【推荐1】Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra warm 2019, with the melt massive (巨大的) enough to cover California in more than 4 feet of water, a new study said.

After two years when summer ice melt had been the smallest, the summer of 2019 broke all records with 586 billion tons of ice melting, according to a report. The loss is far more than the yearly average of 259 billion tons of ice since 2003, and it easily breaks the previous record of 511 billion tons in 2012.

“Not only is the Greenland ice sheet melting, but it’s melting at a faster and faster pace,” said study lead author Ingo Sasgen, a geoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. The study also showed that there were many years in the 20th century when Greenland actually gained ice. The Greenland melt in 2019 added 0.06 inches to global sea level rise. That sounds like a tiny amount, but “in our world it’s huge — that’s astonishing,” said study coauthor Alex Gardner, a nice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. With more water from other melting ice sheets and glaciers (冰川), the ocean expands and that translates into slowly rising sea levels, coastal flooding and other problems.

Though general ice-melt records in Greenland go back to 1948，scientists began making more precise records in 2003, using NASA satellites to measure the gravity of the ice sheets. It’s like put-ting the ice on a scale and weighing it as water flows off, Gardner said.

In 2017 and 2018, cooler Arctic air flowed from the open ocean into Greenland, which made the melt less severe. Several other scientists said Sasgen’s study made sense. “The fact that 2019 set an all-time record is very concerning,” one of them said.

【推荐3】Every time you peel a banana and dispose of the skin, you’re throwing away a tasty, nutritious snack. A recent study has shown if banana peels are blanched (焯水), dried, and ground into flour, they can be turned into baked goods that taste just as nice, if not better than wheat-based products.

Unless you’re a devoted reader of vegan cooking blogs or a Nigella Lawson fan, you’ve probably never considered cooking with a banana peel. But not only is it perfectly safe, but scientists also demonstrated it really is good for you. When their experiment’s products were taste-tested, consumers reported they were just as happy with the flavors as they were with peel-free sugar cookies.

You’ll even get a generous helping of minerals and cancer-fighting nutrients. Enriched with banana peels, for instance, the sugar cookies made in the study contained much more fiber, magnesium, potassium, and antioxidant compounds.

On the downside, adding too much banana peel flour did result in cookies that were somewhat brown and hard, possibly from all the extra fiber. But when batches (批量) were made with flour containing 7.5 percent banana peel, the texture of the cookies hit a far more appealing balance.

While the study only looked at the consequences of adding banana peels to baked cookies, the results suggest using banana peel flour in breads, cakes, and pasta might also be worth considering.

Sure, banana peels are pretty useless when raw. But if they are prepared right, they can actually taste pretty good. They can possibly even extend the shelf life of some products as the peels have antioxidant and antimicrobial properties.

The same goes for other fruit peels, too, like mango skin, which was also found to boost a cake’s antioxidant properties and improve its flavor. So the next time you strip down a banana for the fruit inside, consider keeping the skin. Your belly might thank you later.

【推荐3】L.A. Science Weekend: Natural History and Space

Join in The New York Times Journeys for three days of scientific leaning in Los Angeles. This program includes visits to the city’s most fascinating sites for natural history, zoology and space with experts helping you gain relevant knowledge.

Your New York Times experts:

Kenneth Chang is a science reporter for The New York Times. With a background in physics, he specializes in writing about the physical sciences. His articles have included the mysteries of neutrinos(中微子), and the discovery of a planet around a distant star.

Cornelia Dean is a lecturer at Brown University, a science writer and a former science editor of The New York Times. When she worked in the paper’s science department, members of its staff won every major journalism prize as well as the Lasker Award for public service. She is at work on her fourth book about how to make the best of the land in coastal areas.

John Schwartz is a reporter at The New York Times who writes about climate change. In his career at The New York Times, he has also covered the space program, which took him to half a dozen shuttle launches, two zero-gravity flights, and Space City in Russia, where astronauts train together to fly to the International Space Station.

Anahad O’Connor, who joined The New York Times in 2003, covers consumer health, medicine, science and other topics. As a graduate of Yale University with a degree in psychology and a focus on child studies, he is the author of four books, including the best-selling Never Shower in a Thunderstorm. His work has been featured in The Best American Science Writing, a collection of articles selected by Atul Gawande. Anahad is a frequent guest on national media programs, including PBS Newshour, Good Morning America, and NPR’s All Things Considered.