing such impacts． Having virtual-reality demonstrations （展示）in local science museums of the consequences of climate change would be another way of putting the research into practice， Chiou adds．

【推荐3】Every minute, every single day, about a truckload of plastic enters the ocean.     1     And to date, only 9% of that has been recycled.

We buy a bottle of water, drink it for a few minutes, and throw its permanent packaging (包装) “away”. We eat potato chips, finish them, then throw their permanent packaging “away”. We buy produce, take it out of the unnecessary plastic wrap, then throw its permanent packaging “away”.

The cycle is endless, and it happens countless times every single day.     2     As far as we try to toss a piece of plastic out — whether it’s into a recycling bin or not — it does not disappear. Chances are, it ends up polluting our communities, the ocean or waterways in some form.

For years, we’ve been told the problem of plastic packaging can be solved through better individual action.     3     But the truth is that we cannot recycle our way out of this mess.

Recycling alone will never stop the flow of plastic into the ocean; we have to get to know the source of the problem and slow down the production of all the plastic waste. Think about it: if your home was flooding because you had left the tap on, your first step wouldn’t be to start mopping. You’d first cut the flooding off at its source — the tap.     4    

We need corporations — those like the Coca-Cola company, Unilever, Starbucks and Neatle that continue to produce throwaway (一次性的) plastic bottles — to step up and take responsibility for the mess they’ve created.     5     We will continue to do our part, but it’s time for the world’s largest corporations to do theirs.

【推荐1】In order to reduce noise pollution, more and more airports are promoting a “silent airport” idea, especially in Europe.

Aiming to offer timely and helpful updates of information, international airports were once characterized by their high voices, competing gate announcements and so on. Now, it is all changing. Angela Gittens, director general of Airports Council International (ACI), says there is a growing desire among airports and airlines they serve to create a calm, relaxing atmosphere without being disturbed by announcements. “Passengers can relax while they wait for their flight to board in the common airside lounges (休闲区), and food and drink areas,” she says.

Finland has a tourism slogan (口号) which is “silence, please”. In June, Helsinki Airport in Finland adopted the silent airport idea, therefore, announcements for flights are made only in some certain boarding gate areas. Nobody’s going to call you to your flight, as announcements in all terminals (航站楼) will be made only in emergency circumstances. People begin to worry, what if they miss their boarding time?

Actually, there’s no need to worry about this. Heikki Koski, vice president of Helsinki Airport, says that the improved flight information display system, together with the advanced technology, is changing the way airports communicate with passengers. At Munich airport, Passengers can simply tap a “you are here” display to get directions and approximate walking time to their destinations.

Of course, it is impossible that an airport will be as silent as a temple. There will continue to be an increasing need for airport-wide emergency announcements along with boarding calls. But at silent airports, these announcements should be restricted to specific gates, not the whole airport, as has adopted in Helsinki.

【推荐2】In the mid-1980s, a study compared mtDNA from people around the world. It found that people of African descent (后裔) had twice as many genetic differences from each other than as did others. Because mutations (基因突变) seem to occur at a steady rate over time, scientists were able to conclude that modern humans must have lived in Africa at least twice as long as anywhere else. They now calculate that all living humans descend from a single woman who lived roughly 150,000 years ago in Africa, ''Eve''. If geneticists are right, all of humanity is linked to Eve through an unbroken chain of mothers. This Eve was soon joined by ''Y-Chromosome (染色体) Adam'', the genetic father of us all, also from Africa. DNA studies have confirmed that all the people on Earth, with all their shapes and colors, can trace their ancestry to ancient Africans.

What seems certain is that at a remarkably recent date—probably between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago—one small group of people, the ancestors of modern humans outside of Africa, left Africa for western Asia, either by migrating around the northern end of the Red Sea or across its narrow southern opening.

Once in Asia, genetic evidence suggests, the population split. One group stopped temporarily in the Middle East, while the other commenced a journey which would last tens of thousands of years. Moving a little further with each new generation, they followed the coast around the Arabian Peninsula, India, and Southeast Asia, all the way to Australia. ''The movement was probably unnoticeable,'' says Spencer Wells. ''It was less of a journey and probably more like walking a little farther down the beach to get away from the crowd.''

Although archeological evidence of this 13,000-kilometer (8,000-mile) migration from Africa to Australia has almost completely disappeared, genetic traces of the group that made the trip do exist. They have been found in the DNA of native peoples in the Andaman Islands near Myanmar, in Malaysia, and in Papua New Guinea, and in the DNA of nearly all Australian aborigines (土著). Modern discoveries of 45,000-year-old bodies in Australia, buried at a site called Lake Mungo, provide some physical evidence for the theories as well.

People in the rest of Asia and Europe share different but equally ancient mtDNA and mutations. The mutations which they possess show that most are descendants of the group that stayed in the Middle East for thousands of years before moving on. Perhaps about 40,000 years ago, modern humans first advanced into Europe.

【推荐3】Wikipedia was founded as a branch of Nupedia, a now-abandoned project to produce a free encyclopedia (百科全书). Nupedia required highly qualified contributors, but the writing of articles was slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales, founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to work on the project, discussed ways of supplementing (补充) Nupedia with a more open project. Multiple sources are suggested for the idea that a wiki might allow members of the public to contribute material, and Nupedia’s first wiki went online on January 10.

There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia’s editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a Web site in the wiki format (格式), so the new project was given the name “Wikipedia” and launched on its own domain (域名), wikipedia.com, on January 15. The domain was eventually changed to the present wikipedia.org when the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation was launched as its new parent organization. In March 2007, the word wiki became a newly-recognized English word.

In May 2001, a wave of non-English Wikipedias was launched — in Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. These were soon joined by Arabic and Hungarian. In September, Polish was added. At the end of the year, Afrikaans, Norwegian, and Serbocroatian versions were announced.

Anyone with Web access can edit Wikipedia, and this openness encourages inclusion of a great amount of content. About 75,000 editors — from expert scholars to casual readers — regularly edit Wikipedia, and these experienced editors often help to create a consistent style throughout the encyclopedia.

Editors are able to watch pages and techies (科技人员) can write editing programs to keep track of or correct bad edits. Where there’re disagreements on how to present facts, editors work together to arrive at an article that fairly represents current expert opinion on the subject. Although the Wikimedia Foundation owns the site, it’s largely uninvolved in writing and daily operations.