【推荐1】The curb cut (路缘坡) is a convenience that most of us rarely, if ever, notice. Yet, without it, daily life might be a lot harder in more ways than one, such as carrying baggage, pushing a bicycle or a wheelchair or riding a skateboard etc. —all these tasks are easier because of the curb cut.

But it was created with a different purpose in mind. It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the 1970s, most sidewalks in the United States ended with a sharp drop-off. That was a big deal for people in wheelchairs because there were no ramps (斜坡) to help them move along city blocks without assistance. According to one disability rights leader, a six-inch curb “might as well have been Mount Everest”. So, activists from Berkeley, California, who also needed wheelchairs, organized a campaign to create tiny ramps at intersections to help disadvantaged people dependent on wheels move up and down curbs independently.

I think about the “curb cut effect” a lot when working on issues around health equity. The first time I even heard about the curb cut was in a 2017 Stanford Social Innovation Review piece by Policy Link CEO Angela Blackwell. Blackwell rightly noted that many people see equity “as a zero-sum game.” Basically, there is a deeply rooted social belief among them that intentionally supporting one group hurts another. What the cur b cut effect reveals though, Blackwell said, is that “when society creates the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully, almost everyone wins.”

One such example is closed captioning (字幕), originally intended to help deaf people understand movies and TV shows without needing to hear dialogue or sounds. But it’s easy to think of other applications for closed captioning: it’s convenient for customers watching TV in a noisy bar or gym. second-language learners who want to read as well as listen, or students who use it as a study aid.

So, next time you cross the street, or roll your suitcase through a crosswalk or ride your bike directly onto a sidewalk —think about how much the curb cut, that change in design that broke down walls of exclusion for one group of people at a disadvantage, has helped not just that group, but almost all of us.

【推荐2】Have you been exercising and eating healthy, but when you step on the scale, it says you’ve gained a few pounds? “That’s normal, and it doesn’t mean that your workouts are not effective”, says Jeffrey A. Dolgan, an exercise physiologist in Miami Beach, Florida.

“A person’s scale mass (质量) is a combination of muscle, fat, bone, blood, and even the air that we carry in our lungs,” he says. “Immediately after a workout routine, the percentage of mass in each body part can shift as much as 15 percent. So if you’re gaining weight while working out and eating healthy, it’s probably not the type of weight gain that you think it is.

The scale can’t tell you how much of your body weight is muscle or fat, which means if your goal is to improve your fitness level, the scale is not the best tool for measuring improvements. When you start to change your body composition with your workouts — by building more muscle mass and decreasing your body fat — your scale weight may increase, while your body fat percentage may decrease. These changes happen over weeks and months (not hours or days) so the scale is useless when tracking them.

You may argue that you weigh a few pounds less after a high intensity (强度) training class. Don’t get too excited—it’s just water loss due to sweat. Water makes up approximately 65 to 90 percent of a person’s weight, and variation in water content of the human body can move the scale by ten pounds or more from day to day.

So ignore the scale and pay more attention to objective measurement tools like body composition. Keep in mind that if you’re exercising but gaining weight, you may actually look slimmer.

【推荐2】There have been numerous wake-up calls about the effects of climate change on sea life. As ocean waters heat up, they are making coral lose color. Growing levels of carbon dioxide are making seawater more acidic. Now climate change is starting to affect fish's sense of smell, a phenomenon that will worsen in the coming years if global warming continues growing.

A sense of smell is what the fish can't do without. They use it to find food, detect upcoming danger, escape from predators (捕食者）find safe environments, and even recognize one another. "Future levels of carbon dioxide can have large negative effects on the sense of smell of fish, which can affect fish population numbers and the entire ecosystem, ”said an ocean life expert. "This can be prevented, but we must reduce carbon emissions now before it's too late.”

Experts believe that about half of carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels--have over time ended up in the oceans, lowering the pH of seawater, and making it more acidic.

Researchers found that sea bass (鲈鱼）exposed to the more acidic conditions swam less and were less likely to react when encountering the smell of a predator. Also, they were more likely to "freeze", a sign of anxiety, according to the study. They found the longer the fish were in high CO2,the worse they got along. The researchers also measured the ability of the fish to detect certain odors (气味）in different levels of acidity (酸度）。 The study showed that their ability to detect and respond to some odors connected with food and threatening situations was more strongly affected than other odors.

The research is important because 20 percent of the protein consumed by 3 million people comes from seafood, and about 50 percent of this comes from fish caught from the wild. “Therefore, increases in carbon dioxide in the ocean have the potential to affect all fish species, including those that many people rely on food and livelihood, "the ocean life expert warned.