【推荐2】We are what we eat,and what we eat shows something about what we are in return.So it shouldn't be all that surprising that humans are now apparently eating plastic.

A small trial at the Medical University of Vienna found tiny pieces of it in the digestive(消化的）systems of people from eight different countries,including the UK.The study involved just eight people and doesn't tell us what,if any,effect eating plastic was having on their bodies,which means more research is needed before we know what any of this really means.We already knew that fish were eating plastic.Did we really think it wouldn't reach back up to the top of the food chain,and that the consequences of our own actions couldn't return to affect us?

Does it actually matter?This study can't yet answer that question,because all it tells us is that microplastics(微塑料）were found in human faeces(粪便）。If they're just passing through like unwelcome guests before being driven out of the body,then perhaps there's no damage done.If there were evidence of plastics being absorbed in our internal organs,that could be a dangerous sign.And solving plastic pollution must not be delayed.

Solving plastic pollution is not as simple as some campaigners make it sound.Changing from plastic packaging to other materials would cause other environmental problems,for a start.Bottling liquids in glass rather than plastic makes them heavier,which potentially means more trips to transport them.There is a reason,in short,why we relied so much on plastic in the first place,and even if it were possible to stop using the stuff tomorrow,it would take up to 1,000 years for some of what's being produced right now to disappear completely.

But just because it's difficult,it doesn't mean we can do nothing.There is something really mad about a society that on the one hand is obsessed with the quality of the food we put in our mouths,but on the other hand happily eats its own garbage.The war on plastic,it seems,just got personal.

【推荐3】Using too much water or throwing rubbish into our rivers are clear ways that humans can put our water supply in danger, but we also affect our water supply in less obvious ways. You may wonder how paving(铺砌) a road can lead to less usable fresh water. A major part of the water we use every day is groundwater. Groundwater does not come from lakes or rivers. It comes from underground. The more roads and parking lots we pave, the less water can flow into the ground to become groundwater.

Human activity is not responsible for all water shortages(缺乏). Drier climates are of course more likely to have droughts(干旱) than areas with more rainfall, but in any case, good management can help to make sure there is enough water to meet our basic needs .

Thinking about the way we use water every day can make a big difference, too. In the United States, a family of four can use 1.5 tons of water a day! This shows how much we depend on water to live, but there’s a lot we can do to lower the number.

You can take steps to save water in your home. To start with, use the same glass for your drinking water all day. Wash it only once a day. Run your dishwasher only when it is full. Help your parents fix any leaks(滴水) in your home. You can even help to keep our water supply clean by recycling batteries instead of throwing them away.

【推荐2】The world’s most famous tire (轮胎) graveyard (坟地) of 42 million tires in the sands of Kuwait is finally being cleaned up and recycled. This news in itself would be a major relief to locals who have to suffer from the clouds of black smoke arising during fires. But the government isn’t stopping there. They are aiming to create a green city of 25,000 homes in line with a post-oil Persian Gulf, with a focus on sustainability and tourism.

The first step is to clear the ground. The Salmiya area, nicknamed “Rubber (橡胶) Mountain”, is formed from hundreds of small mountains of spent tires — a reaction from the one million cars which were added to Kuwait’s roads over the decade.

EPSCO Global General Trading recycling company has opened a recycling plant for the tires, where they’ve been collected, sorted, cut up, and pressed into other materials like rubbery coloured flooring tiles (铺地砖). The plant opened in January of 2021, and can recycle up to 3 million tires a year. The recycled material is then exported out to nearby gulf neighbours and Asia. In the place of the tires will be South Saad Al-Abdullah City, a green city characterizing a new era in the Middle-Eastern country.

Spent tires are a major environmental problem worldwide due to the room they take up and the chemicals they can release.

“We have moved from a difficult stage that was characterized by great environmental risk,” says Oil Minister Mohammed al-Fares. “Today the area is becoming clean and all tires are being removed to begin the launch of the project of Saad Al-Abdullah city.”

Expected to cost €3.3 billion and require 30 years to complete, the city hopes to feature green technology, probably like the kind one can see in other cities on the Persian Gulf, both existing and not. Saudi Arabia is planning to build a zero-emissions, car-less future city that’s centered around access to big data rather than water or crops.

【推荐3】Salad plants have already been grown in old shelters and tunnels. Urban farming is a regular topic of interest at places like the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, where leaders consider whether the world's food system, blamed for causing both obesity and malnutrition, can be fixed. There are already plenty of urban farming projects around the world, particularly in the US, Japan and the Netherlands, from urban fish and plant farms to vertical farming.

“It's becoming an expanding industry,” said Richard Ballard, one of the founders of the farm Growing Underground. “There're several other businesses starting up in London in containers, and there are other vertical farms around the country now.”

Growing Underground is not a standard farm. The rows of crops could be in almost any tunnel, but these plants are 100 feet below Clapham High Street and show that urban agriculture is, in some cases at least, not a fad. The underground farm has occupied a part of the Second World War air-raid shelters for nearly five years, and Ballard is planning to expand into the rest of the space later this year.

Growing Underground supplies herb and salad mixes to grocery shops, supermarkets and restaurants. Being in London creates an advantage, Ballard says, as they can harvest and deliver in an hour.

He adds other advantages. Being underground means temperatures never go below 15℃ surface greenhouses need to be heated. They can do more harvests: 60 crops a year, compared with about seven in a traditional farm. Electricity to power the lights is a major cost, but the company believes renewable energy will become cheaper.

Similar British companies include the Jones Food Company in Lincolnshire, while in the US AeroFarms has several projects in New Jersey, and Edenworks in Brooklyn.

【推荐1】If you have a chance to take a walk in a park, look carefully at the people walking their dogs. You’ll probably find friendly-looking people with friendly dogs; quiet people with quiet dogs; large men with oversized dogs and long-haired women with long-eared dogs. As you’ve probably noticed, dogs and their owners look alike. Have you ever wondered why?

These similarities are so common that researchers have tried to explain them. There are two theories (理论): the convergence (趋同) theory and the selection theory. The convergence theory says that as the owner and the dog spend more time together, they influence each other to the point where they grow similar. In other words, they “converge.” The selection theory, on the other hand, says that owners are interested in dogs that look like them, so they choose those dogs as pets.

Recently, researchers at the University of California decided to test the two theories by taking pictures of 45 dogs separately from their owners. Then they asked some students to match the dogs’ photos with their owners. The students were quite successful with purebred (纯种的) dogs: they correctly matched 16 out of 25 with their owners. However, they had almost no success connecting mixed-breed (杂交的) dogs with their owners. When owners select a purebred dog, they can easily predict (预测) what it will look like later. But that is not true with mixed-breed dogs because it’s hard to predict what a mixed-breed dog will look like when it grows up. And since it was the purebreds not the mixed-breeds that looked like their owners, the research seems to prove the “selection theory”.

But one bit of warning. Although many people look like their dogs, not all dog owners enjoy having the similarity pointed out to them. So, even if the similarity is amazing, don’t go up to a stranger and say, “Wow, you look just like your dog!”

【推荐2】When a chunk of ice fell from a collapsing glacier (冰川) on the Swiss Alps’ Mount Eiger in 2017, part of the long deep sound it produced was too low for human ears to hear. But the continuous shaking held a key to calculating the ice avalanche’s (崩塌) critical characteristics.

Low-frequency sound waves called infrasound that travel great distances through the atmosphere are already used to monitor active volcanoes from afar. Now some researchers in this field have switched focus from fire to ice. Usually glaciers move far too slowly to generate an infrasound signal, which researchers pick up using detectors that track slight changes in air pressure. But a collapse—a sudden, rapid breaking of ice from the glacier’s main body—is an infrasound producer in large amounts. Glacial collapses drive ice avalanches, which pose an increasing threat to people in mountainous regions as rising temperatures weaken large fields of ice. A glacier “can become separate from the ground due to melting, causing bigger break-offs,” says University of Florence geologist Emanuele Marchetti, lead author of the new study. As the threat grows, scientists seek new ways to monitor and detect such collapses.

Researchers often use radar to track ice avalanches, which is accurate but expensive and can monitor only one specific location and neighboring avalanche paths. Infrasound, Marchetti says, is cheaper and can detect break-off events around much broader regions as well as multiple avalanches across a mountain. It is challenging, however, to separate a signal into its components such as traffic noises, individual avalanches and nearby earthquakes without additional measurements, says ETH Zurich glaciologist Malgorzata Chmiel. “The model used by Marchetti is a first close estimation for this,” she says. Isolating the relevant signal helps the researchers monitor an ice avalanche’s speed, path and volume from afar using infrasound.

Marchetti and his colleagues have set up collaborations around the continent to better understand signals that collapsing glaciers produce. They are also refining their analysis to figure out each ice avalanche’s physical details.