【推荐1】I'm an early user of social media. For the most part, I've enjoyed the time I've spent on the site. But like many friends I know, I was also starting to feel like my visits to Facebook were just a waste of time.

Of course, the obvious move would just be to steer clear of Facebook and other social media sites. But as a writer, I have to use social media several times a day. And once I'm in the site, it's almost impossible to take no notice of those notices reminding me of posts in my personal feed（信息推送）. I felt like I had to find the one or two meaningful posts that made my social media feed worth the time.

Then I came across a post by Melissa Hartwig, the founder of the Whole30 program. In the post she said "Don't act like social media just happens to you; make it work FOR YOU."

It hit home with me. I immediately set out to change the way I was using social media. I hid and unfollowed groups and accounts（账户）that were not adding something active to my life. I didn't stop to think. I just clicked my way through the feed.

I'm not burying my head in the sand. I continue to follow people whose opinions on different topics differ from my own, but their words are interesting and open-minded.

Then I limited my interaction（互动）on social media. Unless I had something to say, I no longer interacted. A study found that inactive use of social media has a bad effect on our mood, while active use—sharing thoughts and commenting on others' posts—improved mood.

The result? I can say without doubt that I no longer worry about getting into a time-wasting vacuum（真空）. That's because my feed is nowhere near as bottomless as it once was.

【推荐2】New apps, new you!

Why not download new apps to keep your body and mind active? Apps can help you study, exercise and even entertain in life. Self-improvement is only a click away.

Quizlet

When you need to remember content for your studies, making flashcards is a sure-fire way. And the Quizlet app is here to help!

Quizlet is a portable flashcard system. You can search millions of already set-up flashcards and learning tools ,or you can create flashcards yourself for whatever subject or topic you want to learn. They are especially good for subjects with lots of terminology or vocabulary in them such as languages, history and science.

If you have a study buddy, then Quizlet can bring you together online. You can share the flashcards in the study folder and send to your friends. They can check the flashcards on their phone or computer.

Strava

We all know how important exercise is, but sometimes doing it can be hard. Exercise apps like Strava can keep your fitness goals on track.

Strava helps you record your exercise activities, set exercise goals and be part of an exercise community. Running and cycling are the main forms of fitness recorded on Strava, but you can also record walking, hiking, yoga, swimming and more.

Also, you can see you and your friends’ activities on Strava, which helps keep you motivated to exercise regularly. You can also give friends’ activities a “thumbs-up” or comment.

1SE

The idea behind this app is very simple: Turn films you have taken on your phone into a video compilation (合辑).

In particular, it’s about filming one second every day, which is where the name 1SE comes from. You may think one second is not very long. But when combining one-second videos for each day of the year, that is 365 seconds — more than six minutes! Watching this six-minute video is like going on a memory roller coaster of your year, which helps people appreciate the little moments in everyday life. It’s quite powerful.

【推荐1】A group of fifteen volunteers lived in the Lombrives cave for 40 days without clocks, phones, or sunlight as part of a $1.4 million project called Deep Time. The project, led by the Human Adaption(适应) Institute，aims to explore the limits of human ability to adapt to isolation(隔离).

Social media shows the smiling volunteers coming from the cave to a round of applause while wearing special sunglasses to protect their eyes after so long in the dark.

Researchers at the Human Adaption Institute monitored the volunteers closely during their time in the cave. They would regularly check the team's sleeping patterns, social activities, and cognitive(认知的)functions.

During their time in the cave, the volunteers had no communication with the outside world. They slept in tents and made their own electricity with a pedal bike since there was no natural light. They also drew water from a well 146 feet below the earth. Since there was no sunlight, the team had to follow their biological clocks to know when to sleep, eat, or do daily tasks.

All he volunteers were interviewed after the experiment. Christian said he thought he had been underground for 23 days because of losing his sense of time. Another volunteer, Johan, said he was eager to leave the cave. But most of other volunteers felt differently, with two thirds saying they wanted to stay in the cave for longer. “For once in our lives, we had time and could stop to live and do our tasks. It was great.” said Marina. However, Marina did admit that she felt happy to be outdoors and hear natural sounds again.

The researchers behind the project say their next step will be doing more experiments to find out how people can adapt to various extreme living conditions. With our planet's environment being destroyed, we have to find ways to adapt to it. Then we will have a better chance to survive in our future planet or other planets, whether they are similar to ours or not.

【推荐3】“Buzz. Buzz. The queen is that way,” said one honey bee to another. “Pass it on.” Honey bees can’t speak, of course, but scientists have found that the insects combine teamwork and chemicals to relay the queen’s location to the rest of the community, revealing an extraordinary means of long distance, mass communication.

Individual honey bees communicate with the chemical called pheromones, which scientists have long known. But just how these individual signals work together to gather tens of thousands of bees around a queen has remained a mystery.

In the new study, Dieu My Nguyen, a scientist at the University of Colorado, and his colleagues focused on a colony of western honey bees, the most common honey bee species in the world. The researchers set up a flat, pizza box–size arena with a transparent ceiling, in which the bees could walk around, but not fly. They put the queen bee into a cage on one side and released the worker honey bees on the other. The scientists then recorded the insects’ movements from above with a camera and an AI software tracking bees that were releasing pheromones.

Once the first worker honey bees located the queen, they began to gather chains of evenly spaced bees that extended outward from the queen, with each bee sending out pheromones to its neighbor down the line. The findings are the first direct observations of this collective communication in honey bees. Like smelly bread crumbs, the branching communication lines guided far-off honey bees back to the queen’s location — a feat no single bee could achieve alone.

Mark Carroll, an insect biologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cautions that the work was done in a closed, practically 2D space. In reality, he notes, honey bee colonies are 3D, and they often have to fight with elements like wind and rain, which make communicating more complicated. “The next step will be to observe natural honey bee swarms and see if they’re actually doing this.” he says.