【推荐2】Michael Gonsalves, a chef of Golden Oak at Disney World, has a cuisine concept rooted in fresh, locally-sourced ingredients that originated from childhood harvesting produce from their family garden with his mom to eventually leading kitchens at Walt Disney World Resorts to employ a sustainable model.

“Truly the whole process starts with menu planning,” he said. Creating one dish leads into the creation of many more through the end-to-end use of products. As chefs, they are always searching for the best ingredients. It is then their focus to ensure they appreciate and respect all that go into each and every one of them. For example, they source chicken that is naturally grown and fed on a natural plant forward diet, no hormones (激素) or additives — that’s used in many ways throughout menus from a simple grilled chicken breast to bone soup. Nothing goes to waste.

When they do have waste, even if minimal, they shift it from landfills to transform it into compost (堆肥) that’s then used across the Walt Disney World property. They also support Second Harvest, a local community food bank where healthy produce, prepared, but not served, meals eatable for human consumption are donated. Disney also works with pig farmers when they can’t distribute foods past the point of safety for human consumption. Besides, wildlife reservations love to get the meat because tigers and wild cats can still eat that.

Their operations are “on a path to a sustainable zero waste kitchen of tomorrow” where chefs learn the full-life cycle of plants from seed to plate and gain a better understanding and appreciation for the product and their craft.

Golden Oak at Disney has millions of bees that produce up to 300 pounds of honey per year, plus those bees help with cross pollination (授粉) of their gardens on a daily basis. They advocate a culture that helps develop not only the quality of food, but an appreciation for nature.

【推荐3】Does your mouth water when you think of cookies, burgers and French fries? Many people prefer junk food like this to healthy food because they develop a taste for it. Processed, baked, and fried foods often contain a high amount of trans fats.

Trans fats raise bad cholesterol (胆固醇) and lower the good cholesterol that your body needs. Fatty foods do more than cause people to gain too much weight. Trans fats build up in the body and block blood flow to the heart. People whose diet contains a high percentage of trans fats are at risk of developing heart disease or having a stroke.

Food companies and restaurants choose to use trans fat oils because they’re cheap and they make food like crackers and baked goods last longer. They also improve the taste of food. Trans fats became very popular in the second half of the 20th century. This is around the time butter got a bad name for its cholesterol levels. People were told to use margarine (人造黄油) containing trans fats instead because it was “healthier”, but we now know that butter is actually the healthier option.

We all need some fat in our diet. There are three different types of fats: saturated (饱和的) fats, unsaturated fats and trans fats. Doctors recommend that we get most of our fatty calories from unsaturated fats. Neither butter nor margarine fit this category, though other spreads like peanut butter do. Reading the list of ingredients on the label is a good way of avoiding dangerous ingredients like trans fats. Another way is to avoid eating out, especially in fast food restaurants. Also, when shopping try to buy the majority of your food in the fresh-food section and limit the amount of processed and packaged food you buy. You might not think this is important if you’re young, but the choices you make now will affect you for the rest of your life.

【推荐1】“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” The famous Forrest Gump line also works for blind box, which is taking over the world by storm, reaching into the pockets of millions of collectors.

Founded in 2010, Pop Mart is one of the most famous blind box brands (品牌) in China. In 2015, the company began to compete in the designer toys market almost exclusively, with a focus on the blind box model, and became the first home-grown brands to ever benefit from people’s growing toys collecting addiction (嗜好，上瘾).

The idea of blind box started in Japan during the 1980s. It was then called Fukubukuro which means “fortune bag” in Japanese. Blind box customers pay a fixed price, usually 10,000 Japanese Yen, and then test their luck since goods of more than JPY 80,000 to 90,00 worth such as digital cameras and expensive jewelry and sometimes even vouchers (代金券) for a car cam be found in these bags.

The expectation of finding an unknown prize is part of blind boxes’ magic that gets collectors,   mainly young adults, addicted to them. Some say their bodies produce dopamine, the chemical known to cause pleasure, when unboxing a blind box.

However, most die-hard collectors see great value in collecting whole sets of certain series. Companies behind these blind boxes often release sets consisting of a dozen or so. The catch, however, is that the number of figures with special decoration is usually limited, often making continuous treasure hunting a part of the blind box collecting experience.

“In the information age as people become more and more distant from one another, mystery boxes help them make friends with people who share similar likings and find a sense of belonging(归属感),” said Wei Wenqi, an associate professor of psychology.

However, she also warned about the dangers of addiction and overconsumption (过度消费) linked to these blind boxes, especially for teenagers. “We can pay for joy, but not for impulse (冲动),” Wei said, advising parents to pay more attention to what could become an unhealthy habit.”

【推荐2】Time to end Santa’s “naughty list”?

Many of us have magical memories of Santa secretly bringing gifts and joy to our childhood homes — but is there a darker side to the beloved Christmas tradition?

I was — and I’m happy to admit it — a loyal believer of Santa. I absolutely loved the magic of Christmas, especially Santa Claus, and my parents went above and beyond to encourage it. However, as I begin to construct my own Santa Claus myth for my daughter, I can’t help but feel guilty. Could it undermine her trust in me?

    1     Back in 1978, a study published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (矫正精神医学) found that 85% of four-year-olds said they believed in Santa. In 2011, research published in the Journal of Cognition and Development found that 83% of 5-year-olds claimed to be true believers.

I guess it’s not all that surprising.     2     He features in every Christmas TV show and movie. Each year the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) allows you to track Santa’s journey on Christmas Eve. To reassure children during the pandemic in 2020, the World Health Organization issued a statement declaring that Santa was “immune” from Covid 19. And it’s precisely this effort on behalf of parents, and society in general, to create such seemingly overwhelming evidence for the existence of Santa Claus that David Kyle Johnson, a professor of philosophy at King’s College in Pennsylvania, describes as ‘The Santa Lie’ in his book The Myths That Stole Christmas. He highlights how we don’t simply ask children to imagine Santa, but rather to actually believe in him.     3    

The “Santa lie” can reduce trust between a parent and a child.     4     It is the creation of false evidence and convincing kids that bad evidence is in fact good evidence that discourages the kind of critical thinking we should be encouraging in children in this era. “The ‘Santa lie’ is part of a parenting practice that encourages people to believe what they want to believe, simply because of the psychological reward,” says Johnson. “That’s really bad for society in general.”

【推荐3】My mother died of breast cancer when she was merely 50 in 1970. Afterwards, the comment repeated most often was: “You’ll need to be careful for the rest of your life because it may have been passed to you.” In 1994, the first ever breast cancer gene testing arrived. I jumped right to it and tested negative. I’m thankful for the science that has given me this preventive screening (筛查). Good for me, but is it good for everyone?

Here’s the catch. Research on genetic disease has been based mostly on European people, like me. The same went to the mapping of the human genes. The problem is that we know little about how new treatments might work for people of other races. If we diversify patients in clinical trials, we can realize the promise of personalized medicine for everyone, not just white patients. Faced with the unfair phenomena in medical research, what should we do to resolve the problem?

Not only do we need more diverse populations participating in research, but we also need diversity among biomedical researchers and medical professionals to make efforts. That makes research stronger and builds trust with diverse communities. A medical team is working on this now. They are building a diverse next generation of gene editing researchers by teaching high school and community college students from different backgrounds about promising technologies like gene editing to encourage them to become future researchers. This sort of educational outreach can also help to build trust in the medical and research communities. The team leader, John Cooper, PhD, has been outspoken about the current inequalities of delivering new technologies to all people at a fair cost.

Numerous scientists and medical leaders are working to change the situation. While science wasn’t yet far enough along to save my mother, I have harvested the benefits of advanced research and so should we all.

【推荐1】The world’s top climate scientists of the IPCC have just released a landmark report, warning about the future of the planet. The headline—burning fossil fuels is already heating up the planet faster than anything the world has seen in 2,000 years.

The IPCC is a U. N. body of 195 member states that assesses the science related to the climate crisis on behalf of governments every few years. This is the group that defines the scientific consensus. Hundreds of scientists work on a series of reports, which take years to produce. Governments have to sign off on them. And this one is just the latest big reassessment of the climate that the IPCC has done, but it’s the first one that is done in eight years. It also has the clearest, most confident conclusions that have ever been seen in an IPCC report.

According to the report, the greenhouse gases that we have already put into the air have warmed up the planet so far by almost 2 °F compared to the pre-industrial times. This warming trend appears to be accelerating as the greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. And if we keep burning fossil fuels, by 2100—so within the lifetime of a child that’s born today—the planet could be 5 to 7°F hotter.

And one new thing in this report is that it tries to put numbers on what that means. So, for instance, they say heat waves so extreme used to only happen once every 50 years. Now they’re happening almost five times more often. Extreme droughts could double or four times in frequency. In some cases, extreme storms could become three times more frequent and drop 30% more rainfall in a day.

The scientists say preventing the worst effects will demand a U-turn away from use of fossil fuels. And it depends on us collectively. If every country, every business shifts away from burning gas, coal and oil over the next 30 years or so, we could probably limit this warming trend to a total of less than 3.5°F.

【推荐2】Nearly two years after the COVID-19 outbreak, China has granted approval to its first antibody combination therapy (治疗) for COVID-19 treatment, adding a tool to the world’s fight against the disease.

A team from Tsinghua University, along with the Shenzhen People’s Hospital, has accomplished the task in 20 months. It would usually take 10 years. “It can reduce the rate of hospitalization (住院治疗) and death by 80 percent,” said Zhang Linqi, leader of the research team.

The new antibody drug is immediately effective after being used. Moreover, the therapy can protect people, especially those whose physical condition doesn’t allow vaccination (接种疫苗), from becoming infected by COVID-19 for around 9 to 12 months, said Zhang.

How does it work? When a virus infects a cell, it relies on an important type of protein: the spike proteins (棘突蛋白) on its surface. The spike proteins serve as a key to unlocking a cell. If a virus cannot enter a cell, it will disappear immediately. The job of our antibodies is to block the virus from entering cells. So its target is very precise. In addition, thanks to the coordination between the two antibodies, it is highly efficient in preventing the virus, according to Zhang. The qualities of the new drug make it especially useful for high-risk groups, such as frontline medical workers and people not suitable for vaccination due to various underlying health problems.

The new drug is expected to come to the market soon, but it’s not cheap. That’s because of limited production. Noting that China has used science and technology to fight COVID-19 since the beginning of the outbreak, Zhang said, “Science is the key to solving the issue. Science has shown its power in all sectors, from medical treatment, medicine and vaccine development to prevention and control measures.”

【推荐3】Carleen Hutchins finished building her first stringed instrument (弦乐器) in 1949, when she was 38. She is remembered as an excellent luthier. A luthier is a person who makes stringed instruments, such as violins and guitars.

Hutchins was a primary school science teacher. She took up the viola (中提琴) at 36. But she wasn’t satisfied with the viola she bought. Since she was a skilled woodworker, she decided to build one herself.

For more than 50 years, she carved (雕刻) stringed instruments. Hutchins worked from her home — often in her kitchen. She used a scientific method to carve them. Over the years, she made around 500 instruments. Her method is still used. It helps luthiers carve high-quality stringed instruments.

Hutchins also created a family of eight violins known as the violin octet. They change in size and tone (音调). “It’s how the instrument is carved that makes it a violin,” Joe McNalley says. He is the founder of the Hutchins Consort, a group that plays the octet.

The four instruments in the string family are violin, viola, cello, and bass. They cannot play the lowest or highest notes of the piano. They play the notes in between. Hutchins created a family of eight violins that play all the notes a piano plays.

D. Quincy Whitney has written a book about Hutchins. “For centuries, musicians had talked about creating a family of violins that had a total string sound as wide as a piano,” she said.

Hutchins was an artist and a scientist. A big part of her dream was to create top-quality instruments that were affordable. “Her story is about how one person can not only make a difference,” says Whitney, “but can change a whole world.”