【推荐2】One of the biggest social issues in Japan is the increasingly low marriage rate among young people and the small birth rate, which led to an aging and eventually shrinking（萎缩） population. Most young Japanese women simply don’t seem interested in having many children.

Now what began in Japan is happening globally. As David Brooks wrote, birth rate is becoming smaller in much of the world, from Iran — 1.7 births rate per woman — to Russian, where low birth rates connected with high death rates mean the population is already shrinking. And this includes US, which has long had higher birth rates than most developed nations. Aging countries will face the burden of caring for large elderly populations without a larger resource of young workers.

It’s true that global aging is going to present some major challenges. Who will take care of the elderly? Will an older world be less active and slower to change and adapt? It’s all true. Sometimes I worry about a coming generational war over resources, just as I worry about how I will take care of my own parents in their old age, just as I worry about who might take care of me.

But here’s the thing: an older world may have less pressure on the environment. As we all know, the environment is the real victim of overpopulation.

So maybe a world that grows slower and grows older will put less pressure on the environment, and buy us a few more years to ensure our energy use, along with our birthrates, reaches a sustainable（可持续的）level. After all, we’re supposed to get smarter as we got older. Hopefully that holds true for the planet as well.

【推荐1】Almost everyone has heard the expression, “the calm before the storm”.It is usually used to describe a peaceful period just before a very stressful situation or a tense argument.

British sailors coined the phrase in the late 1600s; they noted that before certain storms the seas would seem to become static and the winds would drop.

But why is it often so calm before a storm?

Science has given us the answer. According to US infotainment (资讯娱乐) website How Stuff Works, a calm period occurs because many storms, such as tornadoes and hurricanes, draw in all the warm and humid air from the surrounding area. As this air rises into the storm clouds, it cools and acts as “fuel for the storm, like petrol in a car”.

Once the storm has taken all the energy it can from the air, it is pushed out from the top of the storm clouds and falls back down to ground level. As the air descends, it becomes warm and dry. Warm, dry air is stable, so once it covers an area, it causes a calm period before the storm.

This same process also causes the “eye of the storm” in hurricanes and tornadoes. In these conditions, the calm occurs in the center of the storm because of the strong rotating winds.

The Weather Network has a tip for working out how far away a storm is.First, count how many seconds there are between a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder. Roughly three seconds equal one kilometer. So, for example, if you count nine seconds, the storm is about 3 kilometers away. A good evaluation is that if your count is below 30 seconds, you should seek shelter straight away.

However, due to the complexity of storm system, not all storms are preceded by calm. Given the right conditions, some storms announce themselves with heavy rain and chilling winds.

So, your best bet is to keep yourself updated with weather reports for any predictions regarding a coming storm in your area. That’s the most reliable and sensible way to predict the next display of nature’s temper.

【推荐2】The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth largest lake. Filled with salt water and at least 24 species of fish, the Aral Sea supported a large fishing industry. In the 1960s, water from the Aral Sea started to be used to irrigate dry fields to produce cotton. Three quarters of the water was pumped from the sea over the next two decades, leaving behind a salt-covered desert. The disappearing Aral Sea split into two separate lakes-the small Northern Sea and a much larger body of water to the south.

By that time, most fish in the Aral Sea were gone. Salty irrigation water soon damaged the soil in the cotton fields, so huge amounts of chemical pesticides(杀虫剂)and fertilizers were used trying to keep the fields productive, which could be found in the groundwater and drinking water although must cotton fields disappeared, And the wind picked up salt from the dried-up lake and carried it to farmland far from the Aral. Besides, people who lived in the area experienced many health problems.

Today, however, there is some hope for the region. In the late 1990s, people in Kazakhstan used sand and soil to build a dam that would prevent the Syr Dar'ya river water that fed the lake from flowing, out of the lake. They also decided to take less water from the river for irrigation. The water level began to rise, and places that had been completely dry for decades began to show signs of life. People who lived nearby began to believe that the Aral Sea might return.

A permanent dam, the Kok-aral dam, was completed in August 2005. By April 2006, the water level had already risen three meters, and the water was less salty. The northern part of the Aral Sea may soon be a much healthier place to live for both fish and people.