【推荐1】Almost everybody in America will spend a part of his or her life behind a shopping cart(购物手推车). They will, in a lifetime, push the chrome-plated contraptions many miles. But few will know—or even think to ask—who it was that invented them.

Sylvan N. Goldman invented the shopping cart in 1937. At that time he was in the supermarket business. Every day he would see shoppers lugging(吃力地携带) groceries around in baskets they had to carry.

One day Goldman suddenly had the idea of putting baskets on wheels. The wheeled baskets would make shopping much easier for his customers, and would help to attract more business.

On June 4, 1937, Goldman’s first carts were ready for use in his market. He was terribly excited on the morning of that day as customers began arriving. He couldn’t wait to see them using his invention.

But Goldman was disappointed. Most shoppers gave the carts a long look, but hardly anybody would give them a try.

After a while, Goldman decided to ask customers why they weren’t using his carts. “Don’t you think this arm is strong enough to carry a shopping basket?” one shopper replied.

But Goldman wasn’t beaten yet. He knew his carts would be a great success if only he could persuade people to give them a try. To this end, Goldman hired a group of people to push carts around his market and pretend they were shopping! Seeing this, the real customers gradually began copying the phony(假冒的) customers.

As Goldman had hoped, the carts were soon attracting larger and larger numbers of customers to his market. But not only did more people come—those who came bought more. With larger, easier-to-handle baskets, customers unconsciously bought a greater number of items than before.

Today’s shopping carts are five times larger than Goldman’s original model. Perhaps that’s one reason Americans today spend more than five times as much money on food each year as they did before 1937—before the coming of the shopping cart.

【推荐3】In the early 1980s，an American engineer Chuck Hull went to his boss with an idea：to build a machine that prints out things you can hold in your hand. His manager told him that the company produced UV lamps, not machines that were able to make copies of things of all kinds. But finally they reached an agreement. Hull would spend the day working on the company’s lamps；at night he’d work on his machine.

It was the UV lights that gave Hull the idea at first. The lamps were used in factories to harden a plastic veneer（薄片镶饰）. Hull realized that he could use UV lights to cut plastic pieces into whatever shape he liked and then pile these pieces to form a 3-D thing. Then he had to write programs to tell his machine how to cut each piece. At last，his first 3-D printer was put together.

But by the mid-1980s，the printer had developed into a working product，though it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because the printer was too heavy to carry to exhibitions，Hull made home movies to show it to people. “The movies were pretty boring，but even so，”he said，“we got a strong reaction，especially in Detroit. Back then，the US car industry had been far behind Japan and the car companies were eager for a secret weapon（武器）. “The 3-D printer was just that：engineers could make their own models for parts such as door handles（把手），rather than send plans to a tool and dye shop，saving months during the design process and thus making their cars more competitive.

Now that the technology is becoming affordable，all kinds of people have caught 3-D fever. A professor from the University of California is working on printing out an entire house. Another 3-D artist has made a robotic hand that lets his son，who was born without several fingers，pick up a water bottle. “Anything that can be made will be made by anyone anywhere，”wrote Joris Peels，a 3-D pioneer. “Anyone will be able to 3-D-print a spoon，a truck or a rose. ”

【推荐1】On Wednesday, two things happened. In Syria, 80 people were killed by government airstrikes. Meanwhile, in Florida, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched and fired a sports car into space. Guess which story has dominated mainstream news sites?

The launch of Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful ever launched by a private company, went off successfully. Musk sent his cherry-red Tesla roadster running toward Mars, launching “a new space age”. The event attracted phenomenal publicity and made the rocket launch a masterstroke of advertising for Tesla.

Meanwhile, in Syria, where hundreds of thousands of refugees(难民) may be forced to return to unsafe homes, a UN human rights coordinator for Syria said despondently(沮丧地) that he was no longer sure why he bothers to videotape the effects of bombing, since nobody ever pays attention. He wondered what level of violence it would take to make the world care.

There is, perhaps, no better way to appreciate the tragedy of 21st-century global inequality than by watching a billionaire spend $90m launching a $100,000 car into space.

Musk said he wanted to participate in a space race because “races are exciting” and that while strapping his car to a rocket may be “silly and fun … silly and fun things are important”. Thus, anyone who mentions the huge waste the project involves, or the various social uses to which these resources could be put, can be dismissed as a killjoy.

But one doesn’t have to hate fun to question the justification for pursuing a costly new space race at exactly this moment. If we examine the situation honestly, it becomes hard to defend a project like this.

A mission to Mars does indeed sound exciting, but it’s important to have our priorities straight. First, perhaps we could make it so that a child no longer dies of malaria every two minutes. Or we could try to address the level of poverty in Alabama which has become so extreme that the UN investigator did not believe it could occur in a first-world country. Perhaps when violence, poverty and disease are solved, then we can head for the stars.

Many might think that what Elon Musk chooses to do with his billions is Elon Musk’s business alone. If he wanted to spend all his money on medicine for children, that would be nice, but if he’d like to spend it making big explosions and sending his convertible on a million-mile space voyage, that’s his right.

But Musk is only rich enough to afford these money-consuming projects because we have allowed social inequalities to arise in the first place. If wealth were actually distributed fairly in this country, nobody would be in a position to fund his own private space program.

Elon Musk is right: silly and fun things are important. But some of them are an indefensible waste of resources. While there are still humanitarian crises such as that in Syria, nobody can justify vast spending on rocketry experiments.

【推荐3】The Good Gym was created by Ivo Gormley, 29, who discovered that combining a weekly run with a visit to a housebound（足不出户的）friend of the family was just the inspiration he needed to keep him exercising. It helped that his elderly friend was a former boxer who could offer training tips. As Gormley did his suggested sit-ups, he thought about this: how few people have the time or energy to volunteer and yet use gyms to burn off energy, and how little dialogue there is between working people and the elderly.

Through working with charities and local community centers, the Good Gym matches runners with an individual（个人的）coach 一 a housebound elderly person who would like a regular visitor. They are encouraged to take a newspaper or a modest gift to the value of £1.

Cawley, 38, a hairdresser, heard about the Good Gym through Twitter. "It seemed such a great idea," she said. It took four months for her to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau・ Then she got Mulcahy to run to, based on the distance she requested.

Having a break in her running works well from a training point of view: she does a speed run to Mulcahy's house, rests there, then does a more gentle, warm-down jog on the way home. Cawley is from Stockport and has no grandparents in London, so she enjoys chatting to her elderly coach. While the Good Gym advises runners to stay for about 10 minutes, Cawley sometimes chats to Mulcahy for an hour. Although he has family, and regular visits from professional carers, Cawley thinks he enjoys a visit from someone who does not worry like relatives and is not there out of professional duty. She didn't really know what he thought of "this person turning up and chatting to him” until she told him she was going away on holiday. He said, "I'll really miss you."