【推荐1】Concerns have existed long about what’s gone wrong in modern societies. Many scholars explain growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots as partly a by-product of living in large, urban populations. The bigger the crowd, from this perspective, the greater the distance is between the wealthy and those left wanting.

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge the assumption that bigger societies surely produce a range of inequalities. Using examples from past societies, the pair also rejects the popular idea that social development occurred in stages.

Such stages, according to conventional wisdom, began with humans living in small hunter-gatherer bands where everyone was on equal footing. Then an agricultural revolution (变革) about 12, 000 years ago fueled population growth and the appearance of tribes (部落) and eventually states.

This assumption makes no sense to Graeber and Wengrow. Their research, which extends for 526 pages, paints a more hopeful picture of social life over the last 30, 000 to 40, 000 years. Hunter-gatherers have a long history of changing social systems from one season to the next, the authors write. About a century ago, researchers observed that native populations in North America and elsewhere often operated in small, mobile groups for part of the year and formed large, settled communities the rest of the year. For example, each winter, Canada’s Northwest Coast Kwakiutl hunter-gatherers built wooden structures while in summers, they separated, and fished along the coast in less formal social ranks.

Social flexibility and experimentation, rather than a revolutionary shift, also characterized ancient transitions (转变) to agriculture, Graeber and Wengrow write. Middle Eastern village sites now indicate that the domestication (驯化) of crops occurred on and off from around 12, 000 to 9, 000 years ago. Ancient Fertile Crescent communities regularly gave farming a go while still hunting, gathering, fishing, and trading. Early people were in no rush to treat land as private property or to form political systems headed by kings, the authors conclude.

【推荐2】Some large American companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are experimenting with cutting pay for employees working from home in less costly areas.

The experiment could set a direction for other large companies after the pandemic. A Google pay calculator shows that Google employees could see changes in their pay if they go from working in the office to working from home permanently. Those who move farther away from the office could be hit harder.

Facebook and Twitter have also cut pay for work-from-home, or remote employees who move to less costly areas. Google offers a pay calculator—a device that permits them to see the effects of a move. But some remote employees, especially those who commute from long distances, could experience pay cuts without changing their address. A Google spokesperson said that pay will differ from city to city and state to state, adding that Google always pays at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from.

One Google employee travels to the Seattle office from a nearby area. The employee was considering remote work but decided to keep going to the office-despite the two-hour trip. The employee would likely see their pay cut by about 10 percent by working from home full time. "It's as high of a pay cut as I got for my most recent promotion. I didn't do all that hard work to get promoted to then take a pay cut," he said.

Jake Rosenfeld of Washington University researches pay structures. He said Google's pay structure worries employees about the effects on their families. "What's clear is that Google doesn't have to do this," He said. "It's not like they can't afford to pay their workers who choose to work remotely the same that they are used to receiving."

【推荐1】What would you look like when you are 80 years old? It seems too far away to imagine, but an app named FaceApp tries to show you.

The app creates transformations of users’ faces using various filters(滤镜) and features. The FaceApp aging challenge went viral last month. Even many celebrities like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber shared their wrinkly, grey-haired selfies on social media.

FaceApp helps us stop thinking of things that don’t matter and focus on the present. “We view these images as inferred fiction, not realized and therefore unreal,” US author Nicci Gerrard told The New York Times. “We think of our younger selves, because in one sense that’s who we are. Our younger stories are all still part of us, while our older selves don’t yet exist.” However, not everyone can laugh at their older selves. For some, aging is terrifying and it’s hard to accept what the future holds in terms of looks and feelings. As MetroUK noted, “FaceApp is making people into a painful crisis.”

In addition, FaceApp is facing a number of accusations regarding user privacy. When a user makes changes to a photo, it needs to be uploaded to the servers in Russia, where the company is located, then AI filters your image and sends it back to you. By using the app, you grant FaceApp the license to use, reproduce, change, adapt, and publish your image, as stated in its service agreement.

Despite the concerns over privacy, however, FaceApp does light up the Internet. It gives us the chance to take a look at our futures and perhaps let us consider how to prepare for it.

【推荐1】Europe’s ski resorts (胜地) haven’t been getting enough snow.

Amedeo Reale is president of Sci Club 18, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, a town in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains. In 2026, the area will host the Women’s Winter Olympics downhill skiing events. “The only thing we are scared of is having one or two months of hot weather,” Reale says. “But in Cortina d’Ampezzo, I don’t think there is any problem.” At more than 5,000 feet above sea level, the slopes (坡) stay cold enough for artificial snow.

But other parts of Italy are not so lucky. They’ve been getting a taste of a much warmer future. The only plan for saving Italy’s ski industry is to use artificial snow as much as possible, says Rolando Galli, who runs a ski lift in there sort of Abetone, in Italy. It has done more than $2 million less business this season because of the lack of snow. Even if there’s snow for the rest of the season, Galli says, there’s no way to make up for this year’s lost income. He ran the lifts without snow, just for the views, but not many tourists showed up.

The changing weather is making it hard to find the right conditions for winter-sports competitions. Promoting summertime sports is probably a good business strategy. The government and mountain towns should invest in lakes. In summer, these could be tourist destinations-for fishing, boating, and sightseeing. They might also provide water to fight bush fires. Clinate change is something that we have to face. We can’t just put our heads in the ground and ignore it.

Since 1924, 21 cities have hosted the Winter Olympies. The first was Chamonix, France. If global temperatures continue rising at the current rate, only four of those places will have conditions appropriate for competition by 2050. That’s the prediction of a recent scientific report. Cortina d’ Ampezzo, in Italy, would be rated “unacceptable”, the report says. Only Sapporo, Japan, is considered a reliable bet for the 2078 or 2082 games.

【推荐2】Amphibians are animals that can live both on land and in water. A new global assessment has found that 41% of amphibian species that scientists have studied are threatened with extinction. That’s up from 39% reported in the last assessment in 2004.

The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that the loss of habitat from the legal and illegal expansion of farming and ranching (放牧) contributes most to the extinction risk of amphibians worldwide. But a growing percentage of amphibian species are now also pushed to the edge of extinction by novel diseases and climate change, the study found.

Amphibians have distinct life stages that each often require separate habitats, so they can be disturbed by changes in either water or land environments, said University of Texas biologist Michael Ryan, who was not involved in the study. They are also at risk because of their delicate skin. Most amphibians absorb oxygen to breathe through their skin, and so they do not have scales (鳞), feathers or fur to protect them. Chemical pollution, bacteria and fungal (真菌的) infections impact them quickly, as do heightened swings in temperature and dampness levels due to climate change.

For example, frogs are active usually at night. If it’s too hot, they won’t come out even at night because they would lose too much water through their skin, said co-author and researcher Patricia Burrowes. But remaining in sheltered resting places limits frogs’ ability to eat and to produce.

Juan Manuel Guayasamin, a frog biologist at the University San Francisco of Quito, Ecuador, said that advances in technology to track animals and climate variations allowed the new study to use much more precise data than the 2004 assessment. “We have a much better understanding of some risks,” said Guayasamin.

The study identified the greatest concentrations of threatened amphibian species in several biodiversity hot spots, including the Caribbean islands, the tropical Andes, Madagascar and Sri Lanka. Other locations with large numbers of threatened amphibians include Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, southern China and the southeastern United States.