【推荐1】Tree planting used to be regarded as an effective means of controlling climate change. Perhaps it’s time for us to rethink this practice. Trees pull carbon dioxide or CO2 from the air. This effectively removes CO2 from the atmosphere, making trees an important part of the fight against climate change. But trees only hold onto carbon dioxide as long as they’re alive. Once they die, trees decay and release that CO2 back into the atmosphere.

Recent studies have found that trees around the world are growing faster than ever. Rising atmosphere CO2 is probably driving that rapid growth, said Roel Brienen. High levels of this gas are boosting temperatures, which in turn speeds tree growth in those areas, he added. The faster trees grow, the faster they store carbon. It seems like good news. However, it is known that fast-growing tree species, in general, live shorter lives than their slow-growing relatives.

In order to see whether this is a universal phenomenon, Brienen and his colleagues analyzed over 210,000 individual tree ring records of 110 tree species from more than 70,000 sites worldwide. “By measuring tree rings’ widths, one can tell how fast trees grew, while counting rings provides information on tree ages and allows making inferences about trees’ maximum lifespan.” Brienen explained.

The team also created a computer program that modeled a forest. Early on, it showed that “the forest could hold more carbon as the trees grew faster”, Brienen reported. But after 20 years, these trees stared dying and losing this extra carbon again. “We must understand that the only solution to bring down CO2 levels is to stop emitting it into the atmosphere,” said Brienen.

【推荐2】The old saying “Use it or lose it” doesn’t appear to be true when it comes to someone’s ability to preserve and use a foreign language, a new study has revealed.

The research team tasked almost 500 British people who had taken French GCSE or A-level between the 1970s and 2020 with completing a French vocabulary and grammar test. They included a survey of whether participants had used their French knowledge over the years since their exams, and excluded (排除) anyone who had studied a language later on in life.

They found that participants who had taken their exam 50 years ago and not used French since performed at the same level as recent school leavers, and as well as those who used French occasionally.

Lead researcher Monika Schmid said: “The knowledge of language is astonishingly stable over long periods of time, compared to other subjects such as maths, history or science. This is likely because of the way language is stored in memory. Vocabulary is memorized in the same way that facts, dates and names are, while this memory may become weaker over time, and grammar is learned in a similar way to riding a bike, a kind of muscle memory, which is much more stable. Vocabulary knowledge on the other hand, exists in a highly connected network, which means that we need only be reminded of a word that sounds similar to a foreign language word for our brain to recall it.”

“Many people are put off revisiting languages they once learnt as they fear they will be forced to relive (重温) some of the more ‘boring’ element s of the courses, such as grammar, but our work suggests that this would not be necessary. We hope that it might encourage more people to pick foreign languages back up if they know it would only take a short amount of time in refresher lessons to bounce back to their original level,” Schmid added.

【推荐1】Everywhere I look outside my home I see people busy on their high-tech devices, while driving, walking, shopping, even sitting in toilets. When connected electronically, they are away from physical reality.

People have been influenced to become technology addicted. One survey reported that “addicted” was the word most commonly used by people to describe their relationship to iPad and similar devices. One study found that people had a harder time resisting the allure of social media than they did for sleep, cigarettes and alcohol.

The main goal of technology companies is to get people to spend more money and time on their products, not to actually improve their quality of life. They have successfully created a cultural disease. Consumers (消费者) willingly give up their freedom, money and time to catch up on the latest information, to keep pace with their peers or to appear modern.

I see people trapped in a pathological (病态的) relationship with time-sucking technology, where they serve technology more than technology serves them. I call this technology servitude. I am referring to a loss of personal freedom and independence because of uncontrolled consumption of many kinds of devices that eat up time and money.

What is a healthy use of technology devices? That is the vital question. Who is really in charge of my life? That is what we need to ask ourselves if we are to have any chance of breaking up false beliefs about their use of technology. When we can live happily without using so much technology for a day or a week, then we can regain control and personal freedom, become the master of technology and discover what there is to enjoy in life free of technology. Mae West is famous for proclaiming the wisdom that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.” But it’s time to discover that it does not work for technology.

Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google acknowledged that “we can be swept away by our technologies.” To break the grand digital connection people must consider how life long ago could be fantastic without today’s overused technology.

【推荐2】Nowadays, many employees hold the view that they should be allowed to have pets in their workplace and believe they help reduce stress and improve their health, a recent study suggests.

“The response was overwhelmingly positive,” said Dr Meredith Wells, a researcher involved in the study. “People thought pets reduced stress, improved job satisfaction.”

“Other studies have found that pets can reduce stress and blood pressure levels for children, older adults, and sick patients, but few studies have examined the effect of pets in the workplace,” Wells added.

Wells and Dr Rose Perrine, another expert, examined 31 local businesses around Kentucky that allowed employees and owners to bring cats and dogs to the workplace. The 193 employees rated their feelings about having pets in the office on a six-point scale.

The companies that allowed pets tended to be smaller, and they did so because the owner or manager wanted to bring his or her own pet to work. Most employees enjoyed having pets in the workplace —even workers who didn’t own pets themselves.

Employees reported that pets in the workplace help foster social communication and are good for business.

Not everyone was entirely enthusiastic. Some drawbacks reported were noise from barking, hair on the furniture, the possibility of the animal urinating on the floor, and allergies. There was also some concern that clients or customers may have allergies or be afraid of the animal.

【推荐3】For most people today, their GPS (Global Positioning System) has become a lifeline, giving directions to the nearest bathroom or restaurant. But the price we pay for the convenience could be our sense of direction.

“I do think GPS devices cause our navigational skills atrophy.” said Nora Newcombe, a psychologist at Temple University in the US who studies how the human brain navigates. “The problem is that you don’t see an overview of the area and where you are in relation to other things.”

To understand the risk, you first need to understand how our brain keeps us from getting lost. Through experiments, researchers have found that our navigational strategies usually fall into two groups. The first involves a spatial map inside your brain. As you explore an area, you think about how the streets fit together and the best way to get between different places. Eventually, the map lets you navigate between any two points in the area. The second involves a series of landmarks and steps: turn right at the gas station, and your school is on the left. It’s quick and reliable, but less flexible—it doesn’t help you get from your school to a totally new place, even if it’s nearby.

These two methods might not sound all that different, but according to Nora Newcombe, a psychologist at Temple University in the US, people who are bad at navigation have trouble with the first strategy – creating spatial maps. What’s more, people’s ability to create maps is decided by how often we use the skill.

That helps explain what happens when people trust themselves with GPS devices. According to Professor Veronique Bohbot of McGill University, people depending on GPS show more activity in the part of the brain that is good at following directions—but less activity in the part which creates the spatial maps.

It turns out that our sense of direction isn’t the only thing we could lose. One more thing that could go is our connection to the environment we travel through. Researchers have found that when people rely on GPS while driving, their memory of their trip is of a route on a screen, rather than the landscape they traveled through. Moreover, researchers believe that active navigation improves the type of thinking used in all kinds of spatial processes. “It’s things like urban planning, and looking at a map to see where resources are. That’s not replaceable by your phone.” Newcombe said.

【推荐1】The world’s hottest rainforest is located not in the Amazon or anywhere else you might expect, but inside Biosphere (生物圈) 2, the experimental scientific research facility in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona. A recent study of tropical trees planted there in the early 1990s reported a surprising result: They have withstood temperatures higher than any likely to be experienced by tropical forests this century.

The study adds to a growing number of findings that are giving forest scientists something that’s been in short supply lately : hope. Plants may have unexpected resources that could help them survive — and perhaps even prosper — in a hotter, more carbon-rich future. And while tropical forests still face both human and natural threats, some researchers believe terrible reports of their approaching decline due to climate change may have been overstated.

“Biology is clever, ”says Scott Saleska, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson and co-leader of the Biosphere 2 study. “It’s a lot smarter than our models yet represent.”

The last few years have seen a flood of alarming reports about forests and climate change’s effects on them. Scientists have announced that the Amazon forest is no longer a reliable carbon sink; the Amazon rainforest may be nearing a tipping point; tropical forests globally are already close to the hottest temperatures they can tolerate and climate change is killing off old trees.

One thing is certainly true: Our fossil fuel emissions are creating a climate that humans have never seen and trees haven’t experienced in a very long time.“We’re pushing tropical forests into temperatures they’ve never seen since the Cretaceous — since there were dinosaurs,” says Abigail Swann, an ecologist and climate scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

【推荐2】In 1947 a group of famous people from the art world decided to hold an international festival of music, dance and theatre in Edinburgh. The idea was to reunite Europe after World War Ⅱ.

It quickly attracted famous names such as Alec Guinness, Richard Burton, Dame Margot Fonteyn and Marlene Dietrich as well as the big symphony orchestras (交响乐团). It became a fixed event every August and now attracts about 400,000 people yearly.

At the same time, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (the Fringe) appeared as a challenge to the official festival. Eight theatre groups turned up uninvited in 1947, believing that everyone should have the right to perform, and they did so in a public house that had been disused for years.

Soon, groups of students firstly from the University of Edinburgh, and later from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham were making the journey to the Scottish capital each summer to perform plays by little-known writers in small halls.

Today the Fringe, once less embraced, has far outgrown the festival with around 1,500 performances of music, dance and theatre on every one of the 21 days it lasts. And yet as early as 1959, with only 19 theatre groups performing, some said it was getting too big.

A paid administrator (管理人员) was first employed only in 1971, and today there are eight administrators working all year round and the number rises to 150 during August itself. In 2004 there were 200 places housing 1,695 shows by over 600 different groups from 50 different countries. More than 1.25 million tickets were sold.