【推荐1】India and China are leading the global greening effort, a latest NASA study said on Monday, observing that the world is a greener place than it was 20 years ago.

Data from NASA Earth satellites show that human activities in China and India play an important part in this greening of the planet, thanks to tree planting and agriculture. The effect comes mostly from tree-planting programs in China and agriculture in both countries. “China and India account for one-third of the greening,’’ said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University.

China alone accounts for 25 percent of the global increase in leaf area with only 6.6 percent of global green area. The greening in China is from forests and croplands (农田), but in India, it is mostly from croplands with minor contribution from forests. China’s huge contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part from its programs to protect and expand forests.

“When the greening of the earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate from the added carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere. Now with the data, we see that humans are also contributing,” said Rama Nemani, research scientist at NASA. “Once people realize there is a problem, they tend to fix it. In the 1970s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation (植被) loss was not good. In the 1990s, people realized it, and today things have improved. That’s what we see in the satellite data,” added Nemani.

Land area used to grow crops is comparable in China and India, and has not changed much since the early 2000s. Yet these places have greatly increased both their green leaf area and their food production by enhancing the way of cropping. This was achieved through multiple cropping practices, where a field is replanted to produce another harvest several times a year. Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more has increased by about 35%〜40% since 2000 to feed their large populations.

【推荐3】There's plenty of video evidence on social media about some urban wildlife during pandemic lockdown（疫情封锁）.And while it's been for tragic, costly reasons, we have to stop the human activity all over the world for a while.

On an increasingly crowded planet, wildlife scientists think that this will have some important effects.The only way to measure that, though, is with lots of bio-loggers.

Professor Christian Rutz, University of St Andrews said that a bio-logger is a small electronic device that can record, store and in some cases automatically send information, so that information could be positional information, from which we can find out through satellite（卫星） tracking where an animal goes and what it's up to.

Through using the labor-saving equipment, researchers can get much information.For example, the information about more than 1500 birds' movements and migrations （迁徙）was recorded by those bio-loggers over a decade effortlessly.

However, studying human absence is more     tricky."One famous study in the Chernobyl exclusion zone that I visited with scientists last year, has shown how nature took over a landscape that was abandoned after the nuclear disaster." Professor Christian Rutz said.

Now, in dozens of ongoing studies, wildlife researchers have their bio-loggers on animals from African elephants to migrating birds, and some of that data has been automatically uploaded throughout lockdown.Scientists do the research by focusing on the behaviour of animals without the presence of human.

Professor Christian Rutz told BBC： "And so this is really a golden opportunity to research this relationship between humans and wildlife and we hope that this project will inspire us to make plans for the future and there are some very useful suggestions that could come out of this.”

This lockdown has been at huge human and economic cost, which is why scientists say it's important to maximize what we can learn from lockdown, about how to share the space we have with many other animals.

【推荐1】Nonfiction Contest

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【推荐2】Talking to yourself may seem a little shameful. If you've ever been overheard (偶然听到) criticizing yourself for a foolish mistake or practicing a speech, you'll know the social problems it can cause. According to the well-known saying, talking to yourself is the first sign of madness.

But there’s no need for embarrassment. Talking to ourselves, whether out loud or silently in our heads, is valuable. Self-talk allows us to plan what we are going to do, manage our activities and control our emotions.

For example, take a trip to any preschool and watch a small girl playing with her toys. You are very likely to hear her talking to herself: offering herself directions and talking about her problems. Psychologists call this private speech-language that is spoken out loud but directed at yourself. We do a lot of it when we are young.

As children, according to the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, we use private speech to regulate our actions in the same way that we use public speech to control the behavior of others. As we grow older, we internalize (使……内在化) this system.

Psychological experiments have shown that this so-called inner speech can improve our performance in tasks like judging what other people are thinking. One recent study suggested that self-talk is most effective when we address ourselves in the second person: as “you” rather than “I”.

We keep the private speech we use as children inside-but we never truly put away the out-loud version. If you want proof, turn on a sports channel. You’re sure to see an athlete or two cheering themselves up or scolding themselves after a bad shot.

Making a dialogue with ourselves-asking questions of the self and providing answers-seems to be a very good way of solving problems and working through ideas. Hearing different points of view means our thoughts can end up in different places, just like a regular dialogue, and might turn out to be one of the keys to human creativity.