【推荐2】Early in the pandemic, refrigerators began popping up in unlikely places outdoors. Volunteers plugged them in on street corners in cities. Anyone could take food for free.

The fridges were necessary to address food insecurity, activists said. Many people lost their jobs during the pandemic and could not afford to buy food. The problem continues due to rising food prices.

Tajahnaé Stocker started the Community Fridge Project, in Wichita, Kansas. She raised $1.500 to buy, decorate, and stock a fridge with food. It was a step toward solving the hunger crisis. “Charity alone cannot solve every problem,” she says. The fridge is “just trying to fill in the gap of a grocery store.”

Volunteers have stocked hundreds of fridges around the U.S. They’re on street corners,outside cafés, and at churches and housing developments. Kristin Guerin runs a community fridge network in Miami, Florida, called Buddy System MIA. The group fills its fridges up to five times a day. Usually, the fridges are empty within an hour. “The need is still really high,” Guerin says.

Often, community fridges contain homemade meals or donations from restaurants and supermarkets. The group 901 Community Fridges operates in Memphis, Tennessee. It stocks fridges with leftover meals from other food-assistance groups, so meals don’t go to waste.

The movement has begun to expand beyond food. Donations of diapers and other baby items are accepted by 901 Community Fridges. The group plans to provide additional services, like laundry and help for recent immigrants. “Anything that might be needed in the community,” organizer L.J Abraham says. In Miami, the fridges are papered with flyers advertising summer camp and other programs. “The fridges have become small community centers”, Guerin says. “They have become a staple, and they will be for a while.”

【推荐1】Long before the Europeans arrived on Easter Island in 1722, the native Polynesian culture known as Rapa Nui showed signs of demographic decline. However, the catalyst has long been debated in the scientific community. Was it environmental degradation or could a political revolution or an epidemic of disease be to blame?

A new study by a group of international researchers, including UC Santa Barbara s Oliver Chadwick, offers a different explanation and helps to clarify the chronological framework. The investigators expected to find that changes coincided with the arrival of the Europeans, but their work shows instead that the extinction of the Rapa Nui culture began prior to that. Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“In the current Easter Island debate, one side says the Rapa Nui severely damaged their environment and killed themselves off,” said Chadwick, a professor in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Geography and the Environmental Studies Program. “The other side says it had nothing to do with cultural behavior, that it was the Europeans who brought disease that killed the Rapa Nui. Our results show that there is some of both going on, but the important point is that we show evidence of some communities being abandoned prior to European contact.”

Chadwick joined archaeologists Christopher Stevenson of Virginia Commonwealth University, Cedric Puleston of UC Davis and Thegn Ladefoged of the University of Auckland in examining six agriculture sites used by the island’s statue-building inhabitants. Their research focused mainly on the three sites for which they had information on climate, soil chemistry and land use trends as determined by an analysis of obsidian spear points.

The team used flakes of obsidian, a natural glass, as a dating tool. Measuring the amount of water that had penetrated the obsidian’s surface allowed them to calculate approximately how long it had been exposed and to determine its age.

The first site the researchers analyzed was near the northwest coast. Lying in the rain shadow of a volcano, it had low rainfall and relatively high soil nutrient availability. The second study site, on the interior side of the volcanic mountain, experienced high rainfall but had a low nutrient supply; the third, another near-coastal are in the northeast, was characterized by intermediate amounts of rainfall and relatively high soil nutrients.

‘‘When we evaluate the length of time that the land was used based on the age distribution of each site’s obsidian flakes, which we used as an index of human habitation, we find that the very dry area and the very wet area were abandoned before European contact.” Chadwick said. The area that had relatively high nutrients and intermediate rainfall maintained a robust population well after European contact.”

These results suggest that the Rapa Nui reacted to regional variations and natural environmental barriers to producing sufficient crops rather than degrading the environment themselves. In the nutrient-rich center where they could produce food well, they were able to maintain a viable culture even under the threat of external factors, including European diseases such as smallpox, syphilis and tuberculosis.

“The pullback from the marginal areas suggests that the Rapa Nui couldn’t continue to maintain the food resources necessary to keep the statue builders in business,” Chadwick included. “So we see the story as one of pushing against constraints and having to pull back than one of violent collapse.”

【推荐2】In today’s youth culture, it seems as if teens are permanently glued to their cellphones, constantly receiving beeping, buzzing and blinking social media notifications (通知). We often hear of the harm of social media to teens and young people, but our latest research on young girls and boys has revealed that social media is not always negative.

In some cases, we found that social media can positively influence their health and well-being, by helping them learn about healthy eating or new workouts to try. Besides, social media provides space for young people to talk to each other about issues of health.

For our study, conducted by researchers from the University of Birmingham and Orebro University, we invited over 1,300 young girls and boys, aged 13-18, from ten UK schools. We were interested in better understanding how young people use social media, and how they feel it impacts their health and well-being. To do this, we selected 84 participants from the main sample and had them take part in small group interviews.

The results showed that social media often had a positive influence on young people’s motivation for being physically active and on their ability to make conscious diet choices. Social media also allowed them to access the information they found inspirational, and learn about different apps they could use to be physically active or monitor their progress. They reported that likes, comments, and views on their social media posts also helped them stay motivated to exercise.

Encouragingly, the young people we spoke to were also highly discerning users of social media. They thought carefully about the content they were engaging with online. For instance, the teenagers reported that they would often ignore content that had the potential to lead to harm, such as images or videos that presented unrealistic workouts or expectations for their bodies.

While the risks should certainly not be overlooked, our findings show that social media can have a positive effect on young people’s health and well-being. A benefit of social media is that it provides real-time, low-cost information, and support from their peers. Making young people use social media safely, critically and responsibly may thus help them continue to lead a healthy life.