【推荐1】I would mention a journey I made through France the summer after I graduated from college. I had just finished a seasonal job in Paris and was slowly making my way to Greece, where I was to live and teach for a year at Athens College. A business associate of my father’s in Pontarlier, an industrial town near France’s border with Switzerland,said that he was driving to join his family on the Mediterranean and would be happy to give me a lift.

I joined him in Pontarlier,and we climbed into his luxury Peugeot and set south for Marseille. This man — Mr.D., I’ll call him — was wealthy and fancied himself a connoisseur (鉴赏家) of great French food and wine. Like many Frenchmen, he also fancied himself something of a philosopher, and what could be better for a philosopher than a young, attentive, and captive listener?

So he idled (使闲着) us south, stretching what today could be a 10-hour highway drive into a multiple-day moveable feast by taking the most scenic and snail’s-paced-country lanes, stopping at great restaurants whenever the mood struck him, which was often, and discoursing (讲述) lovingly and at length on everything from language to politics to women.

How could I complain? I was getting a ride to the Cote d’Azur — which danced all blue-green sea and sun-bright sand in my mind — in the air-conditioned comfort of an elegant Peugeot, and receiving a first-class education in French cuisine, and all for free!

I recall that journey now as a range of images — long, straight, tree-bordered roads and Van Gogh fields，Renoir afternoons of dappled (斑驳的) sunlight and shade, rocky restaurant balconies bordered with bright flowers, laughter and the clink of glasses and the music of French filling the air. I remember drinking a great deal of what seemed to my uneducated nose and mouth to be extraordinarily flavourful red wine.

Eventually we reached Marseille and parted company — both of us, I think, happy for the journey and for its end. In the following years, when summer arrives, I think of road trips.

【推荐1】Traditionally, the study of human health has focused on individual and collective groups, rather than outside forces. In recent years, however, we’ve seen the range of nutrition expanded to include environmental components, with the introduction of new terms like “sustainable nutrition” and “planetary health”.

The growing population will put a greater strain on the ecosystem and resources, further contributing to climate change, which is observed through increased temperatures, rising sea levels and severe weather patterns. Altered weather patterns directly affect yields and crop production, which along with non-climate factors, can impact food security. Displacement from homes, decreased access to resources such as health care and illness due to exposure to extreme temperatures can have long-term health consequences.

As is reported, the extreme drought in Ethiopia in 2016 caused widespread crop failure and resulted in nearly 10 million people requiring food aid. Similarly, in the U. S., 2021 brought Hurricane Ida to the Gulf Coast, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 91 people. When the storm faded, extreme heat followed, which was particularly dangerous given many had lost their homes or electricity in the hurricane. Widespread power failures left people with limited access to essentials.

The challenge of feeding more people using the current food systems poses a threat to biodiversity. For example, overfishing, which involves non-sustainable practices that decrease or endanger species, can result in biodiversity loss. On the contrary, “the more variety of crops grown in one farming system, the more adaptable that system is”, Mary Purdy, an integrative eco-dietitian, says. “The less biodiversity you have in an ecosystem, the more impressionable it is to pests, crop failure and soil degradation (退化).”

As more ecosystems and species become threatened, biodiversity will continue to decrease, which will impact the entire food chain. Each organism and species plays a role in the food chain; altering that chain will have a domino effect (多米诺效应), which could impact human health in numerous ways, such as altering typical eating habits based on availability and in some cases resulting in nutrition insecurity, reducing the gut microbiome and impacting the availability of some medicinal resources.

【推荐2】Have you ever chatted with a friend about buying a certain item and been targeted with an ad for that same item the next day? If so, you may have wondered whether your smartphone was “listening” to you.

We can definitely say that your phone is listening to you via your device s onboard microphone. It always has to listen to you so it can hear your voice command and assist you. Why is my phone listening to me? When you ask Siri to find something, this information is used for targeted ads. It’s not different from typing something into Baidu. If you’re looking for car dealerships in your city, related ads will start chasing you across the Internet in a way a virtual assistant is just another search engine.

What’s worse, your device doesn’t need to listen to your conversations. There’s a good chance you’re already giving it all the information it needs. Most of us regularly disclose our information to a wide range of websites and apps. We do this when we grant them certain permissions, or allow “cookies” to track our online activities.

So-called cookies allow websites to “remember” certain details about our interaction with the site. For instance, login cookies let you save your login details so you don’t have to re-enter them each time. The cookie will host marketer’s ads and grant it access to data it collects from you (which you will have given it permission to do—perhaps by clicking on some harmless looking popup).

As such, the advertiser can build a picture of your life: your routines, wants and needs. These companies constantly seek to evaluate the popularity of their products and how this varies based on factors such as a customer’s age, gender, height, weight, job and hobbies.