【推荐1】    1     The use of health supplements such as multivitamin tablets has increased greatly in the western world. People take these supplements because advertising suggests that they prevent a range of medical conditions from developing. However, there is concern that people are consuming worryingly high doses of these supplements and the European Union (EU) has issued a directive that will ban the sale of a wide range of them. This EU directive should be supported.

    2     Research suggests that people who take Vitamin C supplements of over 5000 milligrams a day are more likely to develop cancer. This shows how much damage these health supplements do to people’s health. A spokesman for the health supplement industry has argued that other research shows that Vitamin C supplements help prevent heart disease, but we can dismiss this evidence as it is from a biased source.

    3    Science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s predicted that pills would replace meals as the way in which people would get the fuel they needed. This, it was argued, would mean a more efficient use of time as people wouldn’t have to waste it preparing or eating meals. The EU directive would help prevent this nightmare of pills replacing food becoming a reality.

    4     People already take too many pills instead of adopting a healthier lifestyle. For example, the consumption of painkillers in Britain in 1998 was 21 tablets per year for every man, woman and child in the country. People do not need all these pills.

    5     Some might argue that the EU directive denies people’s right to freedom of choice. However, there are many legal examples for such intervention when it is in the individual’s best interests. We now make people wear seatbelts rather than allowing them to choose to do so. Opposing the EU directive would mean beneficial measures like this would be threatened.

【推荐2】During the rosy years of elementary school(小学), I enjoyed sharing my dolls and jokes, which allowed me to keep my high social status. I was the queen of the playground. Then came my tweens and teens, and mean girls and cool kids. They rose in the ranks not by being friendly but by smoking cigarettes, breaking rules and playing jokes on others,among whom I soon found myself.

Popularity is a well-explored subject in social psychology. Mitch Prinstein, a professor of clinical psychology sorts the popular into two categories: the likable and the status seekers. The likables’ plays-well-with-others qualities strengthen schoolyard friendships, jump-start interpersonal skills and, when tapped early, are employed ever after in life and work. Then there’s the kind of popularity that appears in adolescence: status born of power and even dishonorable behavior.

Enviableas the cool kids may have seemed, Dr. Prinstein’s studies show unpleasant consequences. Those who were highest in status in high school, as well as those least liked in elementary school, are “most likely to engage(从事) in dangerous and risky behavior.”

In one study, Dr. Prinstein examined the two types of popularity in 235 adolescents, scoring the least liked, the most liked and the highest in status based on student surveys(调查研究). “We found that the least well-liked teens had become more aggressive over time toward their classmates. But so had those who were high in status. It clearly showed that while likability can lead to healthy adjustment,high status has just the opposite effect on us."

【推荐3】Over the last seven years, most states have banned texting by drivers, and public service campaigns have tried a wide range of methods to persuade people to put down their phones when they are behind the wheel.

Yet the problem, by just about any measure, appears to be getting worse. Americans are still texting while driving, as well as using social networks and taking photos. Road accidents, which had fallen for years, are now rising sharply.

That is partly because people are driving more, but Mark Rosekind, the chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said distracted(分心)driving was “only increasing, unfortunately.”

“Big change requires big ideas.” he said in a speech last month, referring broadly to the need to improve road safety. So to try to change a distinctly modern behavior, lawmakers and public health experts are reaching back to an old approach: They want to treat distracted driving like drunk driving.

An idea from lawmakers in New York is to give police officers a new device called the Textalyzer. It would work like this: An officer arriving at the scene of a crash could ask for the phones of the drivers and use the Textalyzer to check in the operating system for recent activity. The technology could determine whether a driver had just texted, emailed or done anything else that is not allowed under New York’s hands-free driving laws.

“We need something on the books that can change people’s behavior,” said Félix W. Ortiz, who pushed for the state’s 2001 ban on hand-held devices by drivers. If the Textalyzer bill becomes law, he said, ”people are going to be more afraid to put their hands on the cell phone."

【推荐1】The call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of still-uncontrolled pandemic and economic crises in the world's most technologically advanced nations. Not very long ago, it was also unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations and that safety nets would be proven so disastrously lacking in flexibility.

The international scholars’ warning letter doesn't say exactly what collapse will look like or when it might happen. Collapseology, the study of collapse, is more concerned with identifying trends and with them the dangers of everyday civilization. Among the signatories (签署者) of the warning was Bob Johnson, the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept, which measures the total amount of environmental input needed to maintain a given lifestyle. With the current footprint of humanity, “it seems that global collapse is certain to happen in some form, possibly within a decade, certainly within this century,” Johnson said in an email.

【推荐3】In 1665, Johannes Vermeer put the last drop of paint onto a canvas and completed his masterpiece “Girl With a Pearl Earring”. But years later on an April day a cyclist named Janine Strong stopped her bike and watched unexpectedly in her fitness app as the snaking line of her cycling route drew the shape of Vermeer’s masterpiece over streets.

Ms. Strong creates what has come to be known as “GPS art”. It is an art category, which means you go outside with your handheld Global Positioning System(GPS) and start moving. The GPS records your movement by creating the dots type of track. This track is a line that details the path you’ve travelled. When you look at this line on the map, then you can see various shapes. Ms. Strong plans her rides in the shapes of stars, birds, lions-and the occasional Vermeer. Then to complete the digital vision of Vermeer’s masterpiece, she biked almost 50 miles around a city to make sure each turn and circle was accurately achieving the covering of Vermeer’s original.

This kind of art form has grown with the widespread availability of satellite tracking for use by ordinary people in fitness apps. It is particularly popular in the app. Strava, and experienced a surge in use during the pandemic. According to a report, more than three billion activities have been uploaded to Strava since the beginning of 2020.

The “GPS art” can be considered the 21st-century version of large-scale drawings on the landscape, a concept gradually known for the world. It even has its own Guinness World Records categories. There was once a couple who completed a 4,500-mile bike ride across Europe that resulted in a 600-mile-wide GPS drawing of a bicycle-the largest such drawing on record.

【推荐1】Early fifth-century philosopher St. Augustine famously wrote that he knew what time was unless someone asked him. Albert Einstein added another wrinkle when he theorized that time varies depending on where you measure it. Today’s state-of-the-art atomic (原子的) clocks have proven Einstein right. Even advanced physics can’t decisively tell us what time is, because the answer depends on the question you’re asking.

Forget about time as an absolute. What if, instead of considering time in terms of astronomy, we related time to ecology? What if we allowed environmental conditions to set the tempo (节奏) of human life? We’re increasingly aware of the fact that we can’t control Earth systems with engineering alone, and realizing that we need to moderate (调节) our actions if we hope to live in balance. What if our definition of time reflected that?

Recently, I conceptualized a new approach to timekeeping that’s connected to circumstances on our planet，conditions that might change as a result of global warming. We’re now building a clock at the Anchorage Museum that reflects the total flow of several major Alaskan rivers, which are sensitive to local and global environmental changes. We’ve programmed it to match an atomic clock if the waterways continue to flow at their present rate. If the rivers run faster in the future on average, the clock will get ahead of standard time. If they run slower, you’ll see the opposite effect.

The clock registers both short-term irregularities and long-term trends in river dynamics. It’s a sort of observatory that reveals how the rivers are behaving from their own temporal frame (时间框架), and allows us to witness those changes on our smartwatches or phones. Anyone who opts to go on Alaska Mean River Time will live in harmony with the planet. Anyone who considers river time in relation to atomic time will encounter a major imbalance and may be motivated to counteract it by consuming less fuel or supporting greener policies.

Even if this method of timekeeping is novel in its particulars，early agricultural societies also connected time to natural phenomena. In pre-Classical Greece, for instance, people “corrected” official calendars by shifting dates forward or backward to reflect the change of season. Temporal connection to the environment was vital to their survival. Likewise, river time and other timekeeping systems we’re developing may encourage environmental awareness.

When St. Augustine admitted his inability to define time, he highlighted one of time’s most noticeable qualities: Time becomes meaningful only in a defined context. Any timekeeping system is valid, and each is as praiseworthy as its purpose.

【推荐2】Like most of us, I try to be mindful of food that goes to waste. The arugula (芝麻菜)was to make a nice green salad, rounding out a roast chicken dinner. But I ended up working late. Then friends called with a dinner invitation. I stuck the chicken in the freezer. But as days passed, the arugula went bad. Even worse, I had unthinkingly bought way too much; I could have made six salads with what I threw out.

In a world where nearly 800 million people a year go hungry, “food waste goes against the moral grain,” as Elizabeth Royte writes in this month’s cover story. It’s jaw-dropping how much perfectly good food is thrown away — from “ugly” (but quite eatable) vegetables rejected by grocers to large amounts of uneaten dishes thrown into restaurant garbage cans.

Producing food that no one eats wastes the water, fuel, and other resources used to grow it. That makes food waste an environmental problem. In fact, Royte writes, “if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world.”

If that’s hard to understand, let’s keep it as simple as the arugula at the back of my refrigerator. Mike Curtin sees my arugula story all the time — but for him, it’s more like 12 boxes of donated strawberries nearing their last days. Curtin is CEO of DC Central Kitchen in Washington, D.C., which recovers food and turns it into healthy meals. Last year it recovered more than 807,500 pounds of food by taking donations and collecting blemished (有瑕疵的) produce that otherwise would have rotted in fields. And the strawberries? Volunteers will wash, cut, and freeze or dry them for use in meals down the road.

Such methods seem obvious, yet so often we just don’t think. “Everyone can play a part in reducing waste, whether by not purchasing more food than necessary in your weekly shopping or by asking restaurants to not include the side dish you won’t eat,” Curtin says.