【推荐1】Every year, some 2.3 million women and men around the world died from work-related accidents or diseases — that’s more than 8, 000 deaths every single day — and at least 402 million people suffer from non-fatal occupational injuries. The number is enormous in terms of personal tragedy and hardship. And it comes with a huge economic loss. It is estimated that occupational accidents and diseases lead to a 5.4 percent loss of annual global GDP.

A safe and healthy working environment is so important that in June 2022 the ILO (International Labor Organization) took a historic step when it added a safe and healthy working environment to its Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.

Why does this matter? It matters because occupational safety and health can now no longer be viewed as an optional extra. All of the ILO’s 186 member states are now required to respect, promote and achieve a safe and healthy working environment as a fundamental principle and right at work.

This is significant for several reasons. First, it recognizes that every worker has the right to be protected from dangers and risks that can cause injury, illness or death in the workplace.

By making occupational safety and health (OSH) a fundamental right, the ILO is sending a clear message to governments and employers of all countries that they must take responsibility for providing a safe and healthy working environment for all workers.

When workers feel safe and healthy in their workplace, they are likely to be more productive and efficient. This can benefit workers, employers as well as the economy. Conversely, when workers are injured or become ill due to workplace dangers, it can have a significantly negative impact on productivity and economic growth.

A safe and healthy working environment is now a fundamental right for each and every worker. Governments, employers, trade unions as well as companies must work together to make this right a reality.

【推荐2】Scientists have used lasers (激光) to generate electricity in the lab before. Recently Swiss researchers have found in a mountaintop experiment that a powerful laser can grab hold of a lightning flash and reroute its path through the sky, which is the first demonstration that the technique works in real-world storms and could someday lead to better protection, against lightning.

Today’s most common anti-lightning tech is the classic lightning rod, a meters-long metal pole rooted to the ground. It attracts lightning and safely guides the electricity into the ground. But the area protected by a lightning rod is limited by the rod’s height. “If you want to protect large buildings like airports, you would need a lightning rod of kilometer size,” says Aurélien Houard, a French physicist. Such at all metal pole would be impractical But a laser could reach that far, stopping distant lightning flashes and taking them down to ground-based metal rods.

Houard and his colleagues tested this idea a top Säntis mountain in Switzerland. They setup a high-power laser near a telecommunication tower tipped with a lightning rod that is struck by lightning around 100 times every year. The tower was hit by lightning four times while the laser was on. One of those strikes happened in a fairly clear sky, allowing two high-speed cameras to shoot the moment. Those images showed lightning rushing down from the clouds and following the laser light for some 50 meters toward the tower’s lightning rod.

To follow the paths of the three flashes they couldn’t see, the researchers looked at radio waves given off by the lightning. Those radio waves showed the three strikes followed the path of the laser much more closely than other strikes that happened when the laser was off. This suggested that the laser guided these three strikes to the lightning rod as well.

It’s a real achievement but the laser is too expensive. It’ll probably take a decade or more before it’s truly able to protect large buildings.

【推荐3】Do you know that every fourteen days one of the world’s 7,000 languages dies out? Throughout human history, languages have died out because of natural disasters, war or genocide (种族灭绝), but nowadays the major factor is globalization. This is happening all over the world. In the Amazon rainforest, for example, native people are learning Portuguese to move to the big cities in Brazil to find work. In South Africa, young people are choosing to use English instead of traditional languages to study in higher education.

About 60% of the world’s population speak one of the twenty most common languages, and the number of speakers of world languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese is increasing rapidly. Would we really miss most small languages if they died out completely? The answer has got to be “yes”!

When a language disappears, we lose the culture and history of a people. We also lose the knowledge of the people who speak the language. In a famous case in northern Australia, doctors couldn’t find a cure (疗法) for a skin problem that the local people developed. When they asked a native woman, she used her own language to describe a plant which could cure the disease. There are many other examples of why disappearing languages are important. Speakers of the Kallawaya language in Bolivia have got a wide vocabulary of medicinal plants in their part of the rainforest which doctors in the modern world have never heard of, and speakers of the Yupik language of Alaska have got ninety-nine words for ice, which shows that they’ve got a unique understanding of their world. Our planet would lose that understanding if these languages disappeared.

But we don’t have to lose as many languages as some people think. Using modern technology can save small languages, and we mustn’t lose the culture, history and knowledge that these languages contain (包含).