【推荐1】Who would win in a fight, a lion or a tiger? Well, if size has anything to do with the matter, the tiger would win.     1     They are also fast. They can sprint as fast as 40 miles per hour for short distances and leap as far as 30 feet horizontally. This makes for an extremely dangerous attack. You might not think that such large, fast, and ferocious creatures need help to survive, but they do.     2    

Tigers are hunted for many reasons. People have long valued the famous striped skins. Though trading tiger skins is now illegal in most parts of the world, they are worth around $10,000 on the black-market.     3     Many Asian cultures believe that various tiger parts have healing properties.

    4     However, perhaps more damage has been caused through the destruction of habitat. Tigers once ranged widely across Asia, but over the past 100 years, tigers have lost 93% of their historic range.

A major obstacle to preserving tigers is the enormous amount of territory that each tiger requires. Each wild tiger demands between 200 and 300 square miles. Tigers are also both territorial and solitary (独居的) animals.     5     Since tigers need so much territory, it is difficult for conservationists to acquire land enough to support a large population of tigers. Even when these considerable spaces are provided, it is even more difficult to move around such large areas to prevent the illegal hunting. There is no easy way to preserve the wild tiger population without making large sacrifices.

【推荐2】Tree-planting, intended to help draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, has become a synonym (同义词) for climate action. In our constant focus on trees, we’ve developed a fixed understanding: Trees absorb carbon dioxide, end of story. The reality is that trees don’t grow well alone. They exist within complex communities, helped along by each other as well as the animals they coexist with. The woodland isn’t nature’s only carbon sink: Grasslands and oceans also help reduce the carbon level and rely on a healthy amount of biodiversity.

That’s what the paper, published in Nature, wants to get across. Co-author Oswald J. Schmitz, a professor of ecology at Yale University, said trees might not be able to do their carbon-uptake job efficiently without the right animals in their ecosystem. That’s because animals animate the carbon cycle through their behavior and roles in the ecosystem. He added that the very presence of wild animals could cause feedback effects that change the ecosystem’s capacity to absorb, release, or transport carbon.

In Serengeti, for instance, the sharp decline in wildebeest (角马) population s during the mid-20th century allowed grass to grow wildly, eventually promoting wildfires that consumed 80 percent of the ecosystem annually and led to a net release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. When disease management and bans on illegal hunting helped animal populations recover, a greater share of the carbon stored in plants was consumed by wildebeest and released as waste, keeping it in the system and restoring the grassland as a carbon sink.

Researchers rarely consider wildlife conservation as a strategy to increase an ecosystem’s carbon storage capacity, said Schmitz. “They think that animals either aren’t important enough or that you can’t take up carbon and conserve animals at the same time,” he said. “Our message is that you can and should. It can be a win-win for both biodiversity conservation and carbon uptake.” We need a full picture-with both trees and animals-to explore nature’s full potential.

【推荐3】Twelve prized camels have been disqualified from a beauty contest in Saudi Arabia after their owners tried to beautify their looks with Botox(肉毒杆菌素).

Thousands of camels are paraded at the King Abdulaziz Camel Festival to be judged on their shapely lips and humps. The festival, which also features camel racing and camel milk tasting, has combined prize money of $57 million.

This year’s event has been stuck in scandal after the 20 million Saudi riyals (里亚尔，货币单位) in prize money for each category tempted some owners to cheat.

The key features in camel beauty are considered to be delicate ears and a big nose. Judges are also looking for perfectly placed humps, muscular physiques and leathery mouths. But there are strict rules against the use of drugs in the lips, or shaved or clipped body parts.

Ali Al Mazrouei, the son of a top Emirati breeder, said Botox was used for the lips, the nose and even the jaw. “It makes the head more inflated, so when the camel comes, it’s like ‘Oh look at how big that head is. It has big lips, a big nose’,” he said.

In the lead up to the festival, Saudi media reported that a vet had been caught giving camels plastic surgery including Botox injections and reducing the size of their ears.

Chief judge Fawzan Al-Madi said the camel was “a symbol of Saudi Arabia”. “We used to preserve it out of necessity; now we preserve it as a pastime,” he said. The camel beauty contest was first held in 2000 and last year was relocated from a remote desert area to a permanent venue north of the capital, Riyadh.

【推荐2】Bicycle riding has taken the world by storm. Bicycles are typically made of steel or aluminum（铝）but now there is a unique company that is growing bikes on trees.

These bicycles are made of British-grown ash trees（白蜡树）by Welsh furniture maker Andy Dix. His company, Twmpa Frames, is making bikes that are both high performance and environmentally sustainable. Going from furniture to bicycles came about after a conversation with author Rob Penn. Penn was looking for craftsmen to make things from an ash tree that fell for his book: The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees.

“We talked about what I might build, and I suggested a bike,“ said Dix. "It seemed like a good fit, but actually I had no experience in bike building, and Rob had a publishing deadline. In the end, I built him a writing desk instead." But the idea interested Dix who decided that he had to make it happen just to see if he could.

It took two years to build the prototype（原型）that was made from ash wood Dix tested the wooden bike on the roughest roads he could find and discovered that it was comfortable, and excellent at absorbing vibrations（振动）.He put more than 3,000 miles on the bike. While cutting down trees can add to more carbon in the atmosphere, sustainable tree farming is possible. Sustainable forestry is about balancing the needs of the environment and forest communities through limiting harvests and replanting trees.

Producing a ton of aluminum in Britain results in carbon emissions of 4,532kg while producing a ton of wood only results in 457kg. Making bicycle frames out of wood won't make a huge difference but it is a small roll in the right direction.

The cost of a new Twmpa Cycle is out of reach for many bicycle riders; the idea of using sustainable materials like ash could start a new cycling revolution that puts the environment first. The company is even making plans to produce a wooden e-bike. Helping the environment could be just a pedal away.