【推荐3】Indoor plants might look as if they just sit around not doing much, but in many ways they are the unsung heroes of the home.     1    , but studies have shown that they can promote people’s wellbeing by improving their mood (心情), reducing stress and helping their memory. What’s more, indoor plants are easy to look after and are not very expensive.

What are indoor plants?

Indoor plants, also known as houseplants or pot plants, are plants that like to grow indoors. Many of these species (物种) are not ideally suited to growing outside in the UK, especially in the winter.     2    .

Why are indoor plants good for you?

Will Spoelstra, who works at the Royal Botanic Gardens, says, “    3    . I find during the winter months, plants around the house can really lift your mood.” Several studies have backed this up and found that indoor plants can improve creativity, focus and memory. There is also research showing that pot plants can clean the air around them by removing harmful gases, such as carbon dioxide. They also remove some harmful chemicals from paints or cooking.     4    .

Which plants can you grow?

Aloe vera, peace lilies and spider plants are some of the species that are easy to grow indoors. You can buy plants from supermarkets, garden centres or online. Younger plants are often cheaper than fully grown ones, and you get to care for them as they mature — which is part of the joy of owning plants. “    5    ,” Spoelstra says. “It can bring a new interest and focus into people’s lives and help to make the link between home and nature.”

【推荐1】Next time you make a salad, you might want to consider adding mushrooms to it. That's because higher mushroom consumption is associated with a lower risk of cancer, according to a new Penn State study.

The systematic review and meta-analysis examined 17 cancer studies published from 1966 to 2020. Analyzing data from more than 19,500 cancer patients, researchers explored the relationship between mushroom consumption and cancer risk.

Mushrooms are rich in vitamins, nutrients and antioxidants. The team's findings show that these super foods may also help guard against cancer. Even though king oyster mushrooms have higher amounts of the amino acid ergothioneine than white button mushrooms, the researchers found that people who incorporated any variety of mushrooms when having meals daily had a lower risk of cancer. According to the findings, individuals who ate 18 grams of mushrooms daily had a 45% lower risk of cancer compared to those who did not eat mushrooms.

“Mushrooms are the highest dietary source of ergothioneine, which is a unique and cellular protector;” said Djibril M. Ba, a graduate student at Penn State College of Medicine. “Refilling antioxidants in the body may help lower the risk of cancer.”

When specific cancers were examined, the researchers noted the strongest connections for breast cancer as individuals who regularly ate mushrooms had a significantly lower risk of breast cancer. Ba explained that this could be because most of the studies did not include other forms of cancer. Moving forward, this research could be helpful in further exploring the protective effects that mushrooms have and helping to establish healthier diets that prevent cancer.

“Overall, these findings provide important evidence for the protective effects of mushrooms against cancer' said coauthor John Richie, a Penn State Cancer Institute researcher and professor of public health sciences. “Future studies are needed to determine the working system of mushroom and specific cancers that may be impacted.”

Math causes anxiety in kids, which can last far into adulthood. This is worsened by the pressure of knowing that math is the gatekeeper to science and technology that drive much of our society.

Ironically, this well-known feature of mathematics is its greatest weakness.

When our kids ask why they need to know algebra, we promise them that it will be useful. Do we listen to jazz because it is useful? Humans like the practical, but we also know that there is much more to life. As Aristotle said, knowledge begins with wonder, but what wonder is there in algebra or calculus? As it turns out, not much. Yet they form the cornerstone of today’s math education. No wonder math creates boredom.

Happily, unlocking the pleasure of math is simple: Do what mathematicians do and seek out unexplored, unknown, undiscovered math.

Regrettably, the mathematical journey is imagined as a terrifying mountain: The wide base is arithmetic, accessible to everyone. Climbing higher brings us to algebra, geometry, and eventually calculus and beyond. We believe that new math ideas have been nearly exhausted.

In reality, math is alive and still advancing, and most of it remains a vast and uncharted countryside. Fresh ideas are constantly being discovered, opening up new and fascinating puzzles. These puzzles allow us to play at the very edge of the mathematical unknown, and many of them are accessible for our students.

Here’s one: Can every even number be written as a sum of two prime numbers? Even numbers such as 8 and 30 can be written as 3+5 and 7+23. But can this be done for every even number? No one knows.

As our kids try to solve this kind of problems, a deeply encouraging truth will appear in their otherwise anxious hearts: It’s OK to struggle with math since everyone struggles with math.

These unsolved puzzles are the great equalizers, helping us realize that we are on the same level as the greatest of mathematicians, all of us staring over the unknown abyss, looking for a way down into the mystery.

【推荐3】In a study published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Diana Deutsch of the University of California and her co-authors find that musicians who speak an East Asian tone language fluently are much more likely to have perfect pitch(音高).

Unlike English, many East Asian languages, such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese, are “tonal”, so that a word’s meaning often depends on the tone in which it is said. So learning perfect pitch is, for fluent speakers of a tone language, similar to learning a second tone language.

The study looked at 203 students at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music through a test. The students listened to the 36 notes. They attempted to identify the notes, and they self-reported their musical, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds — including whether they were very fluent in an East Asian tone language, fairly fluent or not at all fluent. Deutsch and her colleagues found that students who spoke an East Asian tone language very fluently scored nearly 100 percent on the test, and that students who were only fairly fluent in a tone language scored lower overall. Those students who were not at all fluent in speaking a tone language scored the worst on average.

Deutsch acknowledges that it still remains to be discovered why and how it is that some speakers of non-tone languages have perfect pitch. She expects it to be related to either an exceptionally long “critical window” for language acquisition, a very early musical upbringing, or both.

“Perfect pitch for years seemed like a beautiful gift — given only to a few genetically talented people. But our research suggests that it might be available to virtually everybody,” Deutsch said. She also proposed that parents who want their kids to acquire perfect pitch should expose them to musical tones from infancy onwards.

【推荐1】All of us face a variety of risks to our health in our daily life. Driving cars and being exposed to environmental pollutants all pose certain degrees of risk. Some risks would restrict our ability to lead a good life. And some are risks we might decide to avoid if we had the opportunity to make informed choices. Indoor air pollution is one risk that you can do something about.

Scientific evidence has indicated that the air within homes can be more seriously polluted than the outdoor air in even the most industrialized cities. Other research indicates that people spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors. Thus, for many people, the risks to health may be greater due to exposure to air pollution indoors than outdoors.

In addition, people exposed to indoor air pollutants for the longest periods of time are often those most susceptible to the effects of indoor air pollution. Such groups include kids, the elderly and the chronically ill, especially those suffering from respiratory disease.

While pollutant levels from individual sources may not pose a significant health risk by themselves, most homes have more than one source that contributes to indoor air pollution. There can be a serious risk from the cumulative effects of these sources. Fortunately, there are steps that most people can take both to reduce the risk from existing sources and to prevent new problems from occurring. This brochure was prepared by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to help you decide whether to take action that can reduce the level of indoor air pollution in your own home.

Because so many Americans spend a lot of time in offices with mechanical heating and cooling systems, there is also a short section on the causes of poor air quality in offices and what you can do if you suspect that your office may have a problem.

【推荐2】Dr. Eugenia South, director of the Urban Health Lab and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, is a black doctor who hesitated to get the vaccine (疫苗), though faced with different kinds of vaccine from many places. But she researched vaccine safety and received her vaccine. Afterward she talked to other black doctors and friends, “ I realized a lot of people had the same concerns as I had, but they did not have the opportunity to talk to anyone about their concerns.” According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, only 5% of doctors are black. This means many black people do not have black doctors to talk to.

Many black people are hesitant to get the COVID-19 vaccine. “ They may not be able to trust the information that they are getting from their doctors or nurses or even public institutions,” says Dr. Shreya Kangovi, founding executive director (执行董事) of the Penn Center for Community Health Workers.

In January, Dr. South wrote an article for NBC News about her hesitation with the vaccine. She says her favourite part of writing the article was “ having the opportunity to share my story and to share it on such a platform. I’ve heard from a lot of people across the country that my words had an influence on them and they made a decision to get the vaccine because of what I wrote”.

Dr. South helped start a clinic in West Philadelphia, a part of the city where three quarters of people are black. More than 500 black people were vaccinated at the clinic in one day. She also did a call with 21 pastors (牧师) of black churches, telling them about her experience with the vaccine. Pastor W. Lonnie Herndon says, “ Her care and concern helped thousands get on board with getting the vaccine.”

【推荐3】When customers in downtown Vancouver placed orders with Pizza Hut in September, many of the pies landed on their doorsteps without a person in sight. Instead, diners were met by autonomous robots looking like a cooler on four wheels with eyelike lights.

The belief held by Serve Robotics is simple: with slim restaurant profits, a labor shortage and climate change worries “Why move a two-pound hamburger in a two-ton car?” A handful of other robotic delivery companies have the same idea, but they are facing several roadblocks.

“They’re drawing a lot of attention from people while they’re out on the sidewalk because they’re not seeing them that often and people are excited to see them, but as usage continues to increase, this can cause a lot of crowding on already narrow sidewalks,” said Prabhjot Gill, a McKinsey & Co. associate partner.

Ali Kashani, Serve’s Vancouver-bred chief executive, considers the criticism to be a natural part of innovation and thinks they are “a win-win for everybody“. But he’s tried to quiet concerns by ensuring his robots flash their lights to warn people they are around. They are equipped with automatic crash prevention, vehicle collision avoidance and emergency braking.

However, David Lepofsky, chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, said, ”It’s not like we’re denying people a service. We’ve got a way to deliver pizzas that we’ve had since we’ve had pizza delivery. It’s called human beings.“

Manish Dhankher, Pizza Hut Canada’s chief customer officer, agrees no pizza delivery is worth risking somebody’s safety, but said his company only partnered with Serve once the robots had made thousands of injury-free trips.

Serve robots only made nearby deliveries for Pizza Hut’s 1725 Robson St. location for two weeks, but the pilot generated ”childlike excitement“ from customers and had a 95 per cent satisfaction rate.

But Pizza Hut isn’t ready to roll out robots permanently.

”We want to learn more,“ he said. “What happens when you put this in the snowy areas of Saskatchewan and what happens when there is freezing rain?”