【推荐2】It is irrefutable: Parents, who talk to, read and engage with their very young children as often as possible, help them build literacy (读写能力) skills at an early age.

Also certain: Parents of very young children usually have to do a lot of laundry. And low-income families tend to bring their kids with them to public laundromats (洗衣房).

Those truths appear once a week at select neighborhood laundromats in Chicago. That’s when librarians lay down colorful mats and oversized board books beside the industrial washing machines.

Inside one of about 14 laundromats in the city’s low-income neighborhoods, the librarians gather all available children for Laundromats Story Time (LST), a Chicago Public Library (CPL) program.

With the noise of the washers and dryers, anywhere between a handful to more than a dozen children hear stories, sing songs and play games designed to help their brains develop. The event also aims to instruct parents on how to repeat the experience for their kids, working to raise poor literacy rates in underserved communities.

"We read books, we sing songs, we do plays," says Becca Ruidl, the CPL’s STEAM Team early learning manager, who runs the LST program. "We kind of keep it going so parents can walk in adn join in at any time. But a big part of what we do is model literacy skills for parents so they can do it at home with their kids."

While a laundromat seems an unlikely place to engage with children, "we really wanted to meet people in the community where they’re. "Ruidl says.

And it clearly meets a need: Library officials say the program is in increasing demand, while Ruidl says families have adjusted their household’s laundry day to suit the librarians’ laundromat visits. At the same time, LST’s co-sponsors—including a laundry industry trade group and Libraries Without Borders, an organization fighting poverty through literacy—have worked with the CPL to draft an instruction handbook to help expand the concept to other U.S. cities.

【推荐3】We’ve learned bees can understand zero and do basic math. Now a new study shows their tiny insect brains may be able to connect symbols to numbers.

Adrian Dyer, a professor in the RMIT University, said the research showed brains far smaller than humans’ could know numbers. “Humans learn numbers as children, but being able to recognize what numbers really represent needs a certain level of cognitive (认知的) ability,” Dyer says, “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.”

It’s important for humans to do the research. There are 86 billion neurons (神经元) in humans’ brains. Bees only have less than a million. If bees have the ability to 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. Monkeys were taught Arabic numbers and could order them correctly. An African grey parrot called Alex was able to learn numbers and could do simple calculation.

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1】Nowadays, to work remotely, all you need are a computer and an Internet connection. According to a new study, employees who can work from anywhere else are generally happier than those who work onsite(现场的)in an office.

Video conferencing company Owl Labs surveyed 1,202 full-time US workers from the ages of 22 to 65, and discovered that 62 percent of the respondents worked remotely at least some of the time and 38 percent worked onsite. Of the remote workers, 49 percent worked remotely full-time.

As it turns out, working remotely—or the idea of it—makes people happy, 83 percent of the survey respondents agree that the ability to work remotely would make them happier, and 71 percent of workers who do get to work remotely said their job makes them happy, compared with 55 percent of office-only workers.

In the study, full-time remote workers said they're happy in their job, 22 percent more than people who never work remotely. The reasons why respondents said they decided to work remotely were better work-life balance(91 percent), increased productivity/better focus(79 percent), less stress(78 percent), and to avoid a commute(通勤)(78 percent).

One reason why remote workers might be happier is that they were more than twice as likely to earn more than $100,000 per year. And the higher they were on the corporate(公司的)ladder, the more likely survey respondents were to have the privilege of working remotely: The job levels with the greatest percentages of remote workers were founder/CEO-level(55 percent)and vice president(46 percent).

Loyalty is another factor: Remote workers are 13 percent more likely than non-remote workers to stay with their current job for the next five years—making remote work a win-win for employees and employers alike.

Not only are remote employees happier, but they are prepared to work longer hours, according to the report. Remote workers said they work over 40 hours per week, 43 percent more than on-site workers do.

【推荐2】Most of Earth’s freshwater sits underground. Worldwide, about 70 percent of the groundwater drawn to the surface goes for farming. But surface waters — rivers and streams — come from groundwater, too. Drawing too much groundwater over a short time can be harmful. Natural waterways can begin to empty. And that can hurt freshwater ecosystems. Scientists consider this a tipping point when small actions can begin making unusually big differences.

A new study has found that 15 to 21 percent of tapped water (自来水) areas have reached this sort of tipping point. Most of those tapped rivers and streams are in dry areas. Farmers in these areas use groundwater to water their crops. At present drawing rates, the study predicts that 42 to 79 percent of water areas around the world where groundwater is drawn up for use at the surface will reach tipping points by 2050.

A healthy groundwater aquifer (含水层) protects ecosystems against seasonal ups and downs in the use of water. That provides stability for area plants and animals. But if too much groundwater is drawn up from below, surface waters will begin to flow into the aquifer, which can harm what are living in rivers and streams.

De Graaf and the study team set up a computer model. It linked groundwater drawing and water flows within rivers. The model covered fifty years, from 1960 to 2010. Then the researchers used climate forecasts to help the model predict what might happen in future years. Throughout, they kept groundwater drawing rates sustainable. More than half of drawn water areas are likely to cross this ecological tipping point before 2050, the model finds.

“We need to be thinking about this now, not in 10 years,” De Graaf says. “Our study shows us where to target more sustainable efforts.”

【推荐3】Gene therapy (基因治疗) is a revolutionary new technique for treating people with health problems. Up until very recently, the most commonly available methods for treating patients were either through drugs or operations. Gene therapy provides a third option for treatment by transforming or replacing cells with new genetic materials and instructions. Scientists can be very precise in the kinds of changes they make in patients.

Gene therapy works by using a delivery system, such as a virus, to enter a patient's body. Once inside the body, the virus combines with a host cell and delivers the new DNA. The proteins then begin to repair the affected cells. New techniques have focused on removing cells from the patients and transforming them outside the body before reintroducing them to the patients.

The two types of gene therapy are called somatic and germline. Somatic therapy refers to changing or replacing a body cell. In this case, the treatment is restricted to the patient only. This will not affect the patient's future children because the patient's germ (生殖) cells are unaffected. In germline therapy, the patient germ cells are treated, which may affect the patient's future generation.This is highly controversial (有争议的) because it is not clear exactly how this might affect them and further generations. For this reason, many countries have passed laws that prohibit this kind of treatment.

Despite the promise of gene therapy, there are still many barriers that need to be overcome before it comes into widespread use. One of the issues is that the use of viruses to deliver DNA may actually cause unexpected problems in patients if the virus grows and attacks the body. Another problem is the nature of many diseases is very complex and spread throughout multiple genes. The use of gene therapy to change a single gene in the body would probably not be sufficient as a cure. Finally, the costs of gene therapy are high. Some gene therapy procedures may cost over$1 million to undertake and require specialized doctors and equipment.

【推荐1】The remains of an ancient ape (猿) found in Bavaria suggest that humans' ancestors began standing upright millions of years earlier than previously thought.

An international team of researchers said the fossilized skeleton (化石骨骼) of a male ape that lived in the warm and damp forests of what is now southern Germany was quite similar to modern human bones. In a paper published by the journal Nature, they concluded that the previously unknown species — named Danuvius guggenmosi — could walk on two legs but also climb like an ape.

''The findings raise fundamental questions about our previous understanding of the evolution of the great apes and humans, '' said Madelaine Boehme, who led the research.

The question of when apes could walk on two legs has fascinated scientists since Charles Darwin first argued that they were the ancestors of humans. Previous fossil records of apes with an upright move — found in Crete and Kenya — dated only as far back as 6 million years. These apes are called Toumai.

Boehme, along with researchers from Bulgaria, Canada and the United States, examined more than 15,000 bones recovered from the archaeological remains found. Among the remains they were able to piece together were primate (灵长目动物) fossils belonging to 4 individuals that lived 11.62 million years ago. The most complete, an adult male, likely stood about 1 meter tall, weighed 31 kilograms and looked similar to modern-day bonobos, a species of chimp.

Like humans, Danuvius had an S-shaped backbone to hold its body upright while standing. Unlike humans, though, it had a powerful big toe that would have allowed it to grab branches with its foot easily.

Fred Spoor, a biologist at the Natural History Museum in London, called the fossil finds ''fantastic'', but said they would likely be denied or suspected by others, especially because they could challenge many existing ideas about evolution.

【推荐2】A book is made of wood. But it is not a tree. The dead cells have been repurposed to serve another need.

Now a team of scientists has repurposed living cells—scraped(刮落)from frog embryos—and assembled them into entirely new life forms. These millimeter-wide “xenobots” can move toward a target, perhaps pick up a payload(like a medicine that needs to be carried to a specific place inside a patient)—and heal themselves after being cut.

“These are novel living machines,” says Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist and robotics expert at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. “They're neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It's a new class of artifact：a living, programmable organism.” “We can imagine many useful applications of these living robots that other machines can't do,” says co-leader Michael Levin, “like searching out nasty compounds or radioactive contamination(污染物), gathering microplastic in the oceans, traveling in arteries(动脉)to scrape out plaque.”

People have been manipulating(操纵)organisms for human benefit since at least the dawn of agriculture, genetic editing is becoming widespread, and a few artificial organisms have been manually assembled in the past few years—copying the body forms of known animals. But this research, for the first time ever, “designs completely biological machines from the ground up," the team writes in their new study.

Many people worry about the implications of rapid technological change and complex biological manipulations. "That fear is not unreasonable,” Levin says. "When we start to deal with complex systems that we don't understand, we're going to get unintended consequences.” “If humanity is going to survive into the future, we need to better understand how complex properties, somehow, emerge from simple rules,” says Levin. Much of science is focused on "controlling the low-level rules. We also need to understand the high-level rules." In other words, “this study is a direct contribution to getting a handle on what people are afraid of, which is unintended consequences,” Levin says.

【推荐3】Many college students complain about dormitory (宿舍) life: a sweltering room without air-conditioning in summer and a dormitory gate which is closed at 11 pm. But they may miss their dormitories after graduation, when they have to spend as much as a third of their income renting a shabby room.

The rising prices of daily necessities, including food, water, gas and electricity, are also making graduates save every penny to make ends meet. Faced with the high cost of living, college graduates need to make every penny work when they budget（预算） their income.

When it comes to renting, try to spend no more than one third of your income on it．Better still, only spend a quarter, according to Hao Qian, a career consultant. Hao also reminds graduates to set aside about one fifth of their income for social activities. “People have spent more on their social lives because of changes in forms of entertainment,” said Hao, “For example, new friends may want to meet you at a quiet club instead of at a noisy house.”

In spite of the high cost of living, many college graduates still, try to stay in big cities. They usually work in industries such as finance, public relations and IT, which depend on a booming（繁荣的） city economy and technology．

Hao advises such graduates to reduce their expenditure on shopping as much as possible. “If you are not in jobs such as PR and sales which require you to dress well, you don't need to spend much on clothes and accessories（服装配饰）, said Hao, “Spend less than one eighth of your monthly income on shopping.”