【推荐1】Worldwide, millions of tons of fruits and vegetables are thrown away each year because of their less than perfect appearance. Intermarché, the third largest supermarket chain in France, decided to tackle such waste by changing how we view “ugly” produce.

Challenging the “business-as-usual” model, Intermarché decided to change the system and bought imperfect produce from growers that they normally would have thrown away, because it wasn’t pretty enough.

How did Intermarché celebrate such imperfect produce they called “inglorious fruits and vegetables”? By creating a special print, radio and film campaign designed.to particularly promote the produce, launching in-store branding and providing special labeling, and discounting “ugly” produce cost by 30 percent. Stores also offered samples to hesitant shoppers, tastefully proving that the produce was no different from standard fruits and vegetables.

It worked. Sales skyrocketed and Intermarché expanded the program by offering a special line of “inglorious” vegetable soups and fruit juices for purchase. On average, each stores old 1.2 tons during the first two days of the launch. Intermarché also experienced a 24 percent increase in foot traffic. Moreover, there was a big impact in the media. Journalists jumped onboard, suggesting every supermarket should be doing the same as Intermarché. Incredibly, 21 million people overall were introduced to the campaign via media sources.

Why was the campaign so shareable? Not only was there branding campaign socially and environmentally responsible, it was also comedic and visually eye-catching. The inglorious fruits and vegetables were shown in a way that reminded people of cartoon or movie characters. Each “character” was given its own special name, personality, and tagline(宣传语). “The Ridiculous Potato”, “The Ugly Carrot”, and “The Failed Lemon” were uniquely shaped, but were under the spotlight and showcased as if they were perfect celebrities. The campaign was a success and it changed how people thought about imperfect produce.

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【推荐3】Tonal languages use pitch (音调) to distinguish words that otherwise might sound the same. In Mandarin, for instance, mă means horse whereas mã means mother. Nontonal languages like Spanish sometimes include pitch changes to suggest emotion, for example, but not to change a word’s meaning.

As a Mandarin speaker and musician, Jingxuan Liu wondered about the crossover (融合) between language and music. While studying at Duke University, Liu helped analyze the musical abilities of nearly half a million people from 203 countries. Her colleagues had launched an online game in which participants completed several musical tasks, including identifying matching melodies at different pitches and finding beat tracks that fit songs’ rhythms.

On average, native speakers of the 19 represented tonal languages were better at the melody task compared with speakers of 29 nontonal languages. And the effect wasn’t small a tonal first language strengthened melodic understanding by about half the amount that music lessons did, which was also surveyed. But tonal languages speakers tended to be worse at the rhythm task.

Humans must be choosy about what they pay attention to. Pitch patterns are quite important in tonal languages, which might explain the balancing act in music. “You’ve got a finite resource of attention, and you’ve got to divide up that somehow,” says study coauthor Courtney Hilton, a scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Prior research on language and music often compared just two tongues, usually English and Mandarin. But other cultural influences, such as Eastern and Western music styles, could have affected results. By examining a wide range of people, the new study included languages never estimated in this way and reached more generalizable conclusion.

“Our result here is showing that the language someone speaks which is an important part of culture — also shapes cognition,” Hilton says.

【推荐1】Cuba’s first all-female umpire(裁判)team is winning praises by umpiring at top-tier baseball games in a sport that is a national obsession on the island and long dominated by men.

Former baseball and softball player Janet Moreno has been the only one for 18 seasons as Cuba’s first top-league female umpire, but was joined by three others a few months ago. “Things are starting to change,” said Moreno, 49, wearing her black garb ahead of a recent game at Havana’s Latinoamericano Stadium. “This is the first time in the Americas that a team of women works the top league of a country.” On the field, Moreno wears dark sunglasses, firm and unflappable as Industriales and Pinar del Rio fight against each other. “The players have shown her great respect,” said Industriales catcher Oscar Valdes. “What matters is not your gender but who you are on the field and your passion for excellence.” The Cuban four, including Miroslava Cumba, Yalili Acosta and Milagros Quinones, are the only such group in global baseball, according to Cesar Valdes, head of rules and officiating for Cuba’s national baseball league. “We wanted to be ahead,” he said. Even in Major League Baseball, the world’s most watched baseball tournament, there has never been a female umpire.

Preparing for another game this week, the four women swapped jokes and said such camaraderie has helped their success. “I stay focused on my work on the field. I blank out what’s going on in the stands,” said Cumba, 43, who spent eight years previously umpiring youth baseball. Baseball is not the only sport becoming more inclusive: Cuba late last year staged its first official female boxing matches since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution. Moreno, who dreams of someday umpiring the Olympics or World Baseball Classic, jokes that her newfound fame does not mean she must give up her femininity. “When we go out (to umpire)we wear perfume, so that it feels like there is a flower on the field and the flower should not be mistreated,” she said.

【推荐3】Trees are magicians with carbon, pulling it out of the air at remarkable rates to store it in their bodies. They are so good at removing this greenhouse gas that “planting trees” is often synonymous with doing environmental good.

And lots of people are planting trees. The number of tree-planting organizations has grown by almost 300 percent in the past 30 years, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Biological Conservation. But while tree planting can capture a great amount of carbon, it is hardly a silver bullet for the climate crisis — express estimate that even if we maximized our available lands for trees, this alone would not be enough to counteract carbon emissions caused by humans. Plus, many plantations grow the same few species in monocultures, which can hurt local biodiversity.

The minority of tree plantations are set up with carbon capture solely, or even primarily in mind, says Jacob Bukoski, a forestry scientist at Oregon State University. Most trees are planted with the goal of harvesting timber or wood pulp (木浆) for paper. Tree-planting organizations are more likely to create plantations for commercial reasons, the authors of the 2021 paper also note, rather than for biodiversity or carbon capture.

In forestry, there’s a saying that you have to plant “the right tree in the right place, for the right reason.” But when many tree plantations are established for commercial purposes, the tree that is planted is often not the “right” tree, says Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez, an ecologist at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

In a paper published recently in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Aguirre-Gutiérrez and colleagues argue that focusing on the goal of carbon removal by natural process causes organizations to ignore the importance of restoring balanced ecosystems. The result is a collection of trees that do not support local organisms or promote biodiversity in the way native plant species would have. These problems deserve particular notice in tropical areas where land is vast, and conditions such as stable temperatures and high humidity promote tree growth, as ignoring them while planting trees is damaging. When plantations increased the woody cover of the Brazilian savannah by 40 percent, this “resulted in an about 30 percent reduction in the diversity of plants and ants,” Aguirre-Gutiérrez and his co-authors write in the new paper.

Aguirre-Gutiérrez doesn’t want to discourage people from growing more trees, he says. Rather, we need a better way to protect the natural ecosystems and species there, like encouraging the restoration of native forest tree species. Local plants will be “better adapted to the conditions” in these environments, he says, which means they, and nearby species, are more likely to thrive. “If we go in that direction, that will bring us the added value of capturing carbon, but also this sustainability.”