【推荐1】Thousands of encouraging roadside signs have been planted around the world, and it’s all thanks to one woman who felt helpless in the face of mental illness.

Amy Wolff was first encouraged to start planting the encouraging signs after she had a heartbreaking discussion with a friend in May 2017. “We were hanging out with friends when one of them mentioned the growing number of people trying to kill themselves in our community,” says Wolff. “I wasn’t a doctor. I didn’t know of anyone suffering from thoughts of self-harm. What could I do?”

Then Wolff got the idea to start planting encouraging signs in people’s yards. For the following two weeks, she and her kids started knocking on people’s doors across their town of Newburg, Oregon and asking if they could put up signs with messages like “Don’t Give Up” and “Your Mistakes Don’t Define You”.

Wolff then started receiving messages from other people in the community wanting to buy the signs. Within a few days, Wolff had sold over 150 of the yard signs. That night, Wolff’s husband created a website to sell the signs.

“Within a year, we had news media in Dallas, Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland cover our movement,” she added. By the fall of 2018, Wolff set up the Don’t Give Up organization for her signs. Since she planted her first sign two years ago, she has shipped the organizations messages of encouragement to all 50 US states and 26 countries in 6 languages.

With May being Mental Health Awareness Month, the messages that Wolff has received from sign owners are meaningful. One message from Frank reads: “I just had a woman knock on my door. She began to cry and thank me for the signs in my yard. Her son had tried to kill himself and these signs were in the yard the day they came home from the hospital.”

【推荐2】Instead of getting the latest video game system or meeting a celebrity, a young boy who was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness last year has used his Make-A-Wish opportunity to help the homeless in his community.

Abraham and his mother, Miriam, have a passion for taking care of the homeless around their neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi. The pair have a history of providing food to the needy every third Saturday, and they recently got added help from the Make-A-Wish foundation in Mississippi after he was diagnosed with a rare disease, aplastic anemia, in 2020.

The condition causes the body to stop producing enough new blood cells, leaving patients exhausted and easier to suffer infection and uncontrolled bleeding. Abraham later experienced a successful bone marrow transplant (骨髓移植) and found out he was qualified to have one of his dreams fulfilled by Make-A-Wish. It didn’t take long for Abraham to think of the perfect choice. He would continue the mission that was important to him and his mom. With the help of the foundation, Abraham fed about 80 people in Jackson in September.

When the homeless people got the plate, some of them would come back and sing to them and thank them. “And it just really feels good; it warms our hearts. And my parents always taught me that it’s a blessing to be a blessing,” Abraham said.

Not only that, but Make-A-Wish said they would help Abraham feed the homeless in Jackson every third Saturday until August 2022, ensuring that he could help even more people in need.

Abraham did receive a few gifts from Make-A-Wish, including a new laptop, a ring light, and a microphone to help him start a channel on a social media platform. He also plans to start a non-profit called “Abraham’s Table” to continue his mission.

【推荐3】Five years ago, Meredith Arthur, a 45-year-old San Francisco resident and an employee of a social media company, arrived at a neurologist(神经科医生) appointment in a frustrated state. She spoke a mile a minute, explaining why she thought she might hold clues to her disabled shoulder and neck pain, frequent dizziness, and … “I was presenting my inexpert case to an expert, who stopped me and said, ‘I know what’s wrong. You have generalized anxiety disorder.’” Arthur recalls.

The diagnosis(诊断) took Arthur by surprise. She had been so focused on her abnormal physical symptoms(症状) that she hadn’t considered that they could be linked to her mental health. Almost immediately, it clicked.

“My brain was always in overdrive,” Arthur recalls. “I wanted to work all the time and solve everything.”

She would never have described herself as a worrier, however, and certainly didn’t connect her perfectionism to anxiety or its effect on her body. But, in fact, physical discomfort — not upsetting thoughts — is most often what drives people with anxiety to seek treatment.

“The diagnosis changed everything,” says Arthur. “It’s like somebody picked me up off the earth, turned me around 180 degrees, and put me back down. It was the same world, but everything looked a little different.”

Arthur is one of the 40 million American adults who experience an anxiety disorder — the most common form of mental illness — every year. But anxiety touches everyone to varying degrees. Typically, it’s brought on by a stressful or painful event. Its key features are too much fear and worry, and one of the major factors is a feeling of uncertainty about situations that occur in daily life.

These are particularly uncertain times due to the combination of economic dangerousness, social unrest and environmental disasters. Managing anxiety will ensure it doesn’t rule your life.

【推荐1】New research on ants has firstly shown that insects have the ability to shrink and then regrow their brains. It relates to how these particular ants, called the Indian jumping ant, reproduce.

“In most ant colonies (种群), the queen is the only member of the colony that lays eggs. When she dies, the colony dies. The workers just do the hunting and take care of the babies and the chores.” says Clint Penick, a professor of biology at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. But this is not true for Indian jumping ants. Their worker ants have the ability to mate and reproduce. So when the queen dies, a dominance tournament starts. They’ll fight each other over a month to decide who’s going to be the next queen.

The queen doesn’t have an exact replacement. Tournament winners — called “gamergates” — all assume queen-like duties of laying eggs. The study found that when the ants take on the role of gamergates, their brains reduce its size by 19% on average, so that they can save energy to focus on producing eggs. The fact that the ants’ brains shrink to reproduce wasn’t new. But what scientists didn’t know was whether they had the ability to regrow.

Penick’s team separated gamergates from their colonies for a few weeks. The thinking was that the lack of social interaction and care would make them return to their previous status. It worked. After several weeks, the ex-gamergates were back to being low-class workers — with their bigger brains regrown. “We are now starting to find that there are animal species that are capable of shrinking their brains and then regrowing them, even humans to some degree.” Penick says.

There are still potential suggestions for humans. According to Penick, the brains are more flexible in size than we knew. The brains of ants have some shared features with humans. So now scientists are looking at digging into the genetic and other neural mechanisms (神经机制) supporting these brain changes.

【推荐2】In a new study, shark researchers working off the eastern coast of New Zealand have found that three species of deep-sea shark are bioluminescent （生物性发光的），producing a soft blue-green light with specialized cells in their skin.

One of the species, the kitefin shark, grows to a length of nearly six feet, making it the largest known bioluminescent animal. The other two species are somewhat smaller than the kitefin, and all are occasionally caught as unintended by-catch by fishers. None are considered in danger of extinction, but little is known about their lifestyles and biology.

Bioluminescence had previously been documented in only around a dozen shark species, so this discovery significantly adds to our knowledge,^,, says Jerome Mallefet, lead author of the new study.

In the deep sea, where scientists estimate three-quarters of all creatures are bioluminescent, having the ability to create light can be extremely advantageous. In the depths of the ocean, which receives minimal amounts of sunlight, bioluminescent animals can hide themselves from enemies by producing enough light to match their surroundings. All three species examined in this study have large concentrations of photocytes （发光细 胞）on their undersides, which suggests that these sharks may hide from enemies in just this way.

"The discovery that these three species produce light is not surprising", says David Ebert, director of the Pacific Shark Research Center. That's because researchers think many more species of sharks are likely capable of producing light一Mallefet estimates that perhaps 10 percent of the 540 known species of sharks are bioluminescent. But Ebert thinks even this is far from the truth. "As the deep-sea shark research advances, that number will go even higher," he says.

Both Ebert and Mallefet hope that more attention will be paid to deep-sea sharks in the future, as the creatures and their habitat are understudied and under threat. "A lot of people know that sharks can bite," says Mallefet, "but few people know that they can produce light in the dark. ”