【推荐2】Eradajere Oleita thinks she may have a partial solution to two of our country’s problems: garbage and poverty. It’s called the Chip Bag Project. The 26-year-old student and environmentalist from Detroit is asking a favor of local snack lovers: Rather than throw your empty chip bags into trash (垃圾桶), donate them so she can turn them into sleeping bags for the homeless.

Chip eaters drop off their empty bags from Doritos, Lay’s, and other favorites at two locations in Detroit: a print shop and a clothing store, where Oleita and her volunteer helpers collect them. After they clean the chip bags in soapy hot water, they cut them open, lay them flat, and iron them together.

It takes about four hours to sew a sleeping bag, and each takes around 150 to 300 chip bags, depending on whether they’re single-serve or family size. The result is a sleeping bag that is “waterproof, lightweight, and easy to carry around,” Oleita told the Detroit News.

Since its start in 2020, the Chip Bag Project has collected more than 800,000 chip bags and, till last December, created 110 sleeping bags.

Sure, it would be simpler to raise the money to buy new sleeping bags. But that’s only half the goal for Oleita—whose family moved to the United States from Nigeria a decade ago with the hope of attaining a better life—and her fellow volunteers. “We are devoted to making an impact not only socially, but environmentally,” she says.

Eradajere Oleita’s practice is a powerful reminder that environmental injustice and poverty often go hand in hand. As Oleita told hourdetroit.com, “I think it’s time to show connections between all of these issues.”

【推荐3】As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly advanced, there are growing concerns that robots could become a threat. This danger can be avoided, according to computer science professor Stuart Russell, if we figure out how to turn human values into a programmable code.

Russell argues that as robots take on more complicated tasks, it’s necessary to translate our morals into AI language. For example, if a robot does chores around the house, you wouldn’t want it to put the pet cat in the oven to make dinner for the hungry children. “You would want that robot preloaded with a good set of values,” said Russell.

Some robots are already programmed with basic human values. For example, mobile robots have been programmed to keep a comfortable distance from humans. Obviously there are cultural differences, but if you were talking to another person and they came up close in your personal space, you wouldn’t think that’s the kind of thing a properly brought-up person would do.

If only we can find a way to set out human values as clear rules, it will be possible to create more developed moral machines. Robots could also learn values from drawing patterns from large sets of data on human behavior. They are dangerous only if programmers are careless.

One simple check would be to program a robot to check the correct course of action with a human when presented with an unusual situation. If the robot is unsure whether an animal is suitable for the microwave, it has the opportunity to stop, send out beeps(嘟嘟声), and ask for directions from a human. If we humans aren’t quite sure about a decision, we go and ask somebody else.

The most difficult step in programming values will be deciding exactly what we believe in moral, and how to create a set of moral rules. But if we come up with an answer, robots could be good for humanity.

【推荐1】Earth Day is April 22. Every year, people around the world observe the day by helping to care for the environment. They carry out all kinds of activities in an effort to better the planet’s health. One way to support this goal is to grow plants native to your area. This helps wildlife like birds and insects that evolved alongside native plants. For many of these animals, plant pollen is their food. Native pollinators(传粉者)often cannot recognize non-native plants as food. This means they do not collect the pollen or spread plants’ seeds.

Planting non-native species creates so-called ”food deserts“ for pollinators including bees, birds, bats, butterflies and more. Doug Tallamy is a professor of entomology at the University of Delaware. Entomology is the study of insects. He found that non-native plant species can harm the natural food chain, which can lead to a collapse of the environment. “Plant choice matters,” he said. “The plants we choose to landscape our properties with should be determined by how much life can live there.” Humans depend strongly on insects. Without them, we would have no flowering plants, which would harm the food web that supports important animals. Birds, for example, depend on plants for food and spread their seeds while keeping the populations of harmful insects down. Insects support plants that provide oxygen, clean our water, capture carbon and add nutrients to the soil. That builds topsoil and prevents flooding. Without insects, the biosphere-the living parts of the Earth-would rot because of the loss of insect decomposers(分解者).Humans simply could not survive that, Tallamy said.

In addition to providing food and habitat for insects and other wildlife, native plants are able to grow easily and do not require much care. That means less watering and less fertilizing. The situation is a win-win for gardeners and pollinators.

【推荐2】As warming continues, scientists warn the oxygen content of oceans across the planet could be more and more reduced, with serious consequences for the future of fish and other sea life.

    1    . One is the simple fact that as water gets warmer, it can hold less dissolved(溶解的)oxygen. The other reason is less obvious.    2    —either from the atmosphere, or from photosynthesizing algae floating at the top of the sea. The oxygen then spreads to the deep ocean as the surface water slowly sinks.

Global warming is expected to reduce the mixing of the ocean by making surface seawater lighter. That's because in a warmer world we can expect more rainfall and more melting of glaciers, icebergs, and ice sheets.    3    .The extra heat from the warming atmosphere will also make surface water expand and thus make it lighter still.    4    . Instead, more of the oxygen will remain near the surface, where it will be used up by oxygen-breathing organisms.

A low-oxygen ocean may become an inescapable feature of our planet. A team of Danish researchers wondered how long oxygen levels would drop if we could somehow reduce our carbon dioxide emissions to zero by 2100. They determined that over the next few thousand years oxygen levels would continue to fall, until they declined by 30 percent. The oxygen would slowly return to the oceans, but even 100,000 years from now they will not have fully recovered.    5    

【推荐3】One of the talks from the TED stage in Long Beach, California, came from Richard Ture re, an inventor. He is a Maasai from Kenya. And he is very young.

Lions are the top tourist attraction to Kenya, especially in the Nairobi National Park, which is near where Richard lives. Lions are also considered critically endangered in Kenya. One of the main causes of their demise, “is that people kill them in retaliation (报复) for lions attacking their livestock (牲畜)”, says Paula Kahumbu, executive director of Wildlife Direct, a wildlife conservation organization in Africa. She has been studying the conflict between humans and lions, and her work led her to Richard. In one week, she monitored over 50 cases where lions attacked livestock.

One night Richard was walking around with a flashlight and discovered the lions were scared of a moving light. A light went on inside him and an idea was born. Three weeks later, Richard had invented a system of lights that flash around the cowshed (棚), which seemed like a human walking around with a flashlight. His system is made from broken flashlight parts and an indicator box from a motorcycle. “The only thing I bought was a solar board, which charges a battery that supplies power to the lights at night,” Richard says. He calls the system Lion Lights. “There have been a lot of efforts to try to protect the lions,” Kahumbu says. “It’s a crisis and everyone is looking for a solution. One idea was land leases (租赁), another was lion pro-offences (防护栅栏). And basically no one even knew that Richard had already come up with something that worked.”

His simple solution was so successful. He equipped the lights for his neighbors and for six other homes in his community. From there, the lights spread and are now being used all around Kenya.

To get to the TED stage, Richard traveled on an airplane for the first time in his life. He says he has a lot to tell his friends about when he goes back home, and what impressed him the most on his trip was something he saw at the Aquarium of the Pacific: “It was my first time seeing a shark. I’ve never seen a shark.”

【推荐1】Female seals don’t change their spots, according to a new study by University of Alberta biologists. In fact, individual differences in boldness remain consistent over time. The study is among the first to examine boldness in wild marine mammals in the field of animal personality. Animal personality influences many ecological processes, like how individuals interact with other species or respond to changing environmental conditions.

Researchers studied female seals on Sable Island, home to the world’s largest grey seal colony. Over a period from 2008 to 2016, biologist Christi Bubac and a field team led by Fisheries and Oceans Canada measured boldness responses in the female seals when defending their young.

“During the breeding season, we saw that females tend to behave consistently, not only between years, but also within the lactation period of a given year,” explained Bubac, lead author and PhD student in the Department of Biological Sciences studying with wildlife geneticist David Colman. “This provides an example of animal personality, with consistent individual differences observed over time.”

Bubac also examined how reproductive success is related to a seal’s boldness or shyness. Rey seals nurse for 16 to 18 days, so mother seals have a very short window to get baby seals as fat as they can. During this time, baby seals triple in body mass. Body mass is a good predictor of reproductive success because it indicates the puppies’ chances of survival. “On average, we found that bolder females stop feeding those that are two kilograms heavier, compared with the shyest females, improving their chances of surviving the first year of life,” said Bubac.

These results present some very interesting biological questions, explained Coltman, professor of biology. “This research shows that young grey seal moms that are bold tend to stop feeding larger puppies compared with shy moms. However, older grey seals also tend to be bolder. If bolder animals have bigger pups and live longer, why does variation in boldness remain? Why be shy?”

【推荐3】Drinking coffee as soon as one wakes up from a night's sleep greatly affects metabolism （新陈代谢） and blood sugar responses. Scientists published this in the British Journal of Nutrition,

In the study, the UK researchers let 29 healthy men and women take part in three different overnight experiments. In the first two scenes, participants were given a sugary drink upon waking first from a normal night's sleep, and then again after a greatly disturbed night's sleep. In the third, their sleep was similarly, but they were given a strong black coffee 30 minutes before having the sugary drink.

Blood samples from participants were taken following the sugary drinkin each experiment. Results showed that one night of disturbed sleep did not worsen the participants' blood sugar responses at breakfast when compared to a normal night of sleep. However, strong black coffee consumed before breakfast increased the blood sugar response by around 50 percent.

By drinking such kind of drink after breakfast,   UK researchers found that our bodies, ability to break down our food healthily is completely improved. Examining the effects of broken sleep and morning coffee through a range of different metabolic markers, researchers found that, while one night of poor sleep had a limited effect on metabolism, drinking coffee before breakfast could have a negative effect on blood sugar control.

“We know that nearly half of us will wake in the morning and, before doing anything else, drink coffee-the more tired we feel, the stronger the coffee is. This study is important and has far-reaching health influences, and it indeed shakes some coffee drinkers. Up to now we have had limited knowledge about what this is doing to our bodies, in particular for our metabolic and blood sugar control, so we have a long way to go. "said Professor James Bette, co-director of the Centre for Nutrition at the University of Bath.