【推荐1】While we aim to avoid any appearance of baseless theories, it is noteworthy to observe the long-standing practice of putting magnets (磁铁) in cows, a phenomenon that has been carefully unfolding for years. Why are farmers putting magnets in cows?

Known as cow magnets, the devices are placed inside cattle to deal with “hardware disease”. Hardware Disease occurs after an animal eats a metallic object that then makes a hole in the wall of the reticulum, the second stomach room in ruminant animals (反刍动物). This issue arises from the natural eating behaviors of these ruminants, similar to a person at an unlimited food event — quickly and eagerly large bites without sufficient chewing. This fast-paced feeding approach makes them tend to unintentionally consume metal pieces in their food, including broken farm machinery parts, nails and wires used in fencing, for instance.

Metal objects entering the reticulum may result in infections, increased body temperatures, digestive problems, and unease for the animals. To address hardware disease, the main strategy is to prevent metal from entering the cattle’s diet. Farmers have also adopted the method of placing cow magnets into the stomach using either a stomach tube or a balling gun. The cow magnet attracts such objects and prevents them from becoming fixed in the animal’s tissue. These magnets, once positioned, remain within the animals throughout their lifespan, only being removed after death when the cows pass away or are processed for meat.

Moseley, a Veterinary Medicine professor, states in a hardware disease resource, “The magnet gathers foreign metallic objects, reducing the risk of making a hole in the reticulum.” Research shows a mild magnetic field affects a cow’s small blood pathways, improving circulation and aiding recovery without significant impact on the cow or milk quality.

【推荐2】The debate over washing dishes by hand vs.using a dishwasher has been on TreeHugger since it faced the world.In the earliest article I could find from 2005, the dishwasher came out the clear winner, with researchers from the University of Bonn saying it uses only half the energy and one-sixth the water.

Fifteen years later, we're still talking about it, and a new study published in the journal Environment Research Communications shows not much has changed.Dishwashers still take the prize for efficiency（效率）, both in terms of energy and water used.The findings are interesting because kitchen cleanup is something we do every day, so why not learn the best way?

Forty participants were required first to load and run a dishwasher and then to wash dishes by hand the way they would at home.They answered survey questions afterwards about their dish washing behaviors.Three other participants were then required to load a dishwasher and wash dishes by hand following best practices.This meant not pre-rinsing（预冲洗）dishes before loading them in the dishwasher and using the recommended normal cycle with heated dry, rinse-aid, and high-quality cleaner.For washing dishes by hand, this meant using the two-basin method "where dishes are soaked（浸泡）in hot water, rinsed in cold water, and are air-dried."

These "best practices" differ from typical dish washing behaviors.Most people pre-rinse their dishes before loading them into a dishwasher.They also run the tap while washing by hand, which wastes large amounts of water, and rinse with hot water.The researcher found that these typical practices produce "5,620 and 2,090 kg of greenhouse gas emissions（排放）based on washing 4 loads a week for 10 years."So the dishwasher was less than half as bad as hand-washing, even when improper techniques were used.

When it comes to water usage, the benefits of dishwashers continue.Over the course of ten years, a dishwasher will use 16,300 gallons of water, 99.8 percent of which comes from daily use; whereas, washing the same number of dishes by hand for ten years will use 34,200 gallons.

【推荐3】IQ is often considered as an important driver of success particularly in fields such as science, innovation and technology. In fact many people have endless fascination with the IQ scores of famous people. But the truth is that some of the greatest achievements by our species have primarily relied on qualities such as creativity, imagination, curiosity and empathy (同感).

Many of these characteristcs are rooted in what scientists call “cognitive (认知的) flexibility”—a skill that enables us to switch between different concepts or to adapt behavior to achieve goals in a novel or changing environment. Cognitive flexibility provides us with the ability to see that what we are doing is not leading to success and to make the appropriate changes to achieve it.

Cognitive flexibility may have affected how people coped with the pandemic lockdowns (疫情封锁) which produced new challenges around work and schooling. Some of us found it easier than others to adapt our routines to do many activities from home. Such flexible people may also have changed these routines from time to time trying to find better and more varied ways of going about their day. Others, however, struggled and ultimately became more rigid in their thinking.

Flexible thinking is key to creativity. It also supports academic and work skills such as problem solving. For example, visual artists may be of average intelligence but highly creative and have produced masterpieces. Creativity is also important in science and innovation. We have discovered that successful businessmen who have created multiple companies are more cognitively flexible than managers of a similar age and IQ.

Cognitive flexibility is also associated with high recovery from negative life events as well as higher quality of life in older individuals. It can even be beneficial in emotional and social cognition: studies have shown that cognitive flexibility has a strong link to the ability to understand the emotions, thoughts and intentions of others.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that cognitive flexibility is dependent on a network of frontal brain regions. There are a number of ways to objectively assess people’s cognitive flexibility including the Wisconsin Card Sorting test and the CANTAB Set Shift Task. And the good news is that it seems that you can train cognitive flexibility.

【推荐3】Microplastics have invaded seemingly every part of the planet today, including the Arctic. Scientists have been puzzling over how this flood of pollution makes its way to such distant locations far from the city centers where it’s created. A new study finds a surprising route for the tiny particles (微粒).

Scientists found that Arctic surface waters had the highest microplastics concentrations of all the world’s oceans. “We asked ourselves, where does it come from?” says Melanie Bergmann, a scientist and lead author. The biggest load is carried north by the Gulf Stream.

But could microplastics be catching rides on the wind and landing far to the north as snow? It turns out they are. Snow from ice floes (浮冰) in the Arctic had surprisingly high concentrations of microplastics. One spot, close to the middle of the passage, had 14,000 particles per 34 ounces (盎司). And the average across all samples was 1, 800 particles. For comparison, the researchers also analyzed snow near Germany and the Alps. The microplastics measured there were considerably higher, with an average of 24, 600 particles per 34 ounces. So it seems aerial transport is the pathway to transport microplastics to the Arctic.

The study raises concerns about how much microplastics contaminate the atmosphere, carrying a possible health risk to people and animals that breathe them in. “Microplastic is in the air, and it’s not unlikely that we also breathe some of it in,” says Bergmann.

“People think that plastic pollution is a middle-of-the-ocean problem,” says Jennifer Provencher, who studies the effects of plastics and was not involved with the study. “And the more we work on this, the more we are learning that it’s not a middle-of-the-ocean problem. It’s a water body problem, it’s a ground problem, it’s an air problem, and it’s an Arctic problem,” she says.

“For human health, we now know very little. There is a lot of concern because we know we are exposed. More research is needed to fully understand the health effects,” says researcher Chelsea Rochman. Even worse maybe the threat from airborne nanoplastics — they’re too small to see and about which almost nothing is known. “They may actually enter cells,” says Rochman. “So we may have a big problem.”

【推荐2】If you are a parent of young children who browses parenting websites, you will at some point be invited, through targeted advertising, to enrol your child in a Global Maths Skill Assessment — “to see how they compare to peers globally”. You may be urged to consider the possibility — no, probability — that they are “gifted” in some way, if not in maths, then in music or art. It’s window-dressing (门面粉饰) for subscription (订阅) services, but the other day, a line caught my eye that I haven’t been able to forget. “Talent isn’t everything; the important thing is to teach your child to be kind.”

This positioning of “kindness” as the opposite of “talent” is common once you start looking for it. Kindness is, everywhere: the consolation (安慰) prize, the award for perfect attendance. A few years ago, none of this would have struck me as noteworthy. I believed a tendency towards kindness wasn’t something we were born with, but instead something entirely reliant on cultivation. These days I wonder about that, and about our determination to see it that way.

It brings us to the problem of kindness; not only the fact that, in plenty of settings, it can be a code for weakness or neediness, but the fact that the word itself has been emptied out through misuse. Real kindness is not this. Kindness, I try to tell my children, is strength. My child who is always kind to others is frequently confused by the unfriendliness of others, at which point I have to bite my tongue. “Jessica was rude to you because she’s silly” is not what I’m going to teach my seven-year-old.

Can you teach someone to be kind? Of course, but also only sort of, not entirely. You can discipline them with reason and rewards in the same way you can send them to piano every week and eventually they’ll learn to play Twinkle Twinkle. The fact remains that some people are kinder than others not as a result of external forces but from some inborn ability. The ancient Greek storyteller Aesop said, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” Two thousand years later, it remains a hard sell.