【推荐1】The goats raised by a farmer in eastern China are being hailed by local media as a “rival (对手)” to an invasive plant species which Chinese authorities have been calling on the public to help remove for years.

Xiang Jizhong from Zhejiang said this year he has fed his herd of thousands of goats with Solidago canadensis L.,a plant informally known as Canadian Yellow Flower in China. His goats consume as much as seven tonnes of the invasive plant every day, the Zhejiang Daily reported.

The plant species is native to North America and often forms colonies of upright plants, with many small yellow flowers. It is an invasive plant in other parts of the continent and several areas worldwide, including Europe and Asia.

Xiang said he noticed the authorities’ alert about the Canadian Yellow Flower years ago, but last year contacted the Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences to ask about feeding his goats the plant. “We discovered that although it is dangerous to other plants, it is a super food for animals in terms of nutrition. The content of crude protein in it is nearly equal to that of bean plants,” he said.

“Feeding goats with this plant is like people eating hong shao rou (a famous Chinese meat dish ‘braised pork’),” said Xiang.

The other advantage of using Canadian Yellow Flower to feed goats is that it reduced Xiang’s farm’s costs by 40-50 percent. He said he bought around 5 tonnes of this plant every day at one yuan per kg. Villagers earn a daily income of more than 100 yuan per person from harvesting the Canadian Yellow Flower for the farm.

Experts said there was no need to worry that the goat’s waste would spread the plant’s seeds, as they were broken down in the animal’s digestive system.

【推荐2】Overlooking the Biblioteca degli Alberi is Milan’s “Vertical (垂直的) Forest”: two residential tower blocks built in 2014 that are covered in 800 trees,4,500 shrubs and 15,000 plants. If this forest was planted on the ground, it would cover 20,000 m²— the size of three and a half football fields.

Each year the trees will absorb 10,000 tons of CO₂ and 57 tons of pollutants. They should also produce about 900 tons of oxygen. Boeri’s team of architects says the plants will also decrease the average air temperature, create noise barriers and boost biodiversity by creating a habitat for birds, insects and small animals.

It is not just physical wellbeing that is aided by large green structures in our cities. The team behind Sydney’s 100mhigh “vertical garden” claims it is a new form of “living architecture” that reminds us of “the restorative impact that nature has on our souls”. Just how restorative living near trees and plants is for our souls is open to debate; but studies in Germany have suggested that it can be extremely beneficial for our brains.

Scientists examined brain image sequences (顺序) of 341 elderly residents of Berlin, focusing particularly on the amygdala —the part of the brain that controls our fear responses and is responsible for stress and anxiety disorders. They found that there was strong connection between residents living within 1km of the forests on the edge of the city and those with the healthiest amygdala. A health y amygdala means being less likely to suffer from the stress and anxiety disorders controlled by this part of the brain. Mood and anxiety disorders are up to 56%higher in urban environments when compared to rural locations.

With two-thirds of the world’s population predicted to be living in cities by 2050, Milan’s Vertical Forest might show the world a way to create healthier, happier urban spaces.

【推荐1】Johns Hopkins University researchers discovered precisely how spiders (蜘蛛) build webs in the dark. Their creation of a web-building playbook brings new understanding of how creatures with small brains are able to create elegant and complex structures.

Web-building spiders, which build blindly using only the sense of touch, have attracted humans for centuries. “The first step to understanding that is to study the behaviors and skills involved,” said Andrew Gordus, a Johns Hopkins behavioral biologist, “But until now it has never been done, mainly because of the challenge of detecting and recording the actions.”

His team studied a spider native to the western United States. To observe the spiders during their nighttime web-building work, the lab designed a stage with infrared (红外线的) cameras and infrared lights. They monitored and recorded six spiders every night and tracked millions of individual leg actions. “Even if you video record it, that's a lot of legs to track,”said lead author Abel Corver. “It's just too much to go through every frame (帧) and mark the leg points by hand so we trained machine vision software to detect the actions of the spider, frame by frame, so that we could record everything the legs do to build an entire web.”

They found that web-making behaviors are so similar across spiders that the researchers were able to predict the part of a web a spider was working on just from seeing the position of a leg. “Even if the final structure is a little different, the rules they use to build the web are the same,” Gordus said, “which confirms the rules are in their brains.”

Future work for the lab includes experiments with drugs to determine which circuits (回路) in the spider's brain are responsible for the various stages of web-building. Corver said, “This work could help us understand larger brain systems, including humans.”

【推荐3】Clarence DeMar would train for races by running to and from his job in Boston, up to 14 miles a day. His hard work paid off. He won the 1911 Boston Marathon and competed in the next year’s Olympics.

But at the time, many people and medical experts thought prolonged (持续很久的) exercise was dangerous. A doctor, detecting a heart murmur (杂音), warned DeMar to quit the sport.

DeMar proved them all wrong—both during his lifetime and after—in ways that helped change people’s minds about the benefits of exercise.

He became one of the most noticeable distance runners of his day, competing in two more Olympics and winning the Boston Marathon a record seven times between 1911 and 1930. He kept winning races well into his 40s. The press called him “Mr. DeMarathon”.

After he died of cancer at age 70, two Boston-area experts took a look at his heart. What they found were different from all those terrifying warnings. Not only was DeMar’s heart in good shape, but his arteries(动脉) were also two to three times the size of a typical person’s — reducing the risk of a fatal blockage. As for that heart murmur the doctor warned DeMar about? Experts say, “We now know that highly trained athletes often have a heart murmur, and it’s normal.”

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1961, made the front page of The Boston Globe. “It was one of those first studies that taught us that the human body can really handle, very healthfully, lots and lots of exercise,” said Dr. Aaron Baggish, a professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the former medical director of the Boston Marathon.

The popularity of running exploded in the decades after DeMar’s death, as further research backed that up. It’s now well-established that regular exercise makes us healthier and prolongs our lives.

The current national guidelines recommend at least two and a half to five hours of moderate exercise like walking each week, or an hour and fifteen minutes to two and a half hours of vigorous activity like running—and research suggests more is generally better.