【推荐1】Some people not only enjoy eating mushrooms, they also like to collect them in the wild.     1     Many people won’t collect mushrooms in the woods, as eating the wrong mushroom can make you sick or even dead. Therefore, buying them is an easier and safer choice. However, there is another one:     2     There are two ways to do this. You can buy a set of materials called a “grow kit” or you can put them together yourself.

Grow kits are a great way for beginners to try growing mushrooms. These grow kit s include partly-grow n mushroom starters, called “spawn (菌种)”. The spawn is set in soil and is contained in its own grow box. Put the spawn in water overnight.     3     Water it two times a day. Within two or three weeks, you will be eating mushrooms with more on the way. It is a fun, easy activity.

If you are more serious about growing mushrooms and want a larger harvest (收获), it costs less to put the materials together yourself. It is easy. For starters, you will need a wooden, metal, or plastic box. It needs to be about 15 centimeters deep and large enough to hold your harvest.     4     The materials depend on the mushrooms. Finally, you will need fungal spores (Think of them as seeds). You can buy these online or at stores.

Mushrooms usually grow within a week or two. They nearly double in size daily until they finish growing.     5     It can avoid affecting nearby growth.

【推荐2】In ancient times, people tracked the seasons by following the lunar months. Many times, the names of the moons were related with what features the seasons had.    1    It is a special name with a history dating back to Native American tribes (部落). The name is also thought to have a Celtic origin, brought over to North America by European settlers.

Regardless of where the name Wolf Moon comes from, wolves howl (嚎叫) to communicate over long distances both in North America and in Europe. It is a way of saying “here I am” to the rest of the pack or “stay away” to enemies.    2    As the late summer moves towards fall, wolves call more and more to neighbors and enemies.

    3    However, howls by a pack can last from 30 to 120 second, and longer during the breeding (繁殖) season. As a result, wolves are particularly loud in the first month of the year.    4    

Science has not shown that the Moon phase (月相) plays any particular part in the calls of wolves, but wolves are animals that are in general more active at night.    5    They point their faces toward the sky because projecting their howls upward carries the sound farther.

【推荐2】In 2018 biologist Jann Vendetti published a paper that described the discovery of five species of non-native snails and slugs（蜗牛和鼻涕虫）in Southern California. The research would not have been possible without some 1,200 volunteers who uploaded nearly 10,000 photos to the SLIME project (Snails and Slugs Living in Metropolitan Environments) on an app called iNaturalist.

“So the entire existence of that paper is dependent upon these citizen scientists. How do you credit those people?” said Greg Pauly from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. “There are some very specific requirements that a lot of journals and a lot of academic societies use. And those requirements largely would exclude nonprofessional scientists. And to me, that’s absurd.” That’s why Pauly, together with Vendetti, and several Australian biologists are arguing that criteria must change to recognize citizen scientists as authors on scientific journal articles.

They propose what they’re calling “group co-authorship.” The author list on Vendetti’s snail-and-slug paper includes the phrase “citizen science participants in SLIME.” But the phrase is absent when you look up the paper on Google Scholar. The publication software simply isn’t equipped to handle that kind of authorship, and so it erases the group’s vital contribution.

In another case, several years ago in Australia, a team of researchers tried to condition native lizards not to eat the poisonous cane toads. The only reason it was successful was because they partnered with the traditional landowners in northwestern Australia, and this group was called the Balanggarra Rangers.

Several journals flat-out refused to allow for the inclusion of the Rangers as group co-authors. Eventually, the researchers did convince the editors of some journals to allow it, but the group’s title was shortened, as if it was a first and last name, in online indexing software: “B. Rangers.”

The researchers argue that these errors and omissions don’t only make the critical contributions of a native community as invisible, they could also be seen as showing prejudice.

“If the person who had made that contribution was a graduate student who was trying to pursue a career in the sciences, we would all say, ‘Oh, of course that person should be a co-author’. But we don’t necessarily extend that same line of reasoning to citizen scientists.”

Allowing for group co-authorship is not a new idea. In 2004 the journal Nature published a paper titled “Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome.” It listed as the sole author the “International Human Genome Sequencing Association.” “So let’s just choose this group-authorship model and turn it into group co-authorships. This really shouldn’t be that hard.”

【推荐3】On a scale of 0 to 10, I’d say my happiness ranks at about 6. I’m glad to know I’m a 6, because, as a famous management saying puts it, “You can't manage what you don’t measure.” If you want to improve an aspect of your life, you need to be able to assess progress toward your goal-and that means measuring it.

The goal of this column is to help you manage and improve your happiness. A number of people have asked me whether quantitative happiness measures are really accurate and reliable-and it’s a reasonable question. So let’s take a look behind the curtain. But not just for intellectual curiosity; as you will see, understanding the measurement of happiness can itself make you better at improving your own well-being-and avoid some critical errors.

The best method scientists have to understand with confidence how something affects something else is a randomized, controlled trial. Think of the tests currently under way to find a vaccine for COvID-19. They take a long time because the drug companies with trial vaccines are conducting experiments that randomly assign people to a treatment group they get the vaccine and a control group (they get a placebo), and then waiting to seif the drug is effective and safe by comparing the two groups after enough time has passed.

In the research on happiness, this usually isn’t possible. Want to know if people are truly happiest in Denmark, as some studies suggest, and test it with a randomized experiment? You would need to randomly take two groups out of their homes, move one group to Copenhagen, and the other to, say, Dayton, Ohio- but make sure they think it might be Copenhagen and never get the truth. Follow up a few years later to see who is happiest. Obviously, that’s ridiculous. So with randomized controlled trials largely not available to them, happiness researchers instead rely on self-reported happiness surveys, where large groups of people anonymously report their levels of life satisfaction. Then, the researchers use fairly complex statistical techniques to mimic（模拟）a controlled experiment in order to show how different aspects of people’s lives affect-or at least are associated with-their happiness.