【推荐1】Studies continue to show how important strong friendships are to our overall health. Here’re the rules you are supposed to know to keep strong and healthy friendships.

    1     Everyone needs a support network. When you consider yourself the friend of another, you’re implicitly offering to be a part of his or her support network. What’s more, without trust and honesty, there is no authenticity (真实性) to the friendship.

Be all ears to your friends. Too often, we only “half hear” what others are telling us, and have a hard time making space for caring about others’ conditions.     2     If we don’t truly know what our friends need or can’t clearly express how we feel or what we need, friendships won’t survive or continue.

Throw away the judgment.     3     Good friends are able to realize that everyone is human. Friends don’t have to necessarily “like” or “approve” of their friends’ choices, but good friends will accept their friends’ choices no matter what.

Forgive (原谅) where you can — and seek forgiveness when you make a mess of something. No one promises to bring perfection to a relationship, so being willing to accept and forgive the weaknesses of others makes you more likely to build a lasting friendship.     4    

Respect your friends and their boundaries. Everyone has a right to set up personal boundaries to feel safe and respected. Some friends may have a difficult time letting people get close to them for fear of being hurt.     5     Give them the space they need to feel comfortable, and let the relationship deepen over time.

【推荐1】By the year 2050, Earth’s population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion people. With this growth comes a surprising demand for food resources. To find an effective way, to deal with the global food safety crisis, Enter X, Alphabet Inc launched Project Mineral, which focuses on “computational agriculture”, a term to describe new technologies that will further in- crease understanding about the plant world.

Can a machine be taught to understand the plant world? After years of work, Project Mineral leader Elliot Grant and his team’s latest prototype(原型)—a plant-scanning robot-will turn up at the Smithsonian’s “Futures” exhibition later this year. The four-wheeled plant robot, about as tall as a shipping container and as wide as a car, uses different cameras and other technology to monitor and find possible problems with plants.

As it rolls through the farmland, it can identify weeds, and measure the ripeness of fruits. The Mineral robot can become taller to take pictures of wheat plants, or widen to scan a broad bed of crops. What’s more, when the robot meets with different situations out in the field, it can accurately identify specific crops, traits or diseases.

Mineral has partnered with a farmer in the Philippines who is helping the team study diseases in bananas. Images of diseased bananas will be used to teach the robot how to detect diseases.

The robot also takes pictures of flowers and then uses the machine learning model to count a plant’s flowering speed, which is important to understand how a plant responds to its environment and predict the yields. Besides, the robot can measure all kinds of leaf sizes and detect greenness.

Though the robot has come a long way from its origin, it’s still a prototype, Mineral stresses that they’re constantly improving and working closely with experts in the agricultural field to understand plants further.

【推荐3】Coral reefs(珊瑚礁)as underwater walls can help reduce the effects of hurricanes on coastal communities. This seems unbelievable. It is reported that scientists have discovered that coral reefs are even more effective than man-made sea walls under the water. However, coral reefs are especially easy to be influenced by climate change. Overfishing and pollution have also proved very dangerous to them. Since 1950, half of the world’s coral reefs have already been lost. To protect our communities and keep sea ecosystems alive, we need to protect coral reefs right away.

Let’s take a closer look at how coral reefs protect us from floods, and how scientists are restoring (修复) reefs.

The roles that coral reefs play as underwater walls have long been recorded by scientists. During a Category 3 hurricane in 2015 in Australia, the coral reefs effectively protected the eastern shoreline from flooding. In contrast, the western coasts without coral reefs suffered serious damage. The researchers observed that the shape of coral reefs can break the approaching waves. More recently, researchers at the University of Miami have reached the same conclusion. They used a special lab simulator to recreate ocean conditions during a Category 5 hurricane. They found that coral reefs could reduce the impact of waves by up to 95 percent!

Because of higher ocean acidity (酸 性) and temperature, coral reefs are disappearing and dying out. At the same time, climate change puts weakened coral reefs under more stress. The University of Miami researchers are testing to plant new coral reefs while others are actively looking for effective methods to reduce the acidity of sea water. The governments have also paid more attention to these actions and provided enough money for reef restoration. With these efforts, we may address climate threats to coral reefs and they can carry on protecting our communities.