【推荐3】Textile (纺织品) waste is a growing problem for our environment. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported the US throws away more than 11 million tons of clothing every year. That is why some small businesses spotting the problem are beginning to recycle in ways they haven’t before.

Create Good Company is a clothing company that tries to produce sustainable (可持续的) clothing and repurpose older clothing into updated fashionable items. Maggie. Hendricks, the owner of Create Good Company, said, “If you can revamp what you find, why wouldn’t you do that instead of buying new things?   It’s a big issue not to create new waste. I would say we are 90%recycled materials.”

According to the EPA, the average consumer (消费者) throws away 81.5 pounds of clothes every year. “Anywhere between 10%-17%of the waste that’s going into landfills (废弃物填埋场) is made up of things like textiles and clothing,” said Danny Katz with the CoPIRG Foundation.” A lot of the clothing that we’re producing doesn’t even get worn, so it’s going right to the landfill or even being burned and contributing to pollution that way. It’s really worrying.”

This is why businesses like Create Good Company exist—to use outdated clothing and turn it into dresses or jackets.

“There’s just so much waste and so many big companies that might not think about it,” Hendricks said. “Just standing with other like-minded people who are interested in sustainability is important.”

Another important element Hendricks has focused on is creating these items and selling them at an affordable price.

“Sustainability sometimes is green washed in companies and they make things more expensive,” Hendricks said. “That’s not how we become a sustainable world. I think making products affordable is important to me. I want to buy things that are better for the environment without throwing my pocketbook in the fire.”

【推荐1】Aging happens to all of us, and is widely thought of as a natural part of life. It would seem silly to call such a thing a “disease.”

On the other hand, scientists are increasingly learning that aging and biological age are two different things, and that the former is a key risk factor for conditions such as heart disease, cancer and many more. In that light, aging itself might be seen as something treatable, the way you would treat high blood pressure or a vitamin deficiency(不足).

Biophysicist Alex Zhavoronkov believes that aging should be considered a disease. He said that describing aging as a disease creates incentives(动机) to develop treatments.

“It unties the hands of the pharmaceutical (制药的) industry so that they can begin treating the disease and not just the side effects,” he said.

“Right now, people think of aging as natural and something you can’t control,” he said. “In academic circles, people take aging research as just an interest area where they can try to develop interventions（介入，参与）. The medical community also takes aging for granted, and can do nothing about it except keep people within a certain health range.”

But if aging were recognized as a disease, he said, “It would attract funding and change the way we do health care. What matters is understand that aging is curable.”

“It was always known that the body accumulates damage,” he added. “The only way to cure aging is to find ways to repair that damage. I think of it as preventive medicine for age-related conditions.”

Leonard Hayflick, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, said the idea that aging can be cured implies the human lifespan can be increased, which some researchers suggest is possible. Hayflick is not among them.

“There’re many people who recover from cancer, stroke, or heart disease. But they continue to age, because aging is separate from their disease,” Hayflick said. “Even if those causes of death were removed, life expectancy would still not go much beyond 92 years.”

【推荐2】According to the statistics shared by UNESCO, at least 43% of the total languages being spoken across the world are in danger of extinction. Moreover, many languages around the world have less than 1,000 speakers now. Linguists (语言学家) and researchers believe that by the end of the century, at least half of the world’ s languages will have died.

Language activists and people who speak these endangered languages spare no effect to fight back. Scientists believe that digitalization might be our only hope to preserve some of these quickly disappearing languages in the online world.

For example, Oxford University Press launched Oxford Global Languages a few years ago, advocating “digitally underrepresented” languages. They are focused on promoting languages that might have close to a million speakers worldwide, but have little or no online presence. Therefore, they have been creating digital dictionaries as a fundamental building block to help preserve them.

There have been countless other projects like this with the same aim. Another is the Rosetta Project,which aims to create a handheld digital library that will carry more than 1,500 languages. It will be appropriately sized to fit nicely into our hands, and will come with around 13,000 pages of information. Projects like these have as their main goals to ensure the preservation of local languages long after their speakers have died.

Countless languages will continue to perish as the remaining speakers die. Of course, we cannot only rely on digitization to deal with worldwide languages loss. However, it is a step in the right direction. These digital tools offer endangered languages many opportunities to bounce back and survive.

【推荐3】Imagine the feeling of swinging at a baseball going 100 miles per hour-without leaving your living room, or being in race car as it roars down the track, while you are sitting on the couch.

These are just some of the ways that sports business leaders say virtual reality (VR) will revolutionize how people train for and experience sports. Virtual and augmented (增强的) realities are together known as mixed reality (MR). “American footballers are already using VR to better train their minds and read the field,” Ludden said. “This can allow players to perfect their skills without risking injury.”

Canadian company D-BOX Technologies designs and produces moving seats found in cinema and theme parks. It is now moving into sports, and shows its Formula One (F1) racing simulator (模拟器). The seats stimulate the force of gravity, speed and every shaking as F1 champion Lewis Hamilton zips around city streets.

A simulation seat uses pre-programed data now. Someday, though, it could use real-time information sent by the car. “They could broadcast live content through a network in pop-up theaters around the world,” Ludden said. Say you want to experience the true stress of a batter being up against major-league baseball pitcher. “You can have a heart beat added to the sensation on the seat and then you can feel it, boom, boom,” Maheu explained. “When he swings and hits the ball, you can have an impact.”

One day, fans around the world could physically experience every game from their favorite player in real time. Ludden said that current and near-future technology could create “augmented stadiums” for live audiences. Panasonic launched its “Smart Venue” plans which included the overlaying of graphics, advertisements, player statistics and replays on the field of play at a pro football game. “If you are seated in the cheap seats, you can see this really useful.” Fans may someday join in stadium wide games, using the field as a virtual gaming platform,” Ludden added.