【推荐1】Water pollution is a serious problem in India. While the government usually plays the blame game as it fails to find an effective solution to such problems many times, the public has taken the matter into its hands and come up with a solution.

Aparna, a first-year college student, is beautifying Ashtamudi Kayal lakebed by reforming wasted plastic bottles. Aparna collected the pretty ones, brought them home and painted and drew on them. Later, when these bottles started piling up in Aparna’s backyard, she decided to sell them. Aparna’s artworks were so good that they created a hit online. What made her happier was the fact that the areas where she was picking these wasted bottles were slowly becoming cleaner.

Aparna also proved to be an inspiration to others. People started collecting wasted plastic materials from the lakebed and sending them to her. However, while collecting the waste materials was easy, Aparna had a difficult time cleaning the insides of the bottles. A lot of people joined her in this initiative and helped not just collect bottles, but also clean them. This motivated Aparna to conduct another programme in her city on World Water Day (March 22), which was attended by college students, teachers, and employees of the state health department. Aparna displayed a few of her artworks made from waste to show people about how objects can be cleaned, decorated and reused.

Talking about people’s view on waste materials, Aparna said, “We often spend much money buying craftworks from the shop. Instead, we can change such waste materials into something useful and beautiful. I was teased so much for collecting waste from the road. It is the attitude that should be changed.”

【推荐1】Cold weather during winter months may keep many people from leaving home and running in the open air. However, a new study shows that the drop in temperature is a good reason to run. In fact, researchers say, running in cold weather helps improve one’s performance.

Many people say running in the winter can be difficult. Two reasons are the low temperatures and bitter winds. Yet many runners might find it easier than running in hot weather.

That could be because lower temperatures reduce stress on the body. When you run in cold weather, your heart rate and the body’s dehydration (脱水) levels are lower than those in warmer conditions. The body needs less water on a cold day than in warm weather.

This information comes from sports scientists at St Mary’s University in London. John Brewer is a professor of Sport, Health and Applied Science at St Mary’s.

For this study, he and other researchers put a group of people into a room they called an “environmental chamber”. The researchers then recreated summer and winter weather conditions in the room. The test subjects were asked to run 10km under both conditions. Brewer says he and his team recorded biological measurements of the runners. “We’ve got a group of subjects into the environmental chamber, we’ve changed the conditions to replicate the summer or winter and we’ve got them to run 10km under both of those conditions and taken various measurements on each runner while they’ve completed their 10km.”

Brewer says every movement runners make produces heat. He explains that one way in which we lose heat is by sweating. The body loses heat through droplets of sweat. He says the body also loses heat by transporting the blood to the surface of the skin.

【推荐2】Landfills are where most of the world’s plastics end up and a fair amount of it ends up in the world’s oceans. But a new British recycling firm wants it to end up here.

There is a great demand right now for recycled material. There’s a great deal of interest in getting recycling into the plastics industry specially, and so we are really going to further the ability to get plastic into the circular economy.

The firm called Recycling Technologies is breaking down plastic, then turning it into fuel oils or raw material to make new plastics. Basically, currently all we do is we make a hydrocarbon soup and then we take the materials out at different temperatures, so the higher temperatures, the waxes separate out, then we cool it a bit more, and the heavy oils then we call it, a bit more the light oils, and then the rest comes out. It’s naphtha, the gases that don’t condense (凝结) out. We actually use the fuel for the process. Their process is creating a heavy fuel oil that works for marine vessels (海洋船舶). We call it a clean material, because it has very little sulfur in it, in fact almost none, which certainly also fits with the new regulations for marine fill, where they’re asking for much lower sulfur around the world. So it’s a very valuable product.

Right now, the firm is recycling about 7,000 tons of plastic a year, but says it can quickly increase. We are designing to a four-day installation (装置). We will basically come in six ice-free containers which will stand on end, fixed together, and we plug in play mode and the aim is to be up and running within four days. So this is definitely not a refinery (提炼厂) concept.

This is much more a piece of stand-alone industrial equipment. The company has set the ambitious goal of selling 1300 of their recycling units around the world during the next decade, and expect they will be able to recycle 9 million tons of plastic each year.

【推荐3】This may be the 21st century but when it comes to information communication technology (ICT), the gender divide between boys and girls, shows no sign of closing.

This is bad news for the ICT industry where men outnumber women by over five to one. The industry needs at least an extra million recruits(新成员) over the next five years. Obviously, women as well as men are going to have to fill these recruitment gaps. The ICT companies are worried about the shortage of men and women to fill their vacancies(空缺) in the future.

It is believed that women are very well suited to working in ICT. They enjoy working in teams and like looking for creative connections. Many women have the kind of personal skills which are considered essential in developing “new technology”. Professionals who work in Information Technology are constantly creating the world around us, and this can’t be done if you don’t know how people work and how they play. To come up with ideas that will actually make a difference to modern life, you have to understand how people live and work.

In spite of the fact that ICT jobs are well paid and women tend to do well in them, research shows that girls’ opinions of the industry are uniformly negative. Only 5% would consider entering the ICT industry compared to 14% for law and 26% for medicine. Up to the age of 11 girls see ICT as entertaining and interesting but after that age negativity sets in. By the age of 13 this negative view of ICT is confirmed.

After school activities encourage some girls to use Information Technology, and getting ICT staff and other teachers together helps to develop imaginative use of ICT. Imaginative use of ICT especially in music, art, drama, geography and media studies, all helps to open girls’ eyes to the fact that careers in computing can cut across so many different areas.

There is a significant difference in the learning styles between boys and girls. The ICT class in schools is often an exercise where every student completes the same class assignment largely by rote(死记硬背). Although girls follow successfully, they will achieve enjoyment and excellence if allowed to diversify and be creative. For girls, just pressing buttons is not enough.

Another initiative is setting up computer clubs aimed at younger girls aged 8 to 14. This is known to inspire girls to develop their ICT skills and to show them that ICT can be both creative and interesting.

We can’t afford to have girls missing out.