【推荐1】When a group of college kids channeled their pandemic troubles into action, they never imagined the project would fuel a nationwide movement to tackle hunger and food waste.

But that’s exactly what Farmlink has done since 2020, bringing together hundreds of young volunteers to rescue nearly 77 million pounds of harvests headed for the trash and delivered them to those in need. The organization’s efforts help farmers, the environment, and people struggling to feed thef.

Launched during the height of the pandemic in spring, 2020, Farmlink was initially supposed to help struggling families and food banks. “In the United States, 40 million Americans are food insecure,” said Aidan Reilly, who co-founded Farmlink. “Meanwhile, we’re throwing out over 100 billion pounds of food every year.” Learning that local farms were forced to destroy excess produce that they couldn’t sell, especially with restaurants and schools closed, Aidan and a group of friends worked together to contact farms coast to coast.

In California, they found a farmer who had 13,000 eggs that could be donated, and Reilly offered to do the pickup and delivery himself. That was the first of many more deliveries. With “we’ll come to you” as their catchphrase, the group rented trucks and attempted to do all the food pickup and deliveries themselves.

The students ultimately got a welcome help from Uber Freight, and with the help of professional drivers, they moved more than one million pounds of produce from farms to food banks within just two months, transforming their passion project into a massive logistics (物流) operation in the process. Word spread, and more and more young people at home during the pandemic reached out to help.

Farmlink has worked with more than 100 farms and 300 communities in the US, rescuing and moving enough food to distribute more than 64 million meals.

【推荐2】The Healing Power of Water

Water can help.     1     They include reducing anxiety, easing mental tiredness and refreshing us. Here’s some advice on how to control and use the healing power of water.

● Remember that all water counts.

You likely have some close by, even if it is just a stream alongside the road.     2     Then ranch out to water you can visit on the weekend or a vacation.

Urban water matters — rivers, canals and fountains.     3     If you can’t get to actual water, then paintings, photographs, videos and movies can produce some of the same benefits.

Even virtual reality helps. In research studies, computer-generated virtual reality water scenes boosted participants’ moods, likely because they got to interact with the virtual environment.

●     4    

Frequency makes a big difference. A 2019 study found that it takes at least two hours a week in nature to improve our well-being, although that time can be broken into smaller stretches. A more recent study found that spending a similar amount of time near water has the same benefits. Scientists also have found that people who peered into aquariums (水族馆) had lower heart rates and better moods after 15 minutes.

● Try a water sport.

And get good at it. This will help you experience a flow state where time and your worries fall away as you become fully engaged in what you are doing. When you become good at an activity, your brain changes. It forms new neural (神经的) pathways, which become faster and stronger.     5    

【推荐3】Identifying common bird species through their song has never been easier, with numerous phone apps and software available to both ecologists and the public. But what if the identification software has never heard a particular bird before, or only has a small sample of recordings to reference? This is a problem facing ecologists and conservationists monitoring some of the world’s rarest birds.

To overcome this problem, researchers at the University of Moncton, Canada, have developed ECOGEN, a first-of-its-kind deep learning tool that can generate life-like bird sounds to enhance the samples of under-represented species. These can then be used to train audio identification tools used in ecological monitoring.

The researchers found that adding artificial bird song samples generated by ECOGEN to a bird song identifier improved the bird song classification accuracy by 12% on average.

Dr. Nicolas Lecomte, one of the lead researchers, said: “Due to significant global changes in animal populations, there is an urgent need for autonomous tools, such as acoustic monitoring, to track shifts in biodiversity. However, the Al models used to identify species in acoustic monitoring lack comprehensive reference libraries.” With ECOGEN, you can address this gap by creating new instances of bird sounds to support AI models.

The researchers say that creating bird songs in this way can contribute to the conservation of endangered bird species and also provide valuable insight into their vocalisations, behaviours and habitat preferences. The ECOGEN tool can also be used to help conserve extremely rare species. For instance, it could be used to help conserve the critically endangered regent honeyeaters (摄政蜜鸟), from which young individuals are unable to learn their species’ songs because there aren’t enough adult birds to learn from.

The tool could benefit other types of animal as well. Dr. Lecomte added, “While ECOGEN was developed for birds, we’re confident that it could be applied to mammals, fish, insects and amphibians.”

As well as its versatility, a key advantage of the ECOGEN tool is its accessibility, due to it being open source and able to be used on even basic computers.

【推荐1】After a very long battle with cancer, Steve Jobs died at the age of 56. Millions of people worldwide were in deep sorrow for his death. His Apple products, like Michael Jackson’s songs, touched people’s hearts and changed their lives.

Jobs was not an inventor, but he was an innovator (创新者), and a businessman. Based on others’ technology, he designed products of great style for easy use. And he made Apple products seem cool! The iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad were always the coolest products on the market.

Steve Jobs was also a good example of “The American Dream”. He came from humble (低下的) beginnings. He had been an adopted child in a working class family. He dropped out of college early and started Apple in his garage. But his success was soon followed by bad luck.

Jobs was fired as CEO of the company in 1985, but that setback did not stop him. Jobs built a new computer company and also started Pixar. Later, when Apple was in trouble, Jobs was brought back to save the company — and he did it!

Jobs is a great role model for young people. He had a dream and he took chances (even foolish chances, he admitted) to achieve that dream. He suffered setbacks in business, but he didn’t give up his dream. In the end, he left some inspiring words for young innovators: “Stay hungry, stay foolish!”

【推荐2】Quiet classes, quite a few exams and long hours at school…This might sound like the daily life of many Chinese high school students. But a group of 50 Grade 9 students from Bohunt School in Hampshire, UK, decided to try out Chinese schools for four weeks. This idea has been made into a BBC documentary called Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School.

Five Chinese teachers came to a UK school to teach the British students in Chinese way, they came from some excellent schools in big cities including Nanjing and Xi’ an. One month later, students in Chinese classes would have the same tests as other British students in math, science and Mandarin to see who would test better.

The Chinese teachers came in with full confidence, but they quickly found discipline was their biggest challenge. “When I walked into the classroom, some students were chatting, some students were eating, somebody was even putting make-up on her face. I had to control myself, or I would have gone crazy,” said one of the teachers, Li Aiyun.

The British students also complained. Many of them found the classes boring. “In class, we just repeat, repeat, repeat and copy a lot of notes from the board,” one student said.

The students finally took the tests, and the results came out on August 18^th. The Chinese class did better, Chinese teachers were happy, but they thought it was because those students are more hard-working. They also realized their teaching way was “a bit too rigid”, “It’s very hard to say which education system is better. But I think we can learn from each other,” said Li.

The British teachers also believe the results are very important. Neil Strowger, the headmaster of Bohunt said: “We probably do need a longer day at school, but do we really want children to work 15 to 16 hours a day?”