【推荐1】Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children, who are able from a young age to gather their own food.

In the laboratory, chimps don’t naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random ---he just doesn’t care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.

Human children, on the other hand are extremely cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate in achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.

There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught .but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive (认知的) skills, at least when compared with chimps. In tests conducted by Tomasello, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.

The core of what children’s minds have and chimps’ don’t is what Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But beyond that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.

【推荐1】James Sulikowski, from the Shark and Fish Conservation Lab at the School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences at Arizona State University, was one of the scientists who captured the seven foot porbeagle (鼠鲨) shark in the Atlantic.

In a Facebook post, the lab said the shark had been growing for years with a plastic strap around its gills. “Photos ... show the female shark’s head was slowly being sliced off by the unyielding strap,” it said. “The piece of circular plastic had become lodged around her neck when she was younger. As she grew, it began to cut through her skin into her muscle, if we had not removed it, she surely would have died.”

In a message to Newsweek, Sulikowski said the strap was probably one that would normally go around a bait box. “The box went overboard, and the porbeagle shark, when younger, ate the fish in the box,” he said. “While doing so, [the] strap got wrapped around the sharks head. As the shark grew, the strap dug into the shark’s flesh. If we didn’t remove it, the shark would have surely died.”

The photos of the shark being strangled follow the discovery of a dead minke whale that had been killed by a piece of fishing line. The male minke whale was found on a beach in Dennis, Massachusetts. The fishing line had become “wrapped around its head and through its mouth, creating a bridle,” the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said in a Facebook post.

The IFAW said the initial autopsy (验尸) suggests the whale died from injuries caused by the entanglement. It also said there were signs of possible infection. “The entanglement likely contributed to the cause of death, though additional lab results are pending.”

The problem of plastic pollution in the ocean is getting worse. It is thought there is currently over 150 million metric tons of plastic in the world’s oceans, and more and more is entering every year. A report published earlier this year estimated the amount of plastic entering the ocean every year will have doubled by 2040, amounting to 600 million metric tons.

More than one million seabirds and 100,000 marine animals are killed every year by plastic waste. “Plastic in all forms are an issue,” Sulikowski said. “We need more research to understand the extent of the long term effects of this type of pollution.”

【推荐2】Composite image of Europe and North Africa at night, 2016. Credit： NASA Earth NPP Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using Suomi VIIRS data from Miguel Roman, is oftenNASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Artificial light seen as a sign of progress: the march of civilization shines a light in the dark； it takes back the night； it illuminates. But a chorus of scientists and advocates argues that unnaturally bright nights are bad not just for astronomers but also for nocturnal (夜间活动的)animals and even for human health.

Now research shows the night is getting even brighter. From 2012 to 2016 the earth's artificially lit area expanded by an estimated 2. 2 percent a year (map), according to a study published last November in Science Advances. Even that increase may understate the problem, however. The measurement excludes light from most of the energy-efficient LED lamps that have been replacing sodium-vapor technology in cities all over the world, says lead study author Christopher Kyba, a postdoctoral researcher at the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam.

The new data came from a NASA satellite instrument called the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). It can measure long-wavelengths of light, such as those produced by traditional yellow-and-orange sodium-vapor street lamps. But VIIRS cannot see the shortwavelength blue light produced by white LEDs. This light has been shown to disrupt human sleep cycles and nocturnal animals^, behavior.

Credit: Mapping Specialists ； Source: Artificially Lit Surface of Earth at Night Increasing in Radiance and Extent," by Christopher C. M. Kyba et al. , in Science Advances, Vol. 3, No. 11, Article No. E1701528 ； November 22, 2017.

The team believes the ongoing switch to LEDs caused already bright countries such as Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the U. S. to register as having stable levels of illumination in the VIIRS data. In contrast, most nations in South America, Africa and Asia brightened, suggesting increases in the use of traditional lighting. Australia actually appeared to lose lit area一but the researchers say that is because wildfires skewed the data.

"The fact that VIIRS finds an increase (in many countries) , despite its blindness in the part of the spectrum that increased more, is very sad," says FabioFalchi, a researcher at Italy's Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute, who did not participate in the study. In 2016 Falchi, along with Kyba and several other members of his research team, published a global atlas of artificial lighting that showed one third of the world's population currently lives under skies too bright to see the Milky Way at night.

The data also cast doubt on the idea that the LED lighting revolution will lead to energy cost savings. Between 2012 and 2016 the median nation pumped out 15 percent more long- wavelength light as its GDP increased by 13 percent. And overall, countries^, total light production correlated with their GDP. In other words, Kyba says, "we buy as much light as we are willing to spend money on."