【推荐1】When I first saw my dog, she was about the size of a little rabbit, so fluffy (毛茸茸的) that I could barely see her eyes. She just lay in the corner of the cage, absolutely terrified of me and my family. We fell in love with her at first sight and took her home immediately.

In our first few weeks as dog owners, my family witnessed our dog use the house as her toilet, chew on our chairs, eat our socks and shoes and bark at all hours of the night. Despite the countless dog parenting books that my mother had read before we adopted our dog, we were not prepared for the lovely trouble-making fluffball that came our way.

We entered her in a puppy class, where she could learn how to be a man’s best friend, and spent hours upon hours trying to train her by giving her meat flavored treats for any sign of good behavior. Unfortunately for us, the puppy class teacher and my father, who can’t say no to the puppy dog face, gave her far too many treats for behavior both good and bad, and now, at age 3, my dog is a master con artist (行骗高手).

She purposefully steals towels, napkins, tissues, socks, cardboard boxes, plastic wrap and anything else forbidden, just because she knows that we will do anything to get it back from her. She takes all sorts of things, not wanting them at all, and just sleeps on them, waiting for someone to notice her tricks. It is her way of saying that if we don’t give her whatever she wants, she will cause us endless trouble.

And what can I do with her? She’s my baby puppy after all.

【推荐2】Bird flu has reached new areas of the world and has become a year-round problem, animal and disease experts warn.

More than 20 experts and farmers on four continents spoke to a news agency about the problem. They suggested that record outbreaks will not stop soon on poultry (家禽) farms. They also warned that farmers must view the disease as a serious risk all year, instead of doing prevention efforts during spring movement seasons for wild birds. The outbreaks of the virus (病毒) have continued through the summer heat and winter cold in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Egg prices set records after the disease killed tens of millions of chickens last year. These record prices, at a time of worldwide economic problems, are especially damaging to people who use eggs as a main source of protein.

Wild birds are mainly responsible for spreading the virus, experts say. Waterfowl like ducks can carry the disease without dying and pass it to poultry through waste, saliva (唾液) and other ways. Farmers’ best efforts to protect their birds are not enough.

“In the US, Rose Acre Farms, the country’s second-largest egg producer, lost about 1. 5 million chickens at a Guthrie County, Iowa, production farm last year. These losses occurred even though anyone who entered barns was required to shower first to remove any sign of the virus,” Chief Executive Marcus Rust said.

The US, Britain, France and Japan are among the countries that have suffered record losses of poultry over the past year, leaving some farmers feeling helpless.

“Avian flu is occurring even in a new poultry farm with modern equipment and no windows, so we don’t know what to do to avoid an outbreak,” said Shigeo Inaba, who raises chickens for meat in Ibaraki, near Tokyo.

【推荐3】Thanks to the 1999 Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, 26 endangered species in Australia have seen their populations recover.

It seems like that we're always hearing about new animals that have become endangered, but there's some good news in Australia: 26 animal species no longer meet the criteria to be listed as threatened. Australia’s biodiversity has been in decline, with more than 1, 700 species and ecological communities known to be on the line. In 1999, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act was passed to introduce protections for endangered animals. The burrowing bettong is one of 26 Australian species that have returned from the edge of extinction.

Seemingly these are working, as a recent study published in the journal Biological Conservation reviewed the animals that were previously or currently listed as threatened between 2000 and December 2022, and discovered that 26 species had recovered to no longer meet the criteria. Species that have seen improvement include the charmingly named burrowing bettong, the golden bandicoot and the bulloo grey grasswren.

Factors behind this improvement include habitat management, control of introduced predators (捕食者) and translocation of endangered animals to predator-free islands. However, the species have not been officially delisted at this time. The EPBC Act only allows species to be delisted if doing so will not have a negative effect on their survival, and researchers believe that conservation gains could be lost should management efforts be stopped.

Dr Michelle Ward, a conservation scientist at WWF Australia, told The Guardian, “The key problem with delisting species is that then they no longer have monitoring and no longer need certain funding plans.”

However, it is promising that researchers have found signs of improvement. Hopefully this will continue among these and other species!

【推荐1】The Amazon rainforest is nearing a tipping point, according to researchers from the University of Exeter, UK.

Previous studies have warned that the world’s largest rainforest, which acts as the lung of the Earth, is approaching a critical threshold. But most past research has depended on projections using models, not real-world observations.

Now, Tim Lenton and his colleagues have used two sets of satellite data covering between 1996 and 2016 to measure the greenness of the Amazon over time, watching for how it recovered after impacts such as drought and fires.

They found that since the early 2000s, 76 percent of the region had become less resilient. Importantly, says Lenton, the signal of this growing trouble was picked up without immediately obvious changes such as huge drops in the forest’s biomass or tree cover.

“Why do we care about it? It’s worth reminding ourselves that if it gets to that tipping point and we lose the Amazon rainforest then we get a significant feedback to global climate change,” says Lenton. He says a change into savannah would unlock about 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide stored in the trees and soil.

Lenton says he cannot put an exact date on how far off the rainforest's tipping point might be, but he expects it to be a process that would take in a few years. Other Amazon experts say the research adds to a growing body of evidence that the rainforest is approaching a tipping point.

The changes aren't the same throughout the rainforest. The south-eastern part of the Amazon has already changed to the point at which it is now a carbon emitter rather than a carbon sink.

Matt Finer at the Amazon Conservation non-profit organization says the research could help decide which remaining parts of the forest to prioritize for protection. “The western and north-east Amazon appear the most resilient, showing the need to protect these areas now and in the future from any more damages,” he says.

【推荐1】Some people travel because they want to go to warm places for winter vacations or because they want to visit art museums in Europe. But other people travel simply because they have a passion for it.

Luisa Yu, a 79-year-old woman, fell in love with travel as a young girl in the province of Leyte in the Philippines when she watched movies. “I saw the beautiful scenery, the rivers and the mountains, and that fascinated me,” Yu said. “That’s why I always thought someday I would go to these places and travel.”

At 23, as an exchange student studying medical technologies in the US, Yu decided that she wanted to visit all of the countries in the world, but visa restrictions (限制) didn’t allow her to travel outside of the country.

It took Yu 15years to get her admission allowing her to travel internationally and there were times when she worked three jobs to save money to travel. She eventually took a part-time job as a travel agent, which gave her many more opportunities to travel to new places around the globe.

For the past 50 years, Yu has been visiting countries across the world, even some that are very difficult to get into. She has tried dog meat when she visited the DPRK, explored the beaches of Somalia, and even skydived in Dubai when she was 73. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t go to Somalia, that’s dangerous,’” Yu said. “If I want to go somewhere, nobody can stop me. I want to do everything.”

Yu achieved her goal to visit all of the 193 countries that are recognized by the UN, in November 2023. To date, there have only been around 400 people who have set out to achieve this amazing cause.

Yu’s advice to people who love to travel is to just do it. “Don’t wait for anybody. If I keep on waiting, it will never happen, because the opportunity sometimes comes only once,” she said.

【推荐3】More than 85% of the world’s bird and animal species live in mountains, particularly in forest habitats, but researchers report in the journal One Earth on March 17 that these forests are disappearing at an accelerating rate.

Though their uneven location once protected mountain forests from deforestation, they have been increasingly exploited since the turn of the 21st century as lowland areas become depleted. A team of scientists led by Xinyue He, Dominick Spracklen and Joseph Holden at Leeds University in the United Kingdom, and Zhenzhong Zeng at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China wanted to investigate the extent and global distribution of mountain forest loss.

To do this, the team tracked changes in mountain forests on a yearly basis from 2001 to 2018. They quantified both losses and gains in tree cover, estimated the rate at which change is occurring, compared different charts and types of mountain forests -- boreal, temperate, tropical -- and explored the impacts of this forest loss on biodiversity.

They found that logging was the biggest driver of mountain forest loss overall(42%), followed by wildfires (29%), shifting or “slash-and-burn” cultivation (15%), and permanent or semi-permanent agriculture (10%), though the importance of these different factors varied from region to region. Significant loss occurred in Asia, South America, Africa, Europe, and Australia, but not in North America and Oceania.

Worryingly, the rate of mountain forest loss seems to be accelerating: the annual rate of loss increased by 50% from 2001-2009 to 2010-2018, when we lost approximately 5.2 million hectares of mountain forests per year. The authors write that this acceleration is probably largely due to rapid agricultural expansion into highland areas in mainland Southeast Asia, as well as increased logging of mountain forests either due to decrease of lowland forests or because these lowland forests became protected.

“Any new measure to protect mountain forests should be adapted to local conditions and contexts and need to reconcile(兼顾) the need for enhanced forest protection with ensuring food production and human well-being.” the authors write.