【推荐1】When you were trying to figure out what to buy for the environmentalist on your holiday list, fur probably didn’t cross your mind. But some ecologists and fashion enthusiasts are trying to bring back the market for fur made from nutria (海狸鼠).

Unusual fashion shows in New Orleans and Brooklyn have showcased nutria fur made into clothes in different styles. “It sounds crazy to talk about guilt-free fur—unless you understand that the nutria are destroying vast wetlands every year”, says Cree McCree, project director of Righteous Fur.

Scientists in Louisiana were so concerned that they decided to pay hunters $5 a tail. Some of the fur ends up in the fashion shows like the one in Brooklyn last month.

Nutria were brought there from Argentina by fur farmers and let go into the wild. “The ecosystem down there can’t handle this non-native species. It’s destroying the environment. It’s them or us.” says Michael Massimi, an expert in this field.

The fur trade kept nutria check for decades, but when the market for nutria collapsed in the late 1980s, the cat-sized animals multiplied like crazy.

Biologist Edmond Mouton runs the nutria control program for Louisiana. He says it’s not easy to convince people that nutria fur is green, but he has no doubt about it. Hunters bring in more than 300,000 nutria tails a year, so part of Mouton’s job these days is trying to promote fur.

Then there’s Righteous Fur and its unusual fashion. Morgan says, “To give people a guilt-free option that they can wear without someone throwing paint on them — I think that’s going to be a massive thing, at least here in New York.” Designer Jennifer Anderson admits it took her a while to come around to the opinion that using nutria fur for her creations is morally acceptable. She is trying to come up with a label to attach to nutria fashions to show it is eco-friendly.

【推荐2】Baby seabirds that have not yet hatched communicate with their siblings (兄弟姐妹) in neighboring eggs by vibrating (震动) their shells (蛋壳), scientists have discovered.

A study of yellow-legged gulls revealed one of the known examples of embryo-to-embryo communication. When exposed to the alarm calls of an adult bird responding to a dangerous predator, developing chicks apparently were able to convey the presence of danger to their nest mates by vibrating inside their eggs.

The team collected 9 yellow-legged gull eggs from Sálvora Island and sorted them into nests of three. When the eggs were six days off hatching, two of the three eggs in each nest were temporarily removed from the nest and exposed to either a recording of a predator alarm call or white noise each day until the chicks hatched. The noise was delivered four times a day at random for three minutes at a time. The third egg from each group remained in the nest.

It was found that the embryos in the shells responded to the external alarm calls by vibrating and sounding less, and that this message appeared to be passed on to the third nestmate. It was seen to copy the vibrations. It experienced genetic changes and had an increase in the production of stress hormones (荷尔蒙) as well.

“This kind of communication—embryo to embryo—can generate developmental changes that can have potential benefits to the birds after hatching,” said Noguera, the lead author of the study.

A rise in stress hormones makes birds more aware of their surroundings after hatching. When hatched chicks were exposed to alarm sounds, it was found that those who had listened to the noises previously in the eggs were quicker to run away and hide.

Noguera said the phenomenon was likely to occur in other bird species. His team now plans to investigate whether the chicks are able to pick up other clues about their external environment before hatching, such as how many other eggs are in the nest.

【推荐1】Although his 1-year-old smart-phone still works perfectly, Li Jijia already feels the need to replace it. “There are many better ones available now. It's time to upgrade(更新)my phone.”

Li’s impatience is shared by many. Shortly after the season when new products are released(发布,发售), many consumers feel the urge to upgrade their electronic equipment, even though the ones they have still work just fine.

As consumers’ minds are occupied by Apple’s newly- released products and debate whether the Google tablet is better than the new Amazon Kindle, it might be time to take a step back and ask: “Do we really need the latest upgrades?”

According to Donald Norman, an American author, “planned obsolescence (淘汰)” is the trick behind the upgrading culture of today’s consumer electronics industry.

Electronics producers strategically(战略性地) release new upgrades periodically, both for hardware and software, so that customers on every level feel the need to buy the newest version.

“This is an old-time trick---they’re not inventing anything new,” Norman said. “This is a wasteful system through which companies--many of them producing personal electronics-- release poor-quality products simply because they know that, in six months or a year, they’ll put out a new one.”

But the new psychology of consumers is part of this system, as Norman admitted, “We now want something new, something pretty, the next shiny thing.” In its most recent year, Apple's profit margin(利润) was more than 21 percent. At Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC maker, it was only 7 percent.

Apple’s annual upgrades of its products create sales of millions of units as owners of one year’s MacBook or iPhone line up to buy the newest version(版本), even when the changes are slight.

As to Li Jijia, the need for upgrading his smart-phone comes mainly from friends and classmates. When they are switching to the latest equipment, he worries about feeling left out.

“Some games require better hardware to run,” said Li. “If you don't join in, you lose part of the connection to your friends.”

【推荐2】We will all probably know both some introverts （内向的人）and extroverts （外向的人）in life, and yet we can gain a wrong impression about both types of people. For example, some introverts can be extremely confident and they can be able people. However, some extroverts aren^’t as confident as they'd like to appear to be and often try to hide their true identities behind a false appearance.

Shyness can affect both introverts and extroverts and anybody else too. It can be very debilitating （使衰弱的）and, if severe, can have a huge negative influence upon our ability to form meaningful relationships and it can also affect our careers or jobs.

A lot of people feel shy because they have low self-respect and feel unworthy when comparing themselves to others. They find it difficult to communicate with others whom they don't know. In that case, one of the best ways of overcoming the shyness is to focus the attention on the other person instead. Shy people can try changing people's focus on someone else， so that they don't need to talk about themselves too much.

If you recognize that you are shy and see that as a lion in the way of enjoying your life. you should first overcome it by accepting that it's causing a problem for you. Trying getting into conversations with strangers is helpful. Shy people are challenging themselves and over- coming their shyness. In this way, shy people can get their own self-respect. Each time they do it, this will be repeated until they feel confident enough.

Like any negative thought， determination can also help you beat shyness and having a positive attitude is the key to overcoming the shyness.

【推荐3】The endangered pandas in Qinling Mountains might face a new threat (威胁): the loss of their food, bamboo, which makes up 99% of their meals.

Adult pandas spend most part of the day eating bamboo and have to take in at least 40 pounds a day to stay healthy. However, a new study published in Nature and Climate Change warned that they may soon find their food gone because most of the bamboo in Qinling Mountains might disappear by the end of the century as a result of rising temperature worldwide.

A team made up of researchers from Michigan State University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has studied the effects of climate change on the bamboo in Qinling Mountains. They have found that bamboo is very sensitive to climate changes. “80% to 100% of the bamboo would be gone if the average temperature increases 3.5 degrees worldwide by the end of the century.” said Liu Jianguo, one of the report’s authors.

He added, “This is how much the temperature would rise by 2100 even if all countries will keep their promises in the Paris Agreement. But you know what is happening around the world.”

In recent years, China has been trying its best to protect the endangered pandas by setting up more and bigger natural reserves.

“But it is far from being enough and the endangered pandas need cooperation from the rest of the world, because their future is not just in the hands of the Chinese,” said Shirley Martin from World Wildlife Fund but not a member of the team.

The Qinling Mountains, in the southwest of China, are home to about 260 pandas. That is about 13% of the China’s wild panda population. In addition, about 375 are living in research centers and zoos in China.