【推荐1】Although vaccines are required for entry into school in most places in the United States, the government does allow for exceptions, like religious reasons.

In the last few years, the rates of vaccine-preventable illness have been on the rise. In most cases, these outbreaks began with children who were unvaccinated. To deal with this threat, some schools in New York have been refusing to allow unvaccinated children to attend school. Several parents thought this was unfair and filed lawsuits. Just recently, though, a court ruled in favor of the city schools.

The court made the right decision. Vaccine policy depends not only on the added protection that vaccines provide for those who get shots, but also on the decreased likelihood that anyone will come into contact with the disease. This is known as community immunity. It refers to the fact that when enough people are immunized, then there really can’t be an outbreak. And if there can’t be an outbreak, then everyone is protected.

This is important, because there are people who cannot be given immunizations for various reasons. For example, small babies can’t be given all vaccines.

In 1995, the chicken pox vaccine was introduced in the United States. Over time, more and more children received it. In 2011, a study looked at how the program affected the number of children who died from the disease.

The first thing noted in the paper was that death from chicken pox went down considerably after the vaccine was introduced. From 2001 through 2007, the rates of death remained much lower, with just a few children dying from chicken pox nationally each year.

What’s more from 2004 through 2007, not one child less than 1 year of age died in the United States from chicken pox. This is important, because we cannot give the chicken pox vaccine to babies. In other words, all those babies were saved not because we vaccinated them against this illness, but because older children were.

Therefore, people who refuse to vaccinate their children aren’t just putting themselves at risk — they’re putting everyone else in danger, too.

【推荐3】For more than 5,000 years, chopsticks have been the preferred dining utensil (用具) of a sizable swath of humanity. Nowadays, around a third of the global population uses chopsticks daily. This is both a fact of life and these implements are often single-use, a serious environmental problem.

Every year, around 80 billion pairs find their way to landfills. “In Vancouver alone, we’re throwing out 100,000 chopsticks a day,” says Felix Böck, founder of the Vancouver-based startup ChopValue. “They’re traveling 6,000 or 7,000 miles from where they’re manufactured in Asia to end up on our lunch table for 30minutes.”

Since 2016, Böck has been on a mission to rethink disposable chopsticks. Rather than try to eliminate them, the engineer has been building a circular economy by giving them a second life. In their home base of Vancouver, company staff pick up around 350,000 used chopsticks from 300-plus restaurants every week, all of which become book shelves, cutting boards, coasters, desks, and custom decorations. According to Böck, the startup has saved more than 50 million pairs of chopsticks from landfills since its launch.

“Once you see the volume, you think maybe that little humble chopstick can be the start of something big,” Böck says. “My expertise is in bamboo, so I always looked at chopsticks differently. I used to joke to my friends that I would make something out of chopsticks, since most of the ones we use in North America are made of bamboo.”

Chopsticks are far from the only disposable dining implement to come under scrutiny in recent years. From plastic straws to polystyrene takeout containers, many components of our food cycle sacrifice environmental impact for convenience.

“I think change starts small, and change can be a very relatable thing that we all know from daily life,” Böck says. “Right now, we’re focusing on the chopstick because it’s a very powerful story.”

【推荐1】In 1998, people in Na Doi, a quiet village in northwest Thailand, noticed that their fish catches in the nearby Ngao River were declining. The fish they did manage to net were also getting smaller. Together, Na Doi’s 75 households decided to try a new solution: they would set aside a small stretch of river to be strictly off-limits to fishing.

The rules are usually simple: no fishing of any kind in an agreed-upon area marked by flags or signs. While freshwater reserves won’t solve everything, in places where fish populations are under pressure, they can give species much-needed breathing room to rebuild their numbers, ultimately making them better able to weather other environmental problems.

Na Doi was the second village in the Ngao River valley to adopt this pioneering approach to freshwater fisheries management. Since the late 1990s, at least 50 other villages there have done the same. As a whole, the entirely grassroots-led reserves have been surprisingly successful, according to findings recently published in Nature. Most importantly, the Thailand case provides probably the best real-world proof that fisheries reserves can benefit not just oceans, but freshwater, too

In 2012. Aaron Koning, then a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, began investigating the Ngao River valley reserves to see how widespread and successful they truly were. Koning found, not surprisingly, that older and bigger reserves were more successful, because they offered more time and space—including more kinds of habitat—in which to rebuild fish populations and re-establish rare species. But even reserves established in the last couple of years showed clear benefits from being spared intense fishing pressure. “Reserves that were located closer to a village tended to have an advantage,” Koning says, “probably because villagers were better able to enforce the rules.”

By comparing different systems and approaches around the world, Koning and his colleagues hope to identify common factors for success that could be tailored to diverse rivers and lakes.

【推荐2】Moving to a foreign country is an amazing, life-changing experience. It’s an opportunity to meet new people, make yourself completely involved in a different culture and possibly learn another language. However, before embarking on such an adventure, there are some practical decisions that need to be made. One such decision is choosing where to live.

For me, choosing to live with a French family was the best choice I made, and here is why.

Firstly, a family can show you around the city or town and help you settle in, stopping you from feeling lonely. When you’re in a new environment with people you don’t know who are speaking a language you’re still not fluent in, you might feel lost, tired and homesick — I know I did. However, my host family were wonderful and welcoming; they showed me which buses to take to get to work and cooked dinner for me so we could eat together, and took me with them on trips to the beach, the theatre and even a bullfight. These were great opportunities to experience French culture and build relationships, which in turn helped me feel more comfortable and welcome.

Moreover, living with French people has been brilliant for helping me improve my language skills. Being constantly exposed to authentic French conversation has allowed me to learn new phrases, widen my vocabulary and even improve my accent. My host family are happy to answer my questions and correct me when I say things wrong, which makes me a better and more confident French speaker.

Finally, the experience of living abroad is one that you will remember forever, and perhaps the friendships — like the memories — will also last. Your host family might become your friends for life. You might return for their birthdays, weddings, holidays, and much more. I hope to remain in contact with my host family long after I leave France because when I was away from my friends and loved ones, they welcomed me and made me part of their family.