【推荐3】A rescue center in Alaska has taken in an orphaned baby seal (海豹) that was still in the body when a hunter killed its mother on Easter Sunday.

The Alaska Sea Life Center says a hunter killed the baby’s mother in a village on Nelson Island in the Bering Sea. The hunter then realized there was a live baby inside the seal and successfully delivered (接生) it.

The hunter’s daughter found a hotline of the Seward Rescue Center and called to report the incident. Guided by center staff, a village teacher helped transport the baby to the local airport, and the animal was flown to Anchorage. The Alaska Sea Life Center members met the baby, now called Maxwell, at the Anchorage airport and drove him to Seward on Monday. Staff members say the baby has responded well to food and care, but his condition is still considered very serious.

“Maxwell was close to full-term, and everything looks fairly normal,” said Pam Tuomi, a center vet. “But babies that have never received antibodies (抗体) from their mothers’ milk are at higher risk of infection (感染), so we will keep Maxwell in a separate place and watch him closely for the next few weeks.”

The Sea Life Center is Alaska’s only permanent facility licensed to house stranded marine mammals and seabirds. The staff choose a theme each year for naming animals admitted there, and this year the names are related to caffeine.

“We hope to give Maxwell a second chance to live as a wild sea,” said Brett Long, the center’s director.

【推荐2】A new study shows bee’s tiny insect brains may be able to connect symbols to numbers.

Adrian Dyer is a professor in the RMIT University. He said that the research showed brains which are far smaller than humans’ could know numbers. “Studies have shown primates (灵长类动物) and birds have this ability, but this is the first time we’ve seen this in insects.” Dyer says.

There are 86 billion neurons (神经元) in humans’ brains. Bees only have less than a million. If bees can learn something difficult to understand like human-made symbolic language, this will open up exciting new paths for future communication between humans and animals.

Studies have shown that a number of animals have been able to learn symbols of numbers, including parrots and monkeys. An African grey parrot called Alex was able to learn numbers and could do simple calculation. Monkeys were taught Arabic numbers and could order them correctly.

Understanding how tiny brains of bees manage information opens paths to technology, which is good for the future design of computing (计算) systems.

【推荐3】Scientists have discovered many uses for peppers. Called capsaicin (辣椒素), it’s the main ingredient in pepper spray.     1     In smaller quantities, capsaicin can relieve pain, help with weight loss and possibly affect microbes in the gut (肠道) to keep people healthier. Now how cool is that?

Capsaicin triggers a rush of stress hormones.     2     It can also make someone feel energized. Some people enjoy this feeling. But there is another reason why peppers show up on dinner plates around the world. When food sits out in warm weather, microbes on the food start to multiply. If people eat food with too many of these germs, they risk getting very sick. The cold temperature inside a refrigerator stops most microbes from growing.     3     But long ago, those appliances weren’t available. Peppers were. Their capsaicin and other chemicals, it turns out, can slow or stop microbial growth.

    4     However, a person can’t simply eat hot, spicy food and expect to lose pounds. A drug is being created to make the body burn through fat more quickly than usual. A primary ingredient: Capsaicin. A study showed that mice that ate a high-fat diet containing capsaicin did not gain extra weight.     5    

【推荐1】A worldwide problem has long caught people’s attention: student loan (贷款) debt. In America, the country’s overall student debt reached a record of $1.6 trillion in 2019. The average person with student loan debt owed between $20,000 and $25,000. A recent Japanese government report says it has been lending over $9 billion yearly to students since 2010. Similar conditions exist in Africa and South America.

Several factors account for high student loan debt. One is that employers everywhere have increased their demands for skilled workers, making higher education a requirement for many jobs. The students, however, after graduation, often find that their country’s economy is not strong enough to support their financial needs, so their ability to pay back the loan becomes a problem.

To solve the problem, many countries are seeking their ways. Australia has developed a system where students do not have to pay anything back until they are earning at least $40,000 a year. In America, several candidates running for president in the 2020 election have offered more extreme solutions that all or at least some of these loans will be forgiven.

Some professors in several universities recently studied what the effects of debt forgiveness might be. They found that, overall, sudden debt relief greatly improved the borrowers’ lives. Not only did they have more money, but they were more likely to move to a new area and seek better paying work.

Yet the professors’ research doesn’t include what might happen to financial institutions or the overall economy if debt were totally forgiven. It only looks at how debt forgiveness would help the borrowers. They warn of some other possible negative effects. If a borrower knew that if he ran into any trouble he would be saved because he could get the debt relief, then he might actually become more reckless (轻率的) with his borrowing in the future.

No matter what, the professors agree that if countries do decide to approve some student debt relief, the neediest students should be helped first.

【推荐3】No country in the world has more daily newspapers than the USA. There are almost 2,000 of them, as compared with 180 in Japan, 164 in Argentina and 111 in Britain. The quality of some American papers is extremely high and their views are quoted all over the world. Famous dailies like the Washington Post or the New York Times have a powerful influence all over the country. However, they are not national newspapers in the sense that The Times is in Britain or Le Monde is in France, since each American city has its own daily newspaper. The best of these present detailed description of national and international news, but many tend to limit themselves to state or city news.

Like the press in most other countries, American newspapers range from the “sensational” which feature crime and gossip(闲谈), to the “serious”, which focus on factual news and the analysis of world events. But with few exceptions, American newspapers try to entertain as well as give information, for they have to compete with the attraction of television.

Just as American newspapers satisfy all tastes, so do they also try to attract readers of all political parties. A few newspapers support extremist(极端主义的) groups on the far right and on the far left, but most daily newspapers try to attract middle-of-the-road Americans who are moderate(中立的). Many of these papers print columns by well-known journalists of different political and social views, in order to present a balanced picture.

As in other countries, American newspapers can be either responsible or irresponsible, but it is generally accepted that the American press serves its country well and that it has more than once courageously exposed political scandals(丑闻) or crimes, for instance, the Watergate Affair(水门事件). The Newspapers drew the attention of the public to the horrors of the Vietnam War.