【推荐1】Veganism

What is veganism? The term ”vegan“ was coined in 1944 by a small group of vegetarians who broke away from the term ”Vegetarian“ to form the Vegan Society.     1    

The term ”vegan“ was chosen by combining the first and last letters of ”vegetarian“. Veganism is currently defined as a way of living that attempts to exclude all forms of animal exploitation and cruelty, be it from food, clothing, or any other purpose.

Why do people go vegan? Vegans generally choose to avoid animal products for one or more of the following reasons.

Ethical vegans strongly believe that all creatures have the right to life and freedom.     2    Ethical vegans are also opposed to the psychological and physical stress that animals may endure as a result of modern farming practices. For instance, ethical vegans deplore the small pens and cages in which many livestock live and often rarely leave between birth and slaughter(屠杀).     3    

Some people choose veganism for its potential health effects. For example, plant-based diets may reduce your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and premature death. Lowering your intake of animal products may likewise reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s disease or dying from cancer or heart disease. Some also choose veganism to avoid the side effects linked to the antibiotics(抗生素)and hormones(激素)used in modern animal agriculture. Finally, studies consistently link vegan diets to a lower body weight and body mass index(BMI)so as to lose weight.

    4    A United Nations report argued that these products generally require more resources and cause higher greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based options. For instance, animal agriculture tends to be a water-intensive process. 1,700-19,550 liters of water are needed to produce 0.5 kg of beef. That’s up to 43 times more water than is needed to produce the same amount of cereal grains. Animal agriculture can also lead to deforestation when forested areas are burned for land or pasture, which is thought to contribute to the extinction of various animal species.

【推荐3】Hunting for aliens (外星人) might sound like science fiction. But it’s a serious science.

No aliens have been found yet. But it’s a big universe. Scientists have found thousands of planets orbiting other stars. And there may be billions of other worlds still to be discovered. Some may even have moons that can support life. Over the last 60 years, scientists have hunted only a tiny bit of it for interstellar (星际的) messages.

Some people think we’d have a better chance of meeting aliens if we introduce ourselves. In other words, send our own messages into space. But other scientists say this is a bad idea. We might not want to advertise our existence to unfriendly aliens.

There may also be aliens that aren’t able to send or read messages. Some planets may be home to simple, even tiny life forms. To find those worlds, scientists look for new worlds in the place suitable to live. This is the area around a star where a planet would be just warm enough to have liquid water. That’s important because water is essential for all known life.

A planet may not have to look just like Earth, though, to be a good home for aliens. Some hardy creatures on our own planet grow strong and tall in seemingly unlivable conditions. Some microbes (微生物) live on the deep seafloor. Learning about these microbes broadens our view of what places in the universe might be livable.

The question of whether we are alone in the universe has captured people’s imaginations for thousands of years. And the answer has two equally exciting possibilities. In outer space, either we are completely alone—or we are not.

【推荐1】It was Lefteris Arapakis’s first expedition on a fishing boat, and he didn’t expect what the nets would pull up. There were scorpionfish, red mullet and sea bream. But there was also a bright red can of Coke.

Arapakis, whose family had plied (定期往来) the waters near Athens for five generations, pulled the can out of the net and turned it over to look at the sell-by date stamped on the bottom —1987, seven years older than him. It had been in the Mediterranean for almost three decades.

Every day, the fishing boat — and thousands just like it on the crystalline Mediterranean — caught old bottles, plastic foam, flip-flops and other detritus (碎屑) in its nets. And every day, its crew tossed everything back into the undulating waters, only hauling back what would bring cash.

So Arapakis, now 28, had an idea: he would try to convince the fishing industry to treat plastic as a catch. In 2016, he launched a nonprofit focused on sea cleanup and fishing education called Enaleia, a play on Greek words that calls to mind sustainable fishing. Once the fishers brought the plastic ashore, he would recycle it and pay them for their trouble. Six years into the project, he has signed up more than half of Greece’s large-scale fishing fleet — hundreds of ships — to pull in the plastic they gather as they spy the Mediterranean. He plans to keep expanding globally.

This year, after Arapakis spread his efforts across Greece and much of Italy, he expects to gather nearly 200 tons of plastic — enough to fill a football field five feet high with tiny pieces of plastic. That’s more than 7,500 pounds of plastic every week. And others have taken notice: the United Nations Environment Program named him a Young Champion of the Earth in 2020 — its highest environmental honor for people under 30.

“If we hadn’t taken action, we would have had that plastic floating around the Mediterranean forever,” Arapakis said. At the beginning, convincing fishermen to join was painstaking work, requiring a lot of face time in unfamiliar villages. It wasn’t easy: The industry doesn’t always cotton to environmentalists, since many fishermen think the global plastics activists want to take away their livelihoods.

【推荐3】On August 8, 2021, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its first assessment of climate science since 2013. The news was not good. The report stated that this past decade was the hottest in 125,000 years and that the atmospheric carbon levels are the highest in at least 2 million years. Glaciers are melting faster than any time in over 2,000 years, and ocean levels are rising at twice the rate since 2006.

At the current pace, the researchers expect global temperatures to rise by at least 1.5°, compared to pre-industrial levels, within the next 20 years. The temperature increases will result in significant changes to the planet’s water cycle. Areas that currently receive a lot of rain will get significantly more, while dry regions will become increasingly likely to droughts.

The IPCC’s findings come as no surprise to the millions of people worldwide currently feeling the impacts of climate-related disasters. America and many European countries are battling wildfires. Meanwhile, an unprecedented (史无前例的) week-long storm in July 2021 caused flash floods and mudslides in Western Europe. Climate change is even impacting the Earths coldest and most remote regions which experienced the first rainfall event in recorded history.

The situation may sound hopeless. However, many experts believe it is still not too late to turn things around, if we all act now. While governments need to do their share by introducing and obey stricter carbon emission laws, individuals can also help. Driving less, conserving water, and reducing electricity usage are some great ways to start. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle will help conserve natural resources and energy. It will also save you and your community. Be sure to start doing your part to save our beautiful home today!

【推荐3】Feeling young may be more important than being young, according to researchers from University of College London.

The findings were published by JAMA Internal Medicine. A total of 6, 489 people who were at least 52 years old joined in 2010 or 2011 and were then tracked for an average of 99 months. When they entered the study, they were asked this simple question, “How old do you feel you are?”

Although the average true age of the volunteers was 65. 8 years old, their average self-recognized age was only 56. 8 years old. The feeling that one’s age is lower than one’s chronological age was very common in the study. Fully 69. 6 percent of the volunteers felt at least three years younger while only 4. 8 percent felt more than one year older. The remaining 25. 6 percent felt “about their actual age”.

A total of 1, 266 of the volunteers died during the course of the study, but those deaths weren’t equally spread among all three groups. The mortality rate (死亡率) among those who felt older than their true age was 24. 6 percent, compared with 18. 5 percent for those who felt their age and only 14.3 percent for those who felt much younger.

The researchers also took into consideration various factors that might explain the connection between feeling older and the increased risk of near-term death. With all of these things taken into consideration, they still found that the risk of death during the course of the study was 41 percent higher for the people who felt older than for the people who felt younger.

“People who feel older than their actual age could be targeted with health messages encouraging positive feelings,” the study authors wrote.