【推荐1】Research has shown that listening to music while showering, taking a walk or travelling to school could affect your ability to think outside the box and come up with artistic or creative things to do. Experts say being bored can lead to daydreaming plus the birth of new ideas.

While there is nothing wrong with listening to music, doing so when taking a shower or going for a walk takes away time that could be spent thinking about yourself and your life—the perfect time to let your creative juices flow. Happiness expert Gretchen Rubin said, “You need this open-searching time in order for new ideas to spring up. This is why people get ideas in the shower or in the middle of the night—it’s a period of time when the brain creates its own fun. It’s when I’m bored that I have big insights because my brain is open and trying to entertain itself.”

A recent study by psychologists showed the same process at work. In the research, two groups of people were expected to come up with proposals. They were then asked to complete the task in two backgrounds. One is in a quiet room while the other is with music playing. Researchers found, compared to participants who completed tasks in a quiet background, participants who listened to music performed less creatively.

So, is it best to throw away the bath-time tunes? Most people said the research was a real mood killer. One said, “Sometimes, I need the music to cover all the thoughts I don’t want to think.” Another commented, “Many people have too much going on in their heads. That’s why they listen to music in the shower, by which they can actually relax.” But other listeners said they liked having quiet time while travelling home at the end of the day.

In any case, striking a good balance and listening to music sometimes but being quiet at other times could be the best balance in our life.

【推荐3】Wildlife workers in Florida are feeding manatees to keep them from starving.     1     So far, the rescue workers have already given out 25 tons of lettuce.

Manatees are huge sea mammals that can be as long as 4 meters when grown.    2     In spite of their size, manatees only eat plants that live in the sea. That’s one reason they’re sometimes called “sea cows”. They spend most of their time in warm shallow water looking for food.

But Florida’s manatees have been on the US government’s list of endangered animals since 1967. Most threats to manatees come from humans. One of the biggest problems facing the creatures are boats.     3     Manatees are curious and fairly slow, which has led to thousands of manatees being injured or killed.

    4    At one point, there were only about 2, 000 manatees left in Florida. But by 2016, there were roughly 8,800 manatees.

But now manatees are facing a new challenge: they can't get enough to eat. Many of the beds of sea grass that manatees depend upon have been killed by human-caused pollution. Sea grass began to disappear around 2011. Warming seas, combined with polluted water and fertilizers that have washed off of farmlands, have created huge growths of algae on the ocean’s surface.

Last year, 1,101 manatees died from starving.    5     Many of the manatees that remain are so thin that their ribs can be seen. Often they have trouble swimming.

So last December, wildlife experts came up with a plan to get emergency food to the manatees. They decided to feed them green vegetables like lettuce and cabbage. Long term, Florida is working to help restore sea grass beds. But that will take time.

【推荐1】“We are what we eat”—or so the saying goes. From high-calorie meals to low-fat lunches, much of our health depends on what we eat. We know about the benefits of eating properly for our physical well-being, but food and cooking it is proving to be good for our mental well-being as well.

Some people are now advocating the therapeutic (治疗的）value of cooking food. It’s not just about the end result but the experience someone goes through.

TV chef and author Nadiya Hussain agrees that cooking is great for helping our mind. She loves to bake and became the champion of the TV show, The Great British Bake Off. She says that “Baking’s always been about therapy... It’s never really been about the cake.” And she thinks that baking is an important tool for our socialisation and mental health.

Certainly, creating some delicious food has helped some of us get through the recent lockdown; it’s helped take our mind off things and given us something to do. People have said that kneading dough (面团) to make bread, for example, has given them a sense of calm and control. Research has shown that doing creative tasks, like cooking, makes us feel happier.

Nicole Farmer, who studies how food impacts our biology, behavior and mental health, told BBC online that “cooking represents the shared human experience of food, and nurturing people through food, so I think that’s where it integrates opportunity into immediate positive emotions”.

Of course, cooking can be a very sociable activity and sharing the end result, a rewarding experience. Hopefully, as we start to mix with friends and family again, we can enjoy the benefits once more and put us all in the right frame of mind.

【推荐2】Cetaceans(鲸目动物) communicate through sound to find food and to interact socially. Their sounds vary between species and within communities. The long-finned pilot whales can mimic（模仿） artificial noise, but nobody had previously recorded them. A new study, however, found overlap in the cetacean sound book.

Pilot whales and orcas, the two largest species of cetaceans, are often seen in the same environments and are similar sizes, and both live in social groups with strong union, says Charlotte Curé, a bioacoustics researcher at CEREMA Lab in France, who was not involved in the study. Orcas compete for food with long-finned pilot whales and are potentially their predators.

Evidence from orca stomachs shows they do occasionally eat pilot whales. But pilot whales can mob and chase them away, the only cetaceans seen defending themselves from the strong enemies in this way.

Mimicry could serve as an additional defense: “One assumption is that if they use similar sounds, they may not be recognized as prey,” Erbe says. Pilot whales eating orcas’ food remains might go unnoticed if they use orca-like calls. “This is all underwater,” she adds, “so these animals rely on sound for detecting their prey and predators.” Long-finned pilot whales have shown an ability to distinguish between orca calls with different meanings; Curé suggests that instead of tricking orcas, the callers could instead be presenting a new orca sound to other group members.

Additional work would confirm whether mimicry is actually occurring. Researchers could pair their listening data with direct observations of the animals’ interactions in the wild or perhaps even play orca sounds and watch the whales’ reactions.

But if a future experiment used predatory sounds, it would need to be done very carefully. “A reaction to a predator can be very strong,” Curé says. “In some protected areas, you are not allowed to do more than two predatory playbacks per year.”

【推荐3】Environmental restoration projects in Shaanxi province! Qinling Mountains were not conducted in a timely manner, a central government inspection team has revealed, urging provincial government departments to better shoulder their environmental protection responsibilities.

The Qinling Mountains are a geographically important north-south boundary in China and home to more than 2, 600 plant species and 300 animal species including giant pandas. In the last couple of decades, the Qinling Mountains have attracted many investment projects due to their rich natural and historical resources, dotting the area with hundreds of small coal and mineral mines, which led to serious damage to the local environment.

In December 2019, the provincial government banned all exploring and mining activities in key protected areas of the mountains and told enterprises already established there to gradually leave. “After 169 mining companies departed, environmental restoration was conducted slowly, “the inspection team told the provincial government. “The target of restoring 1,000 hectares of abandoned mines by 2020 has yet to be achieved.”

It said 64 tailings ponds in the area have not been closed as required, while the soil and rocks removed from some abandoned mines are illegally occupying nearby forests or grassland. The inspection team also noted other environmental problems in Shaanxi, such as the illegal us of underground water and pollution along the Yellow River due to the improper treatment of pollutant discharges from nearby mines and factories.

“The provincial government should maintain a firm attitude to safeguard Qinling, the bio-safety barrier in northern China, and put environmental protection work into practice, “the team said. It also stressed the important role environmental protection along the Yellow River plays in the country’s high-quality development and urged the provincial government to better perform its duties in protecting water resources.