【推荐2】Earth's longest artificial structure is usually said to be the Great Wall of China while the second-longest is not a wall, but a fence(栅栏). It stretches for 5,614km across eastern Australia and is intended to stop the country's wild dogs, the dingoes, from hunting sheep.

Australia's dingo fence does not stand alone. Millions of kilometres of fences wrap the world. Some are intended to limit the movement of animals, some the movement of people, and some merely to mark the boundary.

Until recently, data on the effects of fences on wildlife have been inadequate. That has changed with the publication of a report by professor Alex McInturff. One discovery he has made is that more than half of published fence research focuses on just five countries—America, Australia, Botswana, China and South Africa. A second is that only a third of these studies examined the impact of fences on anything other than the target species involved, meaning the animals purposely intended to be kept in or out.

Non-target species, however, are often those that have their fortunes most greatly reshaped by the appearance of poles and wire. Australian fences intended to keep out dingoes are also barriers to long-necked turtles, which travel great distances over land when moving between nesting sites. In Botswana fences built to spare cattle from wildlife-borne disease result in serious interference with wildebeest(角马)migrations.

Not every creature fares badly. Hawks(鹰)in Montana gladly sit on newly built livestock fences to hunt small animals, while fence-based spiders in South Africa outperform their tree-based cousins when it comes to catching insects.

Often, though, the winners are creatures that cause trouble for existing ecosystems. Keeping dingoes out of large parts of Australia has allowed aggressive red foxes to multiply. Native rodents(啮齿类动物)have suffered as a result. Some have been brought to the edge of extinction.

【推荐3】Dressed in long robes, a crowd of young people wanders around royal gardens, with their flowing sleeves and heavily embroidered (绣花的) skirts gently swaying in the breeze. They are not actors on a movie set, but hanfu enthusiasts at a themed event in Beijing.

Benefiting from the growing popularity of social media and a craze for traditional culture, hanfu, a traditional style of clothing once worn by the Han people, has enjoyed a new life thanks to a new wave of young Chinese fans.

A 1980s-born rocket scientist Liu is also a cofounder of a hanfu community in Beijing called Hua Yan Hui. The community was founded in 2011 following a hanfu revival(复兴)movement that emerged from the desire to express national identity and growing cultural confidence. Since then, Liu has been volunteering to support the group.

At first, people who wore hanfu in public were occasionally greeted with mockery, while more passersby asked about their clothing style. “More young people are taking to wearing adapted hanfu as they believe the best way to preserve tradition is to adapt it to modern life,” says Liu.

Yang Kunning was born in the 1990s and works in public relations. She is fond of sharing her love for hanfu online. She opened an account on the video-sharing platform Bilibili and posted videos featuring herself wearing the traditional attire. Thousands of comments and likes pour into her channel as viewers find her videos attractive and creative — blending traditional culture with modern dance movements. “Social media has made hanfu culture popular in China and abroad,” says Yang. “Traditional culture has no national or ethnic boundaries.”

Companies and factories also smell the massive potential in hanfu-related industries. Caoxian County, Heze City, East China’s Shandong Province, is one of the major hanfu manufacturing centers, gathering over 2,000 enterprises and promoting the increase of employment. Over 600 clothes-processing companies have their own designs with intellectual property rights. In addition to domestic clients, a number of companies in Caoxian reported arise in foreign orders this year.

【推荐1】In order to help discover spoilage and reduce food waste for supermarkets and consumers, researchers have developed new low-cost, smart phone-linked, eco-friendly spoilage sensors for meat and fish packaging.

One in three UK consumers throw away food just because it reaches the use-by date, but 60% of the £12.5 billion-worth of food we throw away each year is safe to eat.

The researchers, whose findings were published in ACS Sensors, say the sensors could also eventually replace the use-by date—a widely used indicator of being fresh and eatable.

The sensors cost two US cents each to make. Known as “paper-based electrical gas sensors (PEGS)”, they detect spoilage gases like ammonia (a poisonous gas with a strong unpleasant smell) in meat and fish products. The information provided by the electronic nose is received by a smart phone, and then you can know whether the food is fresh and safe to eat.

The Imperial College London researchers who developed PEGS made the sensors by printing carbon electrodes onto a special type of paper. The materials are eco-friendly and harmless, so they don’t damage the environment and are safe to use in food packaging. The sensors, combined with a tiny electronic system, then inform nearby mobile devices, which identify and understand the data about spoilage gases.

Lead author Dr Firat Guder of Imperial’s Department of Bioengineering, said, “Although they’re designed to keep us safe, use-by dates can lead to eatable food being thrown away. They don’t always reflect its actual freshness. In fact, people often get sick from food-borne diseases due to poor storage, even when an item is within its use-by date.”

“These sensors are cheap enough so we hope to see supermarkets using them within three years. Our goal is to use PEGS in food packaging to reduce unnecessary food waste.”

The authors hope that PEGS could have applications beyond food processing, like sensing chemicals in agriculture, air quality, and detecting disease markers in breath like those involved in kidney disease.

【推荐2】If you like to spend your time up to your elbows in dirt and have the ability to grow plants that don't wither and die, you may have been told you have a green thumb. This is not a medical emergency, but a slang term meant to show one's natural talent for gardening. But where did the phrase come from?

Both green thumb and green fingers have been common expressions in England and the United States for well over a century, with the Oxford English Dictionary citing use of green fingers as early as 1906 from the novel The Misses make-believe by Mary Stuart Boyd. Green thumb, meanwhile, was used first in 1937 Ironwood Daily Globe newspaper article, which described the phrase as gardening slang.

There are several stories about its origins. Some believe it is a result of growing potted plants, which can often have green algae（藻）on the underside that coat hands. Others point to a story about King Edward I and his love of green peas, which were shelled by subservient workers—one would be honoured for doing the most work and having the greenest thumb. There is also the fact that plants contain chorophyll (叶绿素) which can easily discolour your hands.

However the phrase was cultivated, we have a pretty good idea of how it caught on. In the 1940s, wartime Britain enjoyed a popular gardening radio show titled In Your Garden hosted by C.H. Middleton that made use of both green thumb and green fingers.

Why, then, is the phrase focused more on the thumb when all of your fingers are likely to get discoloured? It might have something to do with an old English proverb: "An honest miller (磨坊主) has a golden thumb." The quality of corn flour could be judged by rubbing it between the forefinger and thumb. Mixed together in the collective consciousness, these two expressions may have resulted in the green thumb we hear about today.

【推荐3】The International Union for Conservation of Nature(IUCN) added the Chinese paddlefish (白鲟) to its list of threatened species in July, 2022. People will never see a living Chinese paddlefish again as it has been declared extinct. For many people in China, this might be the first time they had heard the name of the fish that was once a denizen(栖息者) of the Yangtze River Basin.

The fish is thought to have been around since about 200 million years ago. It was among the world’s biggest freshwater species and could grow up to 7.5 meters in length. The last time the fish was spotted was in 2003 in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River in Yibin, Sichuan Province. It was an injured female sturgeon(鲟鱼). After local people treated its wounds, it was released into the river.

According to the IUCN, the global sturgeon reassessment found that 100 per cent of the remaining 26 sturgeon species in the world are now at risk of extinction, up from 85 per cent in 2009. Their decline over the past three generations is steeper than previously thought.

“The extinction of the Chinese paddlefish should be a warning to everyone,” said Zhou Fei, China’s chief program officer at the World Wide Fund for Nature. “It has provided an opportunity for conservation experts to raise public awareness about the urgency of protecting freshwater species in the Yangtze River Basin and educate the public on the need for more efforts to save other species living in the region from extinction,” he added.

To prevent further loss of freshwater species in China, people must act urgently. There is no time to waste. Also, long-term threats to their life and habitats must be eliminated by taking systematic protection measures. The protection of biodiversity will delay the extinction of some species. It’s not something that can be achieved by certain departments. Instead, it requires joint efforts from all sectors of society.