【推荐1】Turtles have a problem. They are delicious. And so are their eggs. That has led to the eggs of marine turtles being poached (偷猎).

To deal with the problem Kim Williams-Guillen and Helen Pheasey of the University of Kent, have come up with a handy gadget (小装置). It is a global-positioning-system (GPS) transmitter (发射机) enclosed in a plastic shell made by 3D printing. The result looks like a turtle's egg and weighs about the same. Dug up and carried away by poachers, it can lead the police to those poachers' bases of operation.

As they report this week in Current Biology, Dr Williams-Guillén and Dr Pheasey have now tested their invention in Costa Rica. They placed a decoy egg into each of 101 turtle nests on four beaches where poaching is a problem. The decoys remained inactive until their shells were exposed to the air. At that moment—presumed to signal the arrival of poachers—the “egg” in question starts broadcasting its location once an hour.

In all, 25 of the decoys were poached. They told different stories. Some travelled just a few kilometres, with one ending up at a bar 2km away from the nest it was taken from, where its signal abruptly ended. Others went quite a distance. One, for example, was carried 137km inland, to a supermarket.

To make sure that they, themselves, were not harming what they were intending to protect, the researchers monitored all of the decoy-laden nests which had survived the attentions of poachers and compared these nests' outputs of hatchlings with those of 44 other surviving nests that had no decoy in them. Both sorts of nest had the same hatching rates, suggesting that adding a decoy did not affect the development of the eggs it was hidden among.

Given the success of their project, Dr Williams-Guillen and Dr Pheasey propose that the idea should be used more widely for turtles. They also suggest that similar decoys might help protect the eggs of other endangered reptiles—and birds—that are collected and traded illegally.

A．It may cause widespread damage to turtle eggs.

B．It will help raise people's environmental awareness.

C．It can be applied to more wildlife conservation fields.

D．It needs further improvement before being put into practice.

【推荐3】Have you ever had the feeling that you can’t think when there is too much noise around? Did you ever think a fish could experience that feeling too? A recent paper published in Science titled “Soundscape (声景) of the Anthropocene Oceans”, combined over 10,000 scientific papers, confirming that undersea life knows that exact same feeling, more often than not. Anthropogenic (人为的) ocean noise, also known as underwater noise pollution, has created a dramatic impact on marine life due to “human-caused” activity within and neighboring our oceans.

Disney Pixar’s animated film Finding Nemo educated us about the ocean, and specifically within the ordinary world of a clown fish. A fact many may not know is that clown fish spend the first part of their lives as larvae, drifting with the current of the ocean until they become strong enough to swim against it. Once they are powerful and strong, they head home in sheltered coral reefs. There is only one drawback — the fish can’t physically see the reef, but they can hear it. The only problem is, if they can’t hear it, will they ever make it home?

Our anthropogenic ocean noise, such as cargo ships, ship and boat propellers, surfing, deep sea mining, etc. are causing destruction of marine life. According to Time, sound is the sensory signal that travels the farthest through the ocean. Anthropogenic noise drowns out the natural soundscapes, putting marine life under immense stress. Altogether, this stress then affects their general health, disrupts their behavior, physiology, reproduction and, in extreme cases, causes death. Marine life can adapt to noise pollution, however, only if they can escape it. This only renders further complications of straying (使偏离) species from their traditional breeding regions or separating them from their families.

Now, what if we told you there is already a solution? Multiple remedies, ideas and designs are currently in the works or already exist to eliminate and reverse the damage of anthropogenic ocean noise. As Time explains, from wind-powered ships to noise-reducing propellers, floating wind turbines and “bubble curtains” that muffle construction noise, the solutions are already available and in some cases, cost-effective. The authors of the paper hope it will catch the attention of policymakers, who historically speaking, have ignored the matter still to this day.

Of all the challenges ocean creatures are battling, luckily sound pollution is the easiest compromise humans can make. Once the noise has decreased, marine life will be able to better manage everything else it is up against.

【推荐1】You have probably heard of the Mozart effect. It’s the idea that if children or even babies listen to music composed by Mozart, they will become more intelligent. A quick Internet search reveals (透露) plenty of products to help you in the task. Whatever your age there are CDs and books to help you taste the power of Mozart’s music, but when it comes to scientific evidence that it can make you more clever, the picture is more mixed.

The phrase “the Mozart effect” was made up in 1991, but it was a study described two years later in the journal Nature that sparked (引发) real media and public interest about the idea that listening to classical music somehow improves the brain. It is one of those ideas that sound reasonable. Mozart was undoubtedly a genius himself; his music is complex and there is a hope that if we listen to enough of it, we’ll become more intelligent.

The idea took off, with thousands of parents playing Mozart to their children, and in 1998 Zell Miller, the Governor of the state of Georgia in the US, even asked for money to be set aside in the state budget so that every newborn baby could be sent a CD of classical music. It was not just babies and children who were exposed to Mozart’s music on purpose, even an Italian farmer proudly explained that the cows were played Mozart three times a day to help them to produce better milk.

I’ll leave the debate on the effect on milk yield to farmers, but what about the evidence that listening to Mozart makes people more intelligent? More research was carried out but an analysis of sixteen different studies proved that listening to music does lead to a temporary improvement in the ability to handle shapes mentally, but the benefits are short-lived and it doesn’t make us more intelligent.

【推荐2】Losing weight comes with a lot of health benefits-including making your brain sharper.

Yes, it turns out that overweight may damage cognitive functions such as memory and attention. There have been few studies of overweight and cognitive functioning, possibly because it is generally believed that it is not a primary risk cause for poor cognitive performance. Losing weight, therefore, may help improve these mental functions, according to a new research led by John Gunstad, assistant professor of psychology at Kent State University.

Growing evidence suggests that being fat is linked to cognitive deficits (缺陷). So Gunstad and his team guessed that losing weight might improve mental function. For their study, they measured memory and attention in a group of 150 overweight participants, some of whom had some kind of operation for weight loss and some did not. All of the volunteers completed mental skills tests to assess their abilities of memory and attention at the beginning of the study, and again 12 weeks later. To begin with, about 24% of the patients showed damaged learning and 23% showed signs of poor memory when tested. At the end of the study, those who had lost weight after operation improved their scores into the average or above average range for cognitive functions. Scores for the volunteers who didn’t lose weight dropped even further.

The study helped Gunstad to find out whether losing weight had any effect on mental function. Now that he’s seen the positive effect that weight loss can have on memory and attention, he says he will next study those who choose to lose weight by the traditional way—eating healthier and getting more active. He expects that losing weight in this way will have a similarly positive effect on the brain. “If we can improve the condition with operations, then we can probably produce the same change with behavioral weight loss as well,” he says.

【推荐3】Seagrass meadows (海草床) are wonder plants growing beneath the sea. They feed and shelter sea life and are masterful at storing carbon. Thanks to the assistance of tiger sharks, a huge seagrass meadow in the Bahamas Banks has been discovered, offering the world a tool to fight climate change.

Seagrass has usually been detected by Earth-orbiting satellites that identify darker spots in the blue water. In a recent study, tiger sharks were selected as research tools due to their highly consistent associations with seagrass ecosystems. They spent 70% of their time in seagrass meadows. The team equipped eight tiger sharks with satellite labels, seven sharks with camera labels, and used a 360-degree camera on a shark for the first time ever.

The data researchers collected was astonishing. The world’s largest seagrass ecosystem, measuring at least 66,900 square kilometers, has been discovered. This reflects a 41% increase from previous estimates of global seagrass. Seagrass can capture (捕获) huge quantities of carbon by photosynthesis (光合作用) and stores it on the seafloor. In terms of climate change, this is excellent news; seagrass is 35 times faster at removing carbon than tropical rainforests. When referring to global seagrass carbon stock estimates, the study indicates that seagrass in the Bahamas may contain 19.2% to 26.3% of all the carbon stored in seagrass meadows on Earth.

Yet seagrass meadows are rapidly disappearing, with over 92% of meadows in the UK gone, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Scientists are collecting seeds and trying to grow new seagrass meadows through restoration projects. This new discovery offers optimism and proves the importance of the ocean for healing.

The sharks led us to the seagrass ecosystem in the Bahamas, which we now know is likely the most significant blue carbon sink on the planet. What this discovery shows us is that ocean exploration and research are essential for a healthy future. The undeveloped potential of the ocean is limitless. These meadows can be protected and can be copied, offering hope for climate change around the globe.