【推荐3】The kid’s face is glowing green from the iPad in her hands, which shows a cartoon boy singing a nursery rhyme and dancing with dinosaurs. She’s so attracted that she doesn’t respond when her mother calls her name. “It’s literally like crack for her,” says her mom Meng Zhou at their home.

It is CoComelon, which may be the most streamed children’s entertainment program in the world. The show was watched for 33 billion minutes last year and had 3.6 billion views on YouTube in January, as many as three-quarters of whom were from outside the U. S. . CoComelon was a Top 10 show on Netflix for more than 100 straight days in 2021, and its music is streamed 1.3 million times a day on Spotify.

CoComelon is not only a ratings juggernaut (收视率主宰). It’s also a model for a new approach to children’s TV. A room of adults could work very hard for years on a concept that helped kids learn important ideas, only to find out viewers weren’t interested. CoComelon’s parent company, Moonbug Entertainment, searches digital platforms like YouTube for popular kids’ programming to figure out what the audience want to watch.

It’s clear that much of CoComelon’s popularity is caused by this program. As parents juggled childcare and remote work, demand for kid content increased greatly, thus making CoComelon successful. The success of the show is the influence that CoComelon has on babies and kids. You can see the evidence in the dozens of TikTok videos showing kids who hear the marimba tones of its theme song. And, Zhou’s daughter’s third word, after Mama and Dada, was CoCo.

As the show and others like it become inescapable, parents are going to have to deal with whether this type of children’s programming works for their families. Sure, their kids may love it — but does that mean it’s any good for them?

【推荐1】A United Nations-backed mission is recommending that the Great Barrier Reef(大堡礁) should be added to the list of endangered World Heritage sites, warning that without “ambitious, rapid and sustained”climate action the world’s largest coral reef is in peril.

The warning came in a report published Monday following a 10-day mission to the reef last March by officials from UNESCO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The reef, a living place of great variety and beauty on the north-east coast of Australia, has been on UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 1981.

Australia’s federal government and Queensland’s state authorities should adopt more ambitious emission reduction targets, in line with international efforts to limit future warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, according to the report.

Feedback from Australian officials, both at the federal and state level, will also be reviewed before UNESCO, the U.N.’s Paris-based cultural agency, makes any official proposal to the World Heritage Committee.

The text is criticizing about recent efforts to stop mass bleaching(褪色) and prevent pollution from ruining the reef’s natural waters, saying they have not been fast nor effective enough. Unlimited emissions lead to increased water acidity, which can be poisonous.

More money should be found to increase the water quality and stop the site’s decline, the report concludes.

In an email to AP, the U.N. cultural agency said: “In recent months, we have had a constructive dialogue with Australian authorities. But there is still work to be done.”

【推荐2】Are you patient? Do you have attention to detail, free time and access to a computer? Well, then a scientist might welcome your help. Researchers in the UK say it’s becoming important to count on common people to help them with their projects. They need people to examine data and submit their observations online.

British teenagers Sasha and Matthew are taking part in a study of penguins (企鹅) from the comfort of their homes. The pair look at pictures and tag (加标签于) photos identifying adults, chicks and eggs. Every click of their mouse is helping to build up a detailed picture of penguin colonies (群). They, and thousands of others, are helping scientists to understand why some colonies are growing and others are decreasing. Within the first four hours of Penguin Watch going live, “citizen scientists” marked more images than the research team did in five years.

Dr. Tom Hart, Penguin Watch Coordinator at Oxford University, says, “When you go beyond what a scientist can analyse to what a mass audience can do, then it increases beyond what any other project could do.”

The British Science Association says families are helping out with careful research. It made a difference to the Planet Hunters Project, which ran for five years. Volunteers looked at dots which showed how the brightness of a star changed at different points in its solar system.

According to Dr. Robert Simpson from Oxford University, who took part in the project, the volunteers discovered planets and these are now in published papers. He says with pride, “We can go and look at these planets with other telescopes and we know they exist because of those helpers.”

But how do scientists guard their research against accidental or deliberate mistakes in observation? Dr. Simpson isn’t worried. “We get lots of people looking at the same things, ”he says. The researcher warns that people who are mistakenly clicking on the site are very obvious and can be identified very quickly. So, there’s no fooling the scientists.

And to make sure things go well, the Penguin Watch paper will go through a peer review before being published. After that, every “citizen scientist” will be credited.

【推荐3】Many Americans pay little attention to science. Even people who regularly watch broadcast television news or cable news channels receive only pieces of science information in their media diet. Yet humor can reach viewers who would never watch NOVA or National Geographic.

Misunderstandings about vaccine (疫苗) safety have contributed to new outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles (麻疹) in 2014-2015 in California and in 2019 Washington state. Last year, I partnered with my colleagues Emily Moyer-Gusé and Melissa Robinson to test how a video of “The Daily Show” influenced parents’   concerns about vaccines.

We randomly split study participants into two groups and gave one a joke-free version of a pro-vaccine video. The other group got a funny version in which host Jon Stewart mixed humor with information about the seriousness of measles virus. One of steward’s jokes, “The United States has been hit with an outbreak of terrible disease. I’m not going to tell you which one. I’m going to tell you this. It rhymes with Vin Diesel. ” He also mocks the parents who avoid vaccinating their children as “science-denying freedom admirers”.

Study results showed that viewing the funny version of the message lowered vaccine safety concerns among the participants, especially those who previously had doubts about vaccine safety. For the audience members with strongest doubts, the funny version reduced vaccine safety concerns by 7 percent.

Traditional Vaccine messages often spark a negative influence in which showing doubters pro-vaccine data only hardens their suspicion. Our findings suggest that humor offers a unique opportunity to address mistaken science beliefs without triggering that sort of resistance.