【推荐2】Bei Bei’s 2019 departure from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, to join the giant panda breeding program in China’s Wolong Nature Reserve, left a big blank for fans. What made the loss of the adorable panda even more upset was the belief that his mother, Mei Xiang, was too old to have more cubs. However, on August21, 2020, the 22-year-old proved experts wrong by giving birth to a healthy cub.

“Giant pandas are an international symbol of endangered wildlife, and with the birth of this precious cub we are thrilled to offer the world a much-needed moment of pure joy,” said Steve Monfort, director of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. “Because Mei Xiang is of advanced pregnant age, we knew the chances of her having a cub were slim. However, we wanted to give her one more opportunity to contribute to her species’ survival. I am incredibly proud of our animal care and science teams, whose expert knowledge and skills in giant panda behavior were vital to this conservation success.”

The zookeepers, who witnessed the “miracle” birth on the live panda camera, say Mei Xiang took to her new cub instantly and has since been seen lovingly caring for it. Nutrition is significant for the survival of the precious cub. Newborn pandas, which weigh just three to five pounds at birth, are unable to crawl or see for about two months. They, therefore, entirely rely on the mother’s warmth, milk, and protection. It will be several days before the cub, whose sex is still unknown, can be brought out from its mother for a thorough physical exam. However, thus far, the cub, which can be heard squawking on the live camera feed, appears to be perfectly healthy.

The newborn’s parents, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, are part of the Zoo’s cooperative breeding agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association. Similar to its brothers and sisters-Tai Shan, Bao Bao, and Bei Bei-upon turning four, the new baby panda will be sent to China to try to increase the numbers of the endangered species, which currently total just 1,864 specimens in the wild.

【推荐1】People in many cities risk their lives every time they cross the street. In New York City, pedestrian deaths accounted for the majority of yearly traffic fatalities continually since 2006, according to government data. For visually impaired people, the situation is uniquely dangerous and getting worse.

Over the past summer designers at Touch Graphics, a company that makes navigation (导航) technology that uses information from several senses, have been working with New York's Department of Transportation to test tactile (能触知的) maps at a busy intersection near a resource center for blind people. The project is part of the city's initiative to eliminate pedestrian traffic fatalities. If the trial is successful, these maps could be installed at all New York's 13,000 traffic lights, according to Touch Graphics president Steven Landau.

Landau says such maps are important because increasingly complex street layouts are making it harder for visually impaired pedestrians to know what they will find after stepping on the road. The technology has been tried in Denmark and Sweden, but the New York trial is a first for North America, according to Landau. San Francisco and Toronto may soon test such systems as well, he adds.

Landau's team created the maps using ultraviolet (紫外线) printing: ink is printed on a surface, then passed under a UV light that cures it before it can air-dry. This process allows for more detail and less ink spreading, which is especially useful creating raised graphics that are clear enough to be felt by touch. Each map uses 3-D shapes and bright, high-contrast colors to show the intersection from one of the eight possible perspectives of someone about to cross it. A raised circle labeled "You are here" in both Braille and standard text shows a pedestrian's starting point, and a dotted line traces the path to be walked. Oval shapes symbolize vehicles, with raised arrows at one end of each "car" to show the direction of traffic in a given lane. A row of black bars represents a bike lane, and medians and islands are customized to show their actual shapes.

【推荐3】Facing the growing digital economy and new positions incubated (孵化) in the sector such as deliverymen and live-streaming hosts, young people, especially those born after 2000, are expressing a stronger willingness for flexible work relations with companies, and also wish to become “digital workers” with flexible work locations and schedules.

A report from Peking University’s National School of Development released on Wednesday said that nearly 66 percent of surveyed employees born after 2000 prefer to work from home. The number is higher than surveyed people born after 1970, with about 54. 4 percent of them preferring the new way.

“The Internet can do anything for me. I check emails from my clients and submit my proposals through WeChat, then we discuss plans via teleconference. I love working from home actually,” said Mi Lu, a 28-year-old new media operator in Beijing. “It’s a much more convenient and cooler thing. We work everywhere, perhaps in a cafe, or on a bullet train or even on the table of a restaurant.”

Hu Jiayin, an associate professor in Peking University’s National School of Development, concluded that their survey shows that young people desire freedom in their jobs, but also wish for stability in their careers because of uncertainties brought by the fast-changing digital economy.

“But the development of the digital economy also brings great uncertainties and a sense of insecurity to the working population, so we’ve found some interesting things during our surveys that over 30 percent of job seekers we’ve surveyed wish to have a stable job at state-owned companies,” she added.

Li Qiang, vice-president of Zhaopin, said that the greatest risk to those seeking flexible work is whether the company pays the salary fully and on time. “It’s necessary for job seekers to set up a long-term development plan, rather than be shortsighted.” He added that companies may bear risks that flexible employees can’t deliver high-quality work in a limited time period, which requires the companies to establish a sound work delivery standard to help evaluate employee performance.

【推荐2】Lonely? You’re hardly alone. Since COVID-19 struck, few teens have been able to spend as much time at school or with friends as they used to. But even before the COVID-19, loneliness was becoming a growing problem for teens. And the trend (趋势) appears throughout industrial nations across the world. That ’s the finding of a new study.

In America, the share of lonely teens jumped from 18 percent in 2012 to 37 percent in 2018. Overall， during those years, the share of girls reporting loneliness basically doubled in the countries studied. The increase in boys was somewhat smaller.

The new study connected rising loneliness to a greater use of smartphones and the Internet. Jean Twenge works at San Diego State University. He and his team found that since 2012, U. S. teens have been spending less time together face-to-face. So this increase in loneliness started long before the COVID-19 made such meet-ups unsafe.

“Smartphones can help us connect with friends,” says Twenge. “But they can also make us feel excluded.” Girls，especially, may feel this way. One reason may be that they post more photos than boys. Studies have shown that if those images don’t get many“likes”, it can affect a teen’s mental (精神的) health. And then there’s “phubbing”. It’s that moment in which a friend or a family member takes out a phone and plays with it, ignoring (忽略) everybody else.

The new study mainly refers to a survey called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Some one million teenage students from 37 countries took this survey in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015 and 2018. Its questions mostly dealt with education. But they also included six statements about loneliness, such as, “I feel awkward and out of place in my school.” The good news: Even in 2018, most teens around the world still felt liked and included at school. But the fact that so many were reporting loneliness is a worrisome trend.

【推荐3】Art is everywhere. Any public space has been carefully designed by an artistic mind to be both functional and beautiful. Why, then, is art still so widely considered to be "the easy subject" at school, insignificant to wider society, a waste of time and effort?

Art can connect culture with commercial products in a way that not many other things can; art generates money and holds significant emotional and cultural value within communities. When people attend a concert, they are paying for music, sure, maybe even hotel rooms, meals, and transport, but they also gain an incredible experience, a unique atmosphere and a memory that will go through the rest of their lives. People don't just want material things anymore, they want to experience life一the arts are a perfect crossover（交迭）between culture and commerce.

Furthermore, the arts can bring communities together, reducing loneliness and making people feel safer. Social bonds are created among individuals when they share their arts experiences through reflection and discussion, and their expression of common values through artworks in honour of events significant to a nation's experience.

The arts clearly have a pretty positive impact on physical and psychological health. It is found that people who frequent cultural places or participate in artistic events are more likely to gain good health compared to those who do not; more engagement with the arts is linked to a higher level of people's wellbeing. The Royal Society of Public Health discovered that music and art, when used in hospitals, help to improve the conditions of patients by reducing stress, anxiety and blood pressure.

Children who are involved with the arts make greater achievements in their education: those engaged with drama have greater literary ability while others taking part in musical practice exhibit greater skills in math and languages. Kids with preference for the arts have a greater chance of finding employment in the future. Participating in the arts is essential for child development; encouraging children to express themselves in constructive ways could help to form healthy emotional responses in later life.

Vital to human life, art is celebrated and used by nations across the world for various purposes. Life without art would be boring and dead still, for art is a part of what makes us human.