【推荐1】With energy bills rising, and global temperatures changing, Deep Green, a small data center startup, and Exmouth Leisure Center have found a way to help each other.

The Internet and computer systems are now integral to the running of most businesses, so there are more and more data centers. In order to keep temperatures down, data centers have to use an effective air conditioning system. In 2022, the data center industry used around 4% of global electricity. The data center market will grow three times in the next ten years.

Since 2020, energy costs for a swimming pool have reportedly increased three times, leaving many centers with no choice but to close. They say by March 2024, 40% of council areas could risk losing their swimming pools if nothing changes. Similarly, data centers have had to raise their fees in order to cover the extra cost of cooling their equipment, making it impossible to offer a competitive rate.

Where most normal data centers waste the heat that the computers create, Deep Green has found a solution to benefit everybody. They have built a small data center in Exmouth Leisure Center, allowing the heat from the servers to heat the swimming pool.

This solution is free of charge, and Exmouth Leisure Center is expecting to save around £20,000 a year. Because the data centers run 24 hours a day and are necessarily built with backup power systems, they make for excellent and continuous heat output.

Deep Green is already in discussion with Greenwich Leisure Limited who run seven swimming pools across London, as well as the Commons Project Foundation who hope to set up a data center to warm 70 London flats.

【推荐2】In 2018, when Hemesh Chadalavada was 12 years old, his grandmother forgot to turn off the gas after she made herself a cup of tea. This experience caused Hemesh to invent the “Alpha Monitor”, a device designed for dementia (痴呆) patients.

He started creating this device with whatever was at home, with the help of the internet. “The first model I built was a huge box. I learnt how to make a wearable device on the internet by learning which components to use and where I could source them in Hyderabad. I started with a hardware device, after which I learnt coding online and moved to machine learning and data science, to help me perfect my device,” he adds.

The Alpha Monitor has two parts, one, a wearable watch-like device, and the second, an alarm which connects to it. “You attach the device to the patient. In case the patient throws it away or doesn’t like wearing it, you can just put it in a bag and fix it in their pocket or sock or wherever you like. Once you plug in the alarm, you will be warned for every tiny change in movement. As soon as the patient gets up or wanders away, it will warn the family members with a huge alarm sound,” says Hemesh.

The wearable device monitors body temperature, pulse, and detects movement, falls and more. It works using a gyroscope sensor to detect even the slightest movement and health sensors for pulse and temperature. It works without Wi-Fi or bluetooth and has a range of 1-2k m, according to Hemesh. It can also be connected to an app for children staying far away to monitor their parents’ movements.

“The happiest I’ve ever been is seeing how the device actually works for patients with Alzheimer’s. It gives me incredible happiness to see the small impact I’ve managed to create in the lives of these families,” smiles the youngster.

【推荐3】It would be difficult to think of a world without colorful clothes. Still, where do those colors come from? The processes that take place before each garment reaches the wearers’ hands are unknown to most consumers. In the fashion industry, it is behind the scenes that fibers and textiles (纺织品) acquire their final colors. But something is about to change drastically.

While the common garment dyeing (染色) processes require large amounts of water, energy and chemicals, now a lab in Australia has developed a cotton that could grow in a range of different colors that may allow them to entirely skip the dyeing process.

The World Bank estimates that 20 percent of industrial water pollution globally comes from the treatment and dyeing of textiles, including the emission of around 72 poisonous chemicals that reach the water supply. It has also estimated that the annual volume of water used worldwide for fabric dyeing alone is 5 trillion liters, enough to fill two million Olympic-sized swimming pools!

While this is still in the early stages, the scientists will be working during the next few months in growing naturally colored cotton plants that will be able to reproduce by developing flowers and seeds. The goal is that they can be used for fibers that will be woven into colorful garments without the need of any dyes.

“Having the cotton produce its own color is a game changer,” MacMillan told ABC News Australia. “This research can really have the potential to transform the global textile industry, because we’re making fibers that are still biodegradable, still renewable, but still have properties that they don’t currently have.”

This new solution is just one way to create a more conscious fashion. The challenge is big but not impossible. The fashion industry has to think outside the box to keep finding ways that reverse the current situation and inspire hope for a sustainable future.

【推荐1】In the worsening economic environment, restaurants a returning to sharing menus to stop hard up customers from cutting back on starters and desserts.

Expenses in restaurants have fallen by 14 percent, from £ 25.38 to £ 21.80 per head, in part because customers are having main courses only and skipping starters and desserts, the research firm Lumina Intelligence has found. This is also hitting receipts from drinks, with the number of meals including alcohol falling from 38.5 percent to 33.9 percent. “To increase profit, restaurants are introducing sharing dishes across courses, including starter and dessert dishes, to encourage customers to spend more,” according to Lumina Intelligence.

Linden Stores, a restaurant that is owned by Laura Christie and her husband and was relocated to the village of Audlem from London in 2020, started a whole new menu of modern British food, with two people sharing seven dishes recently. And, for Christie, it was really a bolt out of the blue. “I wasn’t expecting it to be such a hit,” said Christie. “It was quite a new idea for people. We’re in a small village but it turned out we were breaking more boundaries than we’d thought with this sharing concept.”

Linden Stores is not alone in rethinking its menu to make sharing food more commonplace. A large number of restaurants are following this, among which is El Pastor, a group of Mexican restaurants in London. Actually, stealing your partner’s dessert is a time-honoured restaurant tradition, but restaurant owners are increasingly offering two spoons as a matter of course as sharing food become the latest way for the hospitality industry to fight the recession (经济萧条).

Sharing works because restaurants have become less formal, Christie believes. “It makes people feel like they’re getting more of an experience. Sharing food offers a delicious and exciting way to put together history, culture, and love. It helps save diners’ spend per head. It also helps with the efficiency of restaurants, because you know what you’re having to prepare and you need fewer people to deliver it because you know, ahead of time, what you’re doing.”

【推荐2】A food-tech startup in New York has developed technology to preserve food for months without a fridge and artificial preservatives (人工防腐剂). To cut down millions of tons of food waste worldwide, it also may transform agriculture in developing countries where refrigerated shipping containers and trains are rare or expensive.

Have you ever wondered why we don’t devote more farmland to growing fruits and vegetables since they’re much more nutritious? The reason is food’s spoilage (变质). Farther Farms’ unique CO2 pasteurization (巴氏杀菌法) technology isa simple fix that can spin out packaged foods’ shelf life at room temperature. Their first choice was French fries which would normally need to be frozen to survive trips between production facilities and supermarkets. They can’t be pasteurized like other goods. Instead, Farther Farms puts them into special packaging and fills it with specially made CO2, preventing damage from bacteria.

Growing up in India in a farming family, co-founder Vipul Saran developed Farther Farms as a student at Cornell University. His familiarity with the costs and the trouble of moving agricultural products from farms into towns and cities before they spoiled influenced his development of the technology.

“The whole goal is, basically, how we can look into new food processing technologies that can allow us to create value-added food products from these easily spoilt food products, which avoids the need and the dependency on freezing as much as possible,” Saran said.

Rather than packaging apples or potatoes in a plastic bag, the Farther Farms tech is ideal for value-added food products, not only because they require packaging of some kind, but also because they earn farmers more money. Rather than needing to transport them by refrigerated boxcar or shipping container, Farther Farms would ship them at any temperature, thus allowing food producers of all kinds to reach the maximal number of markets.

【推荐3】We carry smartphones everywhere, taking them to bed and to the bathroom. And for many people, their smartphone is the first thing they see in the morning. More than 90 percent of the world’s population own a smartphone and many couldn’t manage without one.

But most health concerns about phones usually focus on traffic accidents they can cause while driving, the possible harm of radio wave or just what terrible effects they can have on your work or study. The risk of virus infection from your phone is much less of a concern— but it's very real.

A 2019 study found that most people in the U. K. use their phones on the toilet and three in four Americans use their phones while on the toilet. So it’s not surprising that our mobile phones have been found to be dirtier than toilet seats.

It’s been believed that people touch their phone hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day. And while many of us wash our hands regularly after going to the bathroom, cooking, cleaning or gardening, we are much less likely to consider washing our hands after touching our phones.

Hands pick up bacteria and viruses all the time and are recognized as a track of acquiring infection. So are the phones we touch. They can be infected with many different kinds of disease-producing bacteria. These bacteria can cause skin, organ and breathing infections that can be life-threatening.

Indeed, the U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has guidelines for cleaning and disinfecting mobile phones, which, along with door handles, cash machines and lift buttons, are considered reservoirs of infection.

Even if you clean your phone with antibacterial tissues or alcohol, these viruses can survive for several days on hard plastic surfaces, indicating that virus killing must be a regular process.

Use alcohol-based liquid. They need to contain at least 70 percent alcohol to kill viruses on phone covers and touch screens, and do it every day if possible. Do keep liquids away from connection points or other phoneopenings. And get in the habit of putting your phone away after you have cleaning it, then washing your hands.

【推荐1】The Miyun Reservoir (水库) near Beijing plays an important role in providing water to the capital. But not many people know this major project was actually designed by a group of university students as their graduation project. In 1959, under Jiang Nanxiang, the then headmaster of Tsinghua University, who encouraged his students to combine theory with practice, students from the Department of Hydraulic Engineering set about the project.

This is one of the stories told in the new season of Century Masters, which focuses on 11 noted educators, among them Peking University head Cai Yuanpei, promoter of mass education Tao Xingzhi and physical education advocate Jiang Nanxiang, which aired on China Education Television in March, 2024.

Produced by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, Century Masters is dedicated to people renowned for their mastery in different areas. Earlier seasons focused on famous artists, architects and writers. According to Chen Hong, the general director for the series, the new season seeks to preserve and protect the educational practices, ideas and progress of the subjects, and nurture young people in the process. “We want to crystallize the wisdom and sweat of countless educators, a precious heritage for future generations, and open a window to showcase the country’s progress. Many of them also made great achievements in other areas. This series, however, focuses on their contributions to education”, says Chen.

Unlike artists who produce physical creations, the contributions of educators are often theoretical, and so are difficult to show visually. To deal with this, the series brought the educators to life by illustrating their ideas through snapshots (快照) of their work and life. The two episodes (一集) about Ma Yuehan, a pioneer in advocating for physical education at Tsinghua University, explore his habit of regular exercise maintained since childhood, his participation in national and international competitions at university, and the way in which he benefited from being in good health.

【推荐2】Fooling their parents about school was so simple; Robert and Anthony Duran made it a habit.

The twins played hooky from their high school—spending their days playing basketball and listening to music—for two entire years, skipping their freshman and sophomore years. But their truancy (旷课) was discovered when the boys’ father called their high school earlier this month to request the report cards that his sons had repeatedly “forgotten”. “Believe me, I was very upset with them—with myself mostly,” Armando Duran told a local newspaper after school officials alerted him to his sons’ absenteeism.

District policy considers students who are absent more than 50 days to be dropouts. So how to help teenagers facing the problem? Here is the solution. They can enroll in an accelerated career academy to make up their missed credits and plan to graduate a year behind their classmates. Imagine learning maths by calculating how much bears eat each day or by studying the habits of birds in an aviary (鸟舍).

About 100 students will have such opportunities when the school district—in collaboration with the local park service—opens a middle school at the zoo in the city’s 430-acre park. A school building near a park entrance will be used as a central meeting place, but the park grounds are intended to be the real classroom, school officials said. Students can wear zoo uniforms and perform certain tasks during the day, such as feeding the animals.

“The idea is to use the park campus as the school, where kids are likely to get more interested in learning and tend to develop their comprehensive and practical skills beyond textbooks.” said Arthur, the person in charge of the 23,000-student school district. Mr. Zarrella, a teacher in the community, said he is expecting science classes in the park’s greenhouses and history lessons in the park’s museum. “It’s a beautiful place,” he said. “I’ve always felt it has the potential for being an exciting place for kids to learn.”

【推荐3】The following chart is provided by Elizabeth Weise from《America Today》. It shows the growth of the immersive schools in America.

Based on The Daily Advertiser’s report, foreign children at the age of about 5 are having Chinese lessons like this:

Zhaoting Xia, a 29-year-old teacher, holds paper copies of Chinese currency and invites kids up one at a time to use the “money” to purchase something from her pretend fruit stand.

One of the students, a 5-year-old boy, picks out his money and greets Xia with “ni hao”, starting the conversation as he has been taught. Then he works in some vocabulary words to ask for a plastic ear of corn. Xia tells him the price, and he counts the money in his hand before making the exchange. They finish with “xiexie” or “thank you”.

In this one exercise, they’ve practiced a lot in such a “real situation”. And all of this takes place in Chinese.