【推荐1】Hardware in general, and smartphones in particular, have become a huge environmental and health problem in the Global South' s landfill sites(垃圾填埋场).

Electronic waste(e-waste) currently takes up 5 percent of all global waste, and it is set to increase rapidly as more of us own more than one smartphone, laptop and power bank. They end up in places like Agbogbloshie on the outskirts of Ghana's capital, Accra.It is the biggest e-waste dump in the world, where 10,000 informal workers walk through tons of abandoned goods as part of an informal recycling process.They risk their health searching for the precious metals that are found in abandoned smartphones.

But Agbogbloshie should not exist. The Basel Convention, a 1989 treaty aims to prevent developed nations from unauthorized dumping of e-waste in less developed countries. The E-waste industry, however, circumvents the regulations by exporting e-waste labelled as “secondhand goods” to poor countries like Ghana, knowing full well that it is heading for a landfill site.

A recent report found Agbogbloshie contained some of the most dangerous chemicals.This is not surprising: smartphones contain chemicals like mercury(水银), lead and even   arsenic (砷 ) Reportedly, one egg from a free-range chicken in Agbogbloshie contained a certain chemical which can cause cancer and damage the immune system at a level that's about 220 times greater than a limit set by the European Food Safety Authority(EFSA), Most worryingly, these poisonous chemicals are free to pollute the broader soil and water system. This should concern us all, since some of Ghana's top exports are cocoa and nuts.

Some governments have started to take responsibility for their consumers' waste.For example, Germany has started a project that includes a sustainable recycling system at Agbogbloshie, along with a health clinic for workers.However, governments cannot solve the problem alone, as there is am almost limitless consumer demand for hardware, especially when governments’ green policies are focused on issues like climate change.

Only the manufacturers can fix this.A more economically sustainable and politically possible solution is through encouraging hardware manufacturers to make the repair, reuse and recycling of hardware profitable, or at least cost-neutral.

Fashion's Melt Down

Throwaway culture is trashing the planet-but one young chemical engineer has her own way to turn it over．

Fast fashion has changed the way we dress．We buy more clothes, more often-but we wear them less．Alina Bassi, founder of Kleiderly, wants to give our clothing waste another chance at a useful life．

Bassi has always cared about the threat of climate change, but she actually started her career in the oil industry．After a few years, she landed at bio-bean, a startup that turned waste coffee grounds into products that could be burnt for heat and fuel．After a year, Bassi was keen to branch out-used coffee grounds are not the biggest threat facing the planet．Instead, she poured her efforts into tackling a much bigger global polluter: the fashion industry．

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, we produce 100 billion items of clothing per year, and this is set to double by 2050．But they don't last long enough to offset（抵消）the carbon cost of producing the material, creating the clothes, and then shipping them to customers．"It makes no sense that we have such a high carbon footprint for something so short-lived," Bassi says．

Using the principles of a circular economy, Bassi has developed a low-energy, multi-stage process to turn clothing fibres into an alternative to oil-based plastic．This new plastic can then be used by manufacturers in their existing machines, so that your old T-shirts and jeans will become different products instead of clothes, such as clothing hangers, or even furniture．

Fashion companies have some other ways to reduce fashion waste, from creating clothes designed to last, to recycling the fabric to make more clothing．But "a problem this big needs multiple solutions," Bassi says．"We think about the multiple lives of a product and how we can keep reusing it instead of letting it fall into landfills or incinerators（焚化炉）,"she says．

【推荐1】I have had just about enough of being treated like a second-class citizen, simply because I happened to be that put-upon member of society ― a customer. The more I go into shops and hotels, banks and post offices, railway stations, airports and the like, the more I’m convinced that things are being run just to suit the firm, the system, or the union. There seems to be a new motto for the so-called “service” organization ― Staff Before Service. How often, for example, have you queued for what seems like hours at the Post Office or the supermarket because there aren’t enough staff on duty at all the service counters? Surely in these days of high unemployment it must be possible to increase counter staff. Yet supermarkets, hinting darkly at higher prices, claim that bringing all their cash registers into operation at any time would increase expenses. And the Post Office says we cannot expect all their service counters to be occupied “at times when demand is low”.

It’s the same with hotels. Because waiters and kitchen staff must finish when it suits them, dining rooms close earlier or menu choice is lowered. As for us guests (and how the meaning of that word has been cut away little by little.), we just have to put up with it. There’s also the nonsense of so many friendly hotel night porters having been gradually withdrawn from service in the interests of “efficiency” (i.e. profits) and replaced by coin-eating machines which supply everything from beer to medicine, not to mention the creeping（慢慢加剧的） threat of the tea-making set in your room: a kettle with teabags, milk bags and sugar. Who wants to wake up to a raw teabag? I don’t, especially when I am paying for “service”.

Our only hope is to repeat our anger whenever and wherever we can and, if all else fails, restore that other, older saying ― Take Our Custom（买卖） Elsewhere.

【推荐2】I have spent much of my time studying how children learn. Children come into the world beautifully designed to direct their own education. They are born by nature with powerful educative abilities, including curiosity, playfulness, sociability, attentiveness to the activities around them, desire to grow up and desire to do what older children and adults can do.

This amazing drive and ability to learn does not turn itself off when children turn 5 or 6. We turn it off with our compulsory system of schooling. The biggest, most lasting lesson of our system of schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.

The focus of my own research has been on learning in children who are of “school age”, but who aren't sent to school, or not to school as traditionally understood. I've examined how children learn in cultures that don't have schools, especially hunter gatherer cultures. I've also studied learning in our culture by children who are trusted to take charge of their own education and are provided with the chance and means to educate themselves. In these settings, children's natural curiosity and desire for learning continue firmly all the way through childhood and adolescence, and into adulthood.

In our culture today, there are many routes through which children can apply their natural drives and abilities to learn everything they need to know for a successful adulthood. More than 2 million children in the United States now base their education at home and in the larger community rather than at school, and an ever increasing proportion (比例) of their families have given up school-based approaches in favor of self- directed learning. These parents do not give lessons or tests, but provide a home environment that improves learning, and they help connect their children to community activities from which they learn. Some of these families began this approach long ago and have adult children who are now developing better in higher education and job- -hunting.

【推荐1】China was a latecomer to space exploration, and in the movies, it has been a latecomer to science fiction, too. That is about to change. The country’s first blockbuster (大片) set in space, The Wandering Earth, opens Tuesday with great expectations that it will represent the dawning of a new age in Chinese filmmaking. The film also opens with the Lunar New Year, the beginning of an official, weeklong holiday that is traditionally a peak box-office period in China. It has a limited show in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The Wandering Earth, shown in 3-D, takes place in a distant future in which the sun is about to expand into a red giant and destroy the Earth. The approaching danger forces the world’s engineers to make a plan to move the planet to a new solar system using giant thrusters (推进器). Things go very badly when the Earth has to pass the Jupiter, setting off desperate disturbance to save humanity from ruin.

The film comes as China reached a milestone in space : the landing of a probe (探测器) on the far side of the moon in January. Although decades behind Russia and the United States, China has now put astronauts in orbit and has ambitious plans to join—or even lead—a new age of space exploration.

“I think there is a very close connection between Chinese cinema and the nation’s fortunes,” said Sha Dan, a leader at the China Film Archive, “When we have the ability to rescue our people abroad, we can make movies like Operation Red Sea. Only when China can enter the space age can we make works like The Wandering Earth.”

The Wandering Earth takes for granted China’s central role in future space exploration, but it also has a vision of the international teamwork necessary to deal with the threats facing the planet, a theme that runs deeply through the film.

【推荐2】Commuters of the future could get some relief from congested roads especially the peak-hour traffic if Uber’s plans for flying taxis work out.

The battery-powered aircraft looks like a cross between a small plane and a helicopter, with fixed wings and rotors (旋转器). It was presented at an international technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

Catering for the need of shorter city travel time, the vehicle is intended to soar over traffic congestion. Uber hopes it will eventually become a form of convenient mass transport and cost commuters aboard less than using their own car, though initially it will be more expensive than that, Uber’s Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden said.

The scheme still faces plenty of challenges, including certification of the new vehicle by authorities, pilot training and constructing urban air traffic management systems that prevent collisions.

Holden declared that Uber is joining NASA’s project to expand air traffic systems, which scores of other companies already belong to.

He told The Associated Press in an interview that he has no dollar figure for the total investment. He said Uber is putting some of its own money into the project, developing software, while other investors are also involved, such as aircraft manufacturers that are developing the vehicle and real estate companies that are providing so-called “skyports” where people will catch their airborne taxi.

Uber is making a bid to reform and polish up its image which has been damaged by certain negative news. Holden said those episodes did not slow development of the flying taxi project of the great company that is in transition.

【推荐3】The age of adulthood is by definition arbitrary. If everyone matured at the same, fixed rate, it wouldn’t be a human process. Indeed, maturation happens at varying speeds across different categories within the same individual, so I’d say I was easily old enough to vote at 16, but nobody should have given me a credit card until I was 32, and I’ve got the county court judgment to prove it.

However, we broadly agree that there’s a difference between a child and an adult, even if we might argue about the transition point. So the political theorist David Runciman’s view that six-year-olds should be allowed to vote goes against any standard argument about the age of civic responsibility. Nobody would say that a six-year-old could be held criminally responsible, could be sent to war, could be capable of consent, could be given responsibility for anything. So allowing them the vote—along with, unavoidably, seven-year-olds who are even sillier, if anything—is quite an amusing proposal.

Runciman’s argument is that this is the only way to rebalance political life, which is currently twisted in favor of the old, who don’t (he added) ever need to demonstrate mental capacity, even long after they’ve lost it.

The first part of his case is self-evident: pensions are protected while children’s centers are closed, concepts such as sovereignty (最高权威) are prioritized over the far more urgent business of the future: climate change. Nostalgia (怀念) for a past the young wouldn’t even recognize plays a central role, which is completely unfair.

Most of the arguments against giving six-year-olds a vote are that children would end up voting for something damaging and chaotic, if someone made unrealistic promises to them, which could never be realized. Well, it’s not children’s fault.

Having said that, children do tend towards the progressive, having a natural sense of justice (which kicks in at the age of six months, psychologists have shown, by creating scenes of great unfairness to babies, and making them cry) and an underdeveloped sense of self-interest. My kid, when he was six, made quite a forceful case against private property, on the basis that, since everybody needed a house, they shouldn’t cost money, because nobody would want anyone else not to have one. Also, food should be free. It was a kind of pre-Marx communism, where you limit the coverage of the market to only those things that you wouldn’t mind someone else not having.

On that particular day, when we were registered as voters, my kid was quite far to the left of me, but in the normal run of things, we’re united, which brings us to the point of the problem: children obey you on almost nothing, but they do seem to believe in your politics until they’re adolescent. So giving kids the vote is really just a way of giving parents extra votes. And what can stop us having even more children, once there’s so much enfranchisement (选举权) in it for us?

Now, if parents could be trusted to use their influence wisely, and hammer into children the politics it will take to assure a better future, then I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with that, apart from, obviously, that culture is already wildly twisted towards parents, and I can imagine a few non-parents boiling with fierce anger. But that’s not worth talking about anyway, because parents can’t be trusted, otherwise we’d all already vote Green(绿党).

In short: no, six-year-olds should not get the vote; but while we’re here, if any votes come up in the near future, which will have an impact on the next five decades of British political life, alongside EU migrants, 16-year-olds certainly should be enfranchised.