【推荐1】We are familiar with the button, but no one knows for sure when it came into being. The button might have shown up as early as 2,000 BCE.     1     Just something pretty sewn onto your clothes. Then about 3,000 years later, someone finally invented the buttonhole, and buttons were suddenly useful.

The button is such a great invention. Not only does it slip through the buttonhole, but then it kind of falls into place.     2     The design of a button hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages. It’s one of the most lasting designs in history.

For me, the best buttons are usually round. There’s either a dome (圆顶状) button with a little shank (柄), or there’s just this sort of round thing with either a rim (边) or not, either two holes or four holes.     3     And the way you figure out its size is: the diameter (直径) of the button plus the width of the button, plus a little bit of room.

Before buttons, clothes were bigger — they were kind of used for covering, and people just wrapped themselves in those things. But then fashion moved closer to the body as we discovered uses for the button.     4    

I think the reason why buttons have lasted for so long, historically, is that they actually work to keep our clothes shut. Zippers break; Velcro (魔术贴) makes a lot of noise, and it wears out after a while. If a button falls off, you just sew that thing on.     5     It’s not just the most elemental design ever, it’s also such a crazy fashion statement.

【推荐2】Glitter (小发光物) is everywhere on colorful holiday cards, on the handicrafts your child makes at school, and in the cosmetics (化妆品) you wear. However, glitter can be the bane of every parent and every primary school teacher. Beyond being hard to clean up, it’s also made of poisonous and unsustainable materials according to a press release from the University of Cambridge.

Now, a team of researchers from the university have found a new way to make glitter from cellulose (纤维素) found in plants, fruits and vegetables.Their findings were published in the journal Nature. The special feature of cellulose can bend light in such a way as to create bright colours through a process called “structural coloration”. The same phenomenon produces some of the brightest colours in nature, such as those of butterfly wings and peacock feathers, and results in colours which do not die away, even after a century.

“Traditional glitter is produced by using plastic, metal or even mineral, and the production process consumes a lot of energy,” said Silvia Vignolini, the paper’s senior author. “And the glitter can get into the soil and the ocean, which leads to an overall level of pollution. Consumers are starting to realise while glitter is fun, it also causes a lot of problems.”

In Europe, the cosmetics industry uses about 5, 500 tonnes of microplastics every year. For many years, Vignolini’s team has been getting cellulose from wood and transforming it into shiny, colourful materials to be used in cosmetics and other products. Actually, any type of plant material, even waste products like fruit peels, can be used. Using techniques which allow cellulose to produce coloured materials, the researchers of the team say that their materials could be used to replace the plastic glitter and the metal glitter that are widely used in cosmetics.

According to the researchers, the glitter alternative could be used in almost all the fields where regular glitter can be found. They even say that it can be added to food and drinks.

【推荐3】Chaudhary weaves (编织) together lengths of rope and grass collected from the nearby riverbank in her village, skillfully shaping the materials into a gift box while instructing a group of women to follow suit.

The ropes being used were once the lifeline for mountain climbers tackling Nepal’s mountains and were then cast away. Diverse measures to remove such discarded materials have rocketed since 2019, when the government launched Clean Mountain Campaign.Around 140,000 tons of waste were collected on Mt. Everest alone, which were handled accordingly, either securely buried or recycled.

Some waste is now finding fresh life, transformed by skilled hands like Chaudhary’s into items to sell, thanks to an initiative led by Acharya, an owner of a waste processing business and an advocate for sustainable waste management. She has been working with the cleaning campaign, aiming at mountains like Mt. Everest.

“Metal waste goes through the recycling process, but we weren’t capable of recycling these ropes and cooking gas cans,” Acharya says. It didn’t occur to her that the waste which couldn’t be recycled could be reused until she met Rai at an art exhibition and a solution emerged.

Rai, a businessman dealing in craftworks, helped connect Acharya with Chaudhary and her team of craftswomen in hopes of unlocking the economic value of the mountain waste. With flexible hours, the project gives the craftswomen an opportunity to earn money even as they maintain their household responsibilities.

“While this seems insignificant compared to waste in the mountains, it’s a start. We can’t supply sufficient raw material with waste sorting and cleaning processes taking plenty of time and money,” Acharya says, desperate to expand the program to involve more women and treat more waste. But progress has been slow. “We need investment to mechanize the cleaning and processing of waste in the initial phase to provide the crafting team with enough materials to meet their demand,” she adds.

Now more than ever, communication and connection are important for maintaining relationships with family, friends and community. Whether it happens suddenly or gradually over time, hearing loss can affect you physically and emotionally. Addressing your hearing loss has the potential to transform your life.

Cochlear implants work different than hearing aids. Rather than amplifying sound, they use state-of-the-art electronic components and software to help provide access to the sounds you have been missing.

Q: How are cochlear implants different than hearing aids?

Hearing aids help many people by making the sounds they hear louder. Unfortunately, as hearing loss progresses, sounds may not only need to be louder, they may need to be clearer. Cochlear implants can help give you that clarity, especially in noisy environments.

Q: Are cochlear implants a proven solution?

Cochlear hearing implant technology is very reliable. In fact, it has been around for 40 years and Cochlear has provided more than 60.0000 implantable hearing devices.

Q: Is it major surgery?

No, not at all. The procedure is often done on an outpatient basis and typically takes just a couple of hours.

Q: Are cochlear implants covered by Medicare?

Yes. Medicare and most private insurance plans routinely cover cochlear implants.

【推荐3】The concept of “forest bathing” has long been praised for its supposed health benefits. It can improve mental health and cognitive (认知) performance, reduce blood pressure and even treat depression and anxiety. Yet forests can be hard to reach or completely inaccessible in a world where as many as 5 billion people might live in urban environments by 2030. Some scientists believe that virtual reality could offer an alternative.

VR has already been used to help distract children undergoing medical procedures, and icy virtual landscapes have eased the pain of burn victims. Could virtual forests obtain the same physiological responses as real ones?

A group of scientists at the Czech University of Life Sciences—a psychologist with researchers in the forestry department—has tested the assumption by taking a group of 15people into the Roztocky háj nature reserve for 30-minute bathing sessions. They then used laser scanners to develop a virtual twin of the same area of forest, enhanced with audio recordings. Twenty participants, including 10 who visited the real forest, spent 30 minutes in the virtual forest. Questionnaires assessing the participants emotional states revealed no significant difference between the two experiences, according to the results. As the forestry researcher leading the project explained, “I was aware that the forest was not real. However, the experience was vivid, and it was easy for me to forget that I was in an experimental room.”

There are limitations, of course. Since computer processing power is finite (有限), virtual forests have physical boundaries. Some of the participants said they felt caged when they encountered the invisible forest wall. Power constraints (约束) also mean the computer is not perfect at small details like mushrooms or insects. Nor can virtual environments imitate every sensory experience of a real forest, like the smell of damp leaves. Making other sensations, like the feel of wind would prove more complicated.

Virtual environments can also cause cybersickness, which happens when your eyes perceive motion while your body does not. That is why some people felt dizzy after the bathing sessions. Psychologists and computer scientists hope that further research with larger groups of participants will help to overcome these limitations.