【推荐2】Look at your modern TV, and you see nothing less than a technological miracle. Scientists began experimenting with the concept of television more than a century ago. But decades would pass before it was brought to the public at the 1939 World’s Fair. More time passed before TV sets were in stores—and even then, it took a while until most people had one.

During the 1950s, TVs were expensive, screens were small and the picture wasn’t always clear. Moreover, early programs were in black and white; color wasn’t in wide use until the mid-1960s. Viewers didn’t have a lot of choice, either. Instead of hundreds of channels to choose from, most cities offered only three or four.

Early TVs worked with the use of analog (模拟的) signals. Here’s how they worked: Using a giant transmission tower, the local television station sent those waves through the air. Antennas on the roofs of buildings and homes received those waves and transported the signal to the television sets inside. By 2009, TV stations replaced analog signals with digital signals, which is the standard used today.

Modern digital TV uses different information streams. For example, one stream is for the picture; another stream is for the audio. Pictures are created by basic units called pixels (像素). Your screen has tens of thousands of pixels. Basically, three colors—red, blue and green—form other colors in various combinations, and the picture is created from all the pixels together. Groups of bits are formed into larger units called bytes (字节), which are the link between the content you’re watching and your TV. Your digital smart TV has an interface that allows you to control all the functions. Basically, a smart TV is a computer, large monitor and receiver all in one package.

In the future, there will be more functions equipped in your cellphone and TV and thus offer you more choices. Whether the TV will be a screen for your cellphone is up to you.

【推荐3】A species of spider lives its entire life underwater, despite having lungs that can only breathe atmospheric oxygen. How does it do it? This spider, known as the Argyroneta aquatica, has millions of rough, water-repellent (防水) hairs that trap air around its body, creating an oxygen can and acting as a barrier between the spider’s lungs and the water.

Now, a team of researchers led by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences(SEAS), has developed a superhydrophobic (超疏水) surface with a stable plastron (胸甲) that can last for months under water, following the suit of the spider.

“Research in these materials is an extremely exciting area that continues to bring into the region of man-made materials elegant solutions evolved in nature, which allow us to introduce new materials with properties never seen before,” said Joanna Aizenberg. “This research exemplifies how uncovering these principles can lead to developing surfaces that maintain superhydrophobicity underwater.”

Researchers have known for 20 years that a stable underwater plastron was theoretically possible but, until now, haven’t been able to show it experimentally. One of the biggest issues with plastrons is that they need rough surfaces to form, like the hair of Argyroneta aquatica. But this roughness makes the surface mechanically unstable and subtle to any small change in temperature, pressure, or tiny defect.

But with a new method and a simple manufacturing technique, the team designed a surface from a commonly used and inexpensive material with a long-lasting plastron that kept the surface dry thousands of hours longer than previous experiments and even longer than the plastrons of living species. To prove the stability of the plastron, the researchers put the surface through the test-bending it, twisting it, hitting it with hot and cold water, and rubbing it with sand and steel.

【推荐1】We’ve all been there, trying our best to do our bit to help save the planet, when a really essential item that you had to order online arrives in such an unbelievable amount of packaging that it makes you feel like it’s an unprepared game of passing the parcel.

It’s made even worse by the fact that some of the packaging can’t be recycled. In fact, 10 million tonnes of packaging waste are produced in the UK every year. A lot of this ends up in landfill, two-thirds of which could have instead been recovered.

The good news, however, is that how packaging waste is managed is in for a BIG shake-up in line with the “polluter pays principle”. By placing the main point of duty to pay on brand owners, they will be encouraged to choose more sustainable packaging options which are recyclable and reusable as much as possible. Otherwise, they will have to pay higher fees.

This is a system known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) — meaning that those who have control over packaging design decisions will be encouraged to do the right thing for the planet at the beginning and consider what happens at the end of the packaging’s life from the start.

What this means is that instead of local authorities picking up the bill for household waste management, companies will have instead to pay for managing your household packaging waste as well as the form businesses, and they will be met with the associated little costs too.

And, as an added bonus, the new EPR laws on packaging will also mean that producers are required to put clear mandatory (强制性的) labelling on packaging, for example, this could be “RECYCLE” or “DO NOT RECYCLE”. Of course, we hope that the “DO NOT RECYCLE” category labelling is the minority. It is aimed that by 2030, 78% of packaging will be recycled in the UK.

【推荐3】Labels placed on fast food items stressing their high climate impact may influence consumers to make more sustainable (可持续的) choices, new study results show.

Food accounts for around one-third of all human-made greenhouse gas emissions, while animal-based foods like red meat and dairy products make up a large part of these emissions.

Researchers carried out a randomized clinical trial with more than 5,000 participants to determine whether calling attention to red meat’s climate impact could change consumer menu selections.

Individuals were shown a simple online fast food menu and asked to select an item for dinner. A control group received a menu with a quick response code label on all items and no climate labels. Another group received a menu with green low-climate impact labels, positively framing choices like fish, chicken, or vegetarian choices. The third group received a menu with red high-climate labels on items containing red meat, negatively framing the choices.

Results showed 23 percent more participants in the high climate label group ordered a sustainable, non-red meat choice, and 10 percent more in the low-climate group ordered a sustainable choice, compared with controls.

“In the United States, meat consumption, red meat consumption in particular, often exceeds (超过) recommended levels based on national dietary guidelines,” researchers wrote in the study. “Shifting current dietary patterns toward more sustainable diets with lower amounts of red meat consumed could reduce diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by up to 55 percent.”

Extra red meat consumption can also be harmful to human health and has been linked with increased risks of diabetes and certain cancers. Fast food restaurants are a key source of red meat in many Americans’ diets, authors noted, adding more than one-third of U.S. individuals consume fast food on a given day.

“These results suggest that menu labeling, particularly labels warning that an item has high climate impact, can be an effective strategy for encouraging more sustainable food choices in a fast food setting,” said lead study author Julia Wolfson, an associate professor from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

【推荐2】Too much light at night can cut the number of seeds a plant makes, a new study finds. Researchers put up street lights in Swiss meadows, far from any real streets. The setup was built similarly to urban light pollution. In these now-light-polluted fields, flowers had 62 percent fewer night visitors — insect pollinators — than did the flowers in dark meadows.

The researchers reported a cabbage thistle bloom hosts a guest insect after dark. Cabbage thistles are the most common flowers in these meadows. Fewer insect visitors at night could mean less pollen pollinated from plant to plant (the first step in making seeds). For the thistles, daytime pollinator visits didn’t make up for this loss at night, says Eva Knop, an ecologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Overall, night-lit plants produced one-eighth fewer seeds than did plants that got full nights of darkness.

Light pollution might affect a whole network of plants and their pollinators, Knop and her colleagues now suggest. Indeed, night pollination was not just a lonely business for a few special plants. There were lots of links between pollen hauls by night and by day. Plants with a lot of night visits were often very busy by day, too. Light at night that decreases seed numbers could over time mean fewer new plants. And fewer plants could mean less food and shelter for daytime insects. So a lot of pollinators working the day and night shifts could be affected, Knop worries.

The new study is the first to show how artificial light affects plants’ ability to make seeds. The test is also unusual because it considers all kinds of insect pollinators instead of focusing only on night-flying insects. The researchers paid special attention to the cabbage thistle, but they also mapped which kinds of insects visited other plants by day or night.