【推荐1】A team led by researchers from the UK examined waterbird data from 1506 protected areas and analyzed more than 27, 000 bird populations across the world. They compared waterbird populations before and after the establishment of protected areas and also compared trends of similar populations within and outside of protected areas.

“Our study shows that, while many protected areas are working well, many others are failing to have a positive effect, ” lead author Hannah Wauchope says in a statement. “In the majority of places we looked, bird populations were stable or were increasing, but some of them weren’t doing any better than in unprotected areas, “ she adds. “That’s disappointing, but not surprising. There seems to be the disconnection between people talking about how much land is protected and whether those areas are actually doing anything positive. ”

This study comes ahead of a United Nations meeting in China to discuss biodiversity goals for the next decade. Several countries have already committed to protecting 30 percent of the planet by 2030, yet the researchers say this alone does not necessarily guarantee positive out- comes for species.

“An obsession(迷恋)with reaching a certain area-based target-such as 30 percent by 2030-without focus on managing existing protected areas appropriately will achieve little, ” co-author Julia Jones says. “When world leaders gather in China later this year to set targets for the next decade, I really hope to see a change of their focus, rather than simply saying how much surface area they are going to protect. ”

According to Thomas Brooks, chief scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, who was not involved in the study, waterbirds are a good example of a group facing the consequences of human behaviors that cause biodiversity loss. These animals respond quickly to changes in site quality and are broadly distributed, clearly reflecting the impact of protected areas.

【推荐2】After a morning hike in the Saneum HealingForest,46-year-old firefighter Kang Byoung-wook has tea made from the bark of an elm tree, practices yoga (瑜伽),and makes a picture with dried flowers. He is one of 40 firefighters taking part in a three-day program, the aim of which is to offer“forest healing" (森林治愈);the firefighters all have posttraumatic stress disorder (创伤后应激障碍).

Saneum is one of three official healing forests in South Korea. Soon there will be 34 more. South Koreans-many of whom suffer from work stress, digital addiction, and great academic pressure have accepted the medicalization of nature with great enthusiasm.

There is increasing evidence that being outside in a pleasant natural environment is good for us. But how many of us get to enjoy nature regularly? Fewer and fewer, it seems. According to Lisa Nisbet, a psychology professor at Canada s Trent University, evidence for the benefits of nature is pouring in at a time when we are most disconnected from it.

"We don't think of being outdoors as a way to increase happiness," says Nisbet."We think other things will, like shopping or TV."But South Korea is starting to challenge this opinion.

So what are some of the benefits of nature that Nisbet refers to? Being surrounded by nature has one obvious effect: It calms us and reduces our stress levels. This has been shown to lower blood pressure and heart rates.

Another experiment conducted by psychologist Stephen Kaplan found that people who took a 50-minute walk in a park had better attention and short-term memory than those who took a walk along a city street.

Perhaps what's more surprising is that nature may also make us more creative. David Strayer, a psychologist at the University of Utah, showed as much with a group of participants, who performed 50 percent better on creative problem-solving tasks after three days of wilderness backpacking.

In fact, we may never know exactly what nature does to the brain. Something mysterious will always remain, and maybe that' s as it should be.

【推荐1】How to deal with waste has been a problem since humans started producing it. As more and more people choose to live close together in cities, the waste-disposal problem becomes increasingly difficult.

During the eighteenth century, it was usual for several neighboring towns to get together to select a faraway spot as a dump site (垃圾填埋场). Residents or trash haulers (垃圾拖运者) would transport household rubbish, rotted wood, and old possessions to the site. Periodically some of the trash was burned and the rest was buried. The unpleasant sights and smells caused no problem because nobody lived close by.

Factories, mills, and other industrial sites also had waste to be disposed of. Those located on rivers often just dumped the unwanted remains into the water. Others built huge burners with chimneys to deal with the problem.

Several facts make these choices unacceptable to modern society. The first problem is space. Dumps, which are now called landfills, are most needed in heavily populated areas. Such areas seldom have empty land suitable for this purpose. Land is either too expensive or too close to residential neighborhoods. Long-distance trash hauling has been a common practice, but once farm areas are refusing to accept rubbish from elsewhere, cheap land within trucking distance of major city areas is almost nonexistent.

Awareness of pollution dangers has led to more strict rules of waste disposal. Pollution of rivers, ground water, land and air is a price people can no longer pay to get rid of waste. The amount of waste, however, continues to grow.

Recycling efforts have become commonplace, and many towns require their people to take part. Even the most efficient recycling programs, however, can hope to deal with only about 50 per cent of a city’s reusable waste.

【推荐2】To solve the problem of tiny plastics polluting waterways, chemists in the Czech Republic are thinking small. Their brainchild is a new microrobot which is no bigger than the tip of a sharpened pencil. When sunlight hits them, they produce chemical reactions that push them through water in a specific direction. When they find a piece of plastic, they stick to it and start to break it down.

Chemist Martin Pumera at the Czech University led the project. A decade ago, he chose to focus on the problem posed by microplastics. They’re everywhere—from the bottom of the ocean to air blowing onto ice atop mountains. They’ve turned up in drinking water. Some studies estimate that billions of pieces of plastic end up in the world’s waters. The plastic has many sources, from shopping bags to washing and cleaning wipes.

In lab experiments, the star-shaped swimmers stuck onto each of four different types of plastic. And after a week exposed to light, the robots had reduced the weight of the plastics. It wasn’t much—only by percent. But that was an indication that they were breaking the plastic down. They also caused the surface of the plastic to change from smooth to rough. That’s another sign that the robots were degrading (分解) it. The new study is a proof of concept type. That means it shows something can be done successfully.

In fact, Pumera says they still have a long way to go. There are many types of plastics. And even these microrobots are unlikely to succeed in degrading them all. The researchers also have not yet shown how safe this system is for the environment, although Pumera says that’s their next goal. The first real-world test will be in a wastewater-treatment plant. “Indeed,” says one researcher. “We’ll need a lot of testing to show that they’re safe in open waterways, such as at sea.”

【推荐3】Right in front of the Minneapolis Central Library, a row of green bikes sits parked in a special stand. Each bike is designed with the logo “Nice Ride”—the name of the city’s bike-share program.

Nice Ride bikes are a lot like the library books that people come here to borrow. To rent a bike, you simply use your membership card at a Nice Ride bike station. Members can rent one of 1,200 bikes from138 stations throughout Minnesota's largest city. People use the Nice Ride bikes to go to work, to go out on business, or just to enjoy the city’s many bike paths.

The rise of bike-share programs like Nice Ride is encouraging more people than ever to choose biking over driving. Rising gas prices and concerns about the environment have also gotten people to dust off their bike helmets, pump air into flat tires, and hit the road.

Why ride? Not only is biking good exercise, but switching from a car to a bike also reduces the amount of pollution in the air. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to climate change, is one of the many polluting substances that come out of a car's tailpipe.

Bike-share systems are found around the world in cities like London, Paris, Barcelona, and Melbourne, Australia. The largest program-with 70,000 bikes-is in Wuhan, China.

To make roads friendlier to non-motorists, the U．S．Department of Transportation has invested more than a billion dollars in cycling and pedestrian projects in recent years．The money went toward building thousands of miles of on-street bike lanes and bike-and pedestrian-only passages called green ways．

【推荐1】The word “music” is easier to use in practice than to explain. Music is a reminder(提醒物) of how things once were, a symbol of how things are and a view of where society is headed. Music can bring us back to memories we wish to never forget, or bring us hope when we feel that all is lost. According to Nietzsche, “Nothing is worth living for without music.”And Albert Einstein once said,“ Without the music education in my childhood, I would succeed in nothing.”

Most of us enjoy different kinds of music just to entertain(娱乐). Are there other reasons for us to listen to music? Some types of music can make us feel relaxed. After a long workday, classical music or certain types of jazz can physically relax our bodies and take our attention away from the cares of the day—at least for a while. On the other hand, loud, fast music with a strong beat can excite us. In fact, sometimes we may prefer one kind of music, but at other times, that’s the last thing we want to listen to.

Music also affects our feelings. Movie music can most clearly show this. If you close your eyes in an action movie or a disaster movie, you can pretty much tell what’s happening on the screen by the music alone. The same is true for a love story. Film composers(作曲家) such as John Williams get paid big money for their ability to change your feelings from moment to moment. So what do you think of music? Clearly, music and feelings are closely connected in some non-physical way.

【推荐2】It is often said that if we dream in a foreign language, it’s a sign that we are making progress in learning that language. But is it true?

Before we can look at multilingual (多语言的) dreams, first we need to look at sleep. The link between sleep and language can be applied to how we learn any language, including our mother tongue. Even adults still learn about one new word every two days in their first language, but, if we are going to have a firm grasp of that new word, we need to link it to our existing knowledge. “In order to do that, we need to have some sleep”, says Gareth Gaskell, a psychology professor at the University of York.

It’s during sleep that the integration of old and new knowledge happens. At night, one part of our brain — the hippocampus-takes whatever new information it got in the day, and passes it on to other parts of the brain to be stored. The role that dreams play in this night-time learning process is still being studied, but it’s entirely possible that during multilingual dreams, the brain is trying to connect two languages, according to Marc Zuist, researcher at the University Hospital of Psychiatry in Switzerland.

So having multilingual dreams could mean that our brain is trying to master a new word or phrase, but it could also have an emotional significance. Danuta Barker, a professor of psycholinguistics (心理语言学) at the University of Silesia in Poland, suggests that multilingual dreams can express fears and desires around learning a foreign language, including the wish to be a native-like speaker or to be accepted within a certain community.

We clearly still have a lot to learn about multilingual dreams, but one thing seems certain: if you’re trying to learn a new language, you should definitely sleep on it.

【推荐3】Celebrity has become one of the most important representatives of popular culture. Fans used to be crazy about a specific film, but now the public tends to base its consumption on the interest of celebrity attached to any given product. Besides, fashion magazines have almost abandoned the practice of putting models on the cover because they don’t sell nearly as well as famous faces. As a result, celebrities have realized their unbelievably powerful market potential, moving from advertising for others’ products to developing their own.

Celebrity clothing lines aren’t a completely new phenomenon, but in the past they were typically aimed at the ordinary consumers, and limited to a few TV actresses. Today they’re started by first-class stars whose products enjoy equal fame with some world top brands. The most successful start-ups have been those by celebrities with specific personal style. As celebrities become more and more experienced at the market, they expand their production scale rapidly, covering almost all the products of daily life.

However, for every success story, there’s a related warning tale of a celebrity who overvalued his consumer appeal. No matter how famous the product’s origin is, if it fails to impress consumers with its own qualities it begins to resemble(类似) an exercise in self-promotional marketing. And once the initial attention dies down, consumer interest might fade, loyalty(忠诚) returning to tried-and-true labels.

Today, celebrities face even more severe embarrassment. The pop-cultural circle might be bigger than ever, but its rate of turnover has speeded up as well. Each misstep threatens to reduce a celebrity’s shelf life, and the same newspaper or magazine that once brought him fame has no problem picking him to pieces when the opportunity appears. Still, the self potential for expansion is limitless. Having already achieved great wealth and public recognition, many celebrities see fashion as the next frontier to be conquered. As the saying goes, success and failure always go hand in hand. Their success as designers might last only a short time, but fashion-like celebrity-has always been temporary