【推荐2】Mammals like us nurse their young with milk. Yet some other animals, including tsetse flies and pigeons, also produce a type of milk to feed their babies. But the newly discovered nursing in Toxeus magnus (大蚁蛛)could be the closest to mammal moms'.

Researcher Zhanqi Chen, who studies spider behavior at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Menglunzhen, found that for the first week or so after her baby comes out of the egg, a spider mom will leave milk droplets around the nest for her young to drink. Then nursing turns more mammalian. The little ones press themselves against their mom's body. Researchers say a gentle finger push on the underside of her stomach will squeeze (挤出)a tiny drop of white milk out of her skin. It comes out much like water from sweat glands (汗腺) and babies drink the milk by taking it up with the tongue.

Baby spiders live on nothing else for the first 20 days of their lives, the researchers report. In the lab, mothers occasionally hunted fruit flies provided by researchers. However, they never brought any of these flies back to the nest to feed their young.

After this period, baby spiders start to feed themselves. But their moms continue nursing them for nearly three weeks more, the team found. With that combined diet, 76 percent of youngsters in lab nests lived long into adulthood. Without mom's milk, they died in about 10 days.

Toxeus magnus spiders enjoy living alone. However, in order to offer extended (延长的) care to their babies, Toxeus magnus mothers end up sharing a nest with their young for an unusually long time. According to a study, only about 120 among the nearly 48,000 known spider species are known to stand being with others for more than three weeks. And only about 30 of those live lifelong social lives. So an example of spiders sharing a nest for such a long time is "a big deal".

【推荐3】Carola’s parotia, one of the fascinating and unique birds of paradise that live on the island of New Guinea, begins his dance. This male bird is attempting to impress a row of females watching him from a branch above.

It seems that the more extreme the male’s costume and colors, the better his chance of attracting a mate. While some birds of paradise perform alone, others, like Goldie’s birds of paradise, often perform together, creating an eye-catching performance that female birds find impossible to resist.

These brilliantly colored birds of paradise have evolved (进化) over millions of years from ancient birds whose feathers were dark and boring in comparison. It seems to be a contradiction that such extreme feathers and colors could have been favored by the process of evolution. After all, these same brightly colored feathers also make them much more noticeable to predators and slow the birds down. The forest of New Guinea is a perfect environment for birds. In fact, sexual selection has been the driving force in evolution of birds of paradise. Over millions of years, they have slowly undergone changes in their color, feathers and other talents. Characteristics that made one bird more attractive than another were passed on and enhanced over time. The usual rules of survival aren’t as important here as the rules of successful mating.

In the past, demand for the birds’ beautiful feather resulted in a huge amount of hunting. In the early 1900s, 80,000 shins a year were exported from New Guinea for European ladies’ hat. However, surprisingly few birds die for these costumes nowadays. Local people are still permitted so hunt birds of paradise for traditional uses. However, hunters usually target older male birds, leaving younger males to continue breeding (繁殖).

There are more serious threats to the birds’ welfare like illegal markets, the large-scale industrial logging, oil prospecting and mining presenting dangers to the birds’ habitats. Meanwhile, human populations continue to grow. Land is owned by different local families whose leaders disagree about which areas should be protected.

【推荐2】Peter and Minke van Wingerden have created something wild: a herd of cows floating on the sea. The Dutch husband-and-wife team’s experiment on sustainable agriculture, called Floating Farm, can be found in the port of Rotterdam. The modernist structure houses 40 cows, who collectively produce some 200 gallons of milk a day. In addition to helping nourish (滋养) the local community, the waterborne farm is playing a part in the global conversation about how the climate crisis is pushing farmers to reconsider how—and where—they produce food.

Floods, extreme heating, droughts and even rising night temperatures have sent the food system off balance. The race to outsmart the constant attack of extreme weather has made the world of farming unrecognizable from what it was only decades ago. A team of scientists in Mexico is developing wheat types that can adapt themselves to different climates, while Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, Colorado, is a testbed for the emerging method of solar farming.

Rotterdam has already established itself as one of the most climate-adaptive places in the world. Everything from office buildings to entire neighborhoods are built on water in the city, which is 90% below sea level. The Wingerdens’ Floating Farm was a new but necessary attempt. Should a weather crisis arise, a waterborne farm isn’t necessarily stuck in place. A former property developer with a background in engineering, Peter found his inspiration for the Floating Farm in a climate disaster in New York City, where Hurricane Sandy prevented the delivery of fresh food to millions.

The Wingerdens’ model is ripe for reproduction—which is exactly what the Floating Farm’s team of 14 are working on now. Plans are under way for a floating vegetable farm to move into the space next to the current Floating Farm. Permit applications are also out for similar structures in Dubai, Singapore and the Dutch cities of Haarlem and Arnhem.

The new projects will apply lessons learned from Floating Farm. “You need to build a house in order to know how to build a house,” Peter says. The biggest obstacles he sees ahead, however, are not financial or physical, but rather political and administrative. “One of the biggest challenges we come across worldwide is regulations. Cities need to have disruptive thinking, cities need to have disruptive departments, and cities need to have areas where you can say: OK, this is the experimental zone.” Because what Peter and his team are pulling off is of a different order than the typical sustainability measures. “We are not innovative,” he says. “We are disruptive.”

【推荐1】Ada Smith, chairwoman of a non-profit organization Protect the Earth, wore green for a special event with school children in New York on Wednesday. The 40-year-old woman stood against the cool weather in a long green coat that has been in her wardrobe (衣柜) for years.

She wore the coat for the first time in 2019 during her husband Bill Smith’s tour to a national environmental conference, and she put on it again in her classic sustainable (可持续的) style. Ada’s recycled outfit was perfect for the occasion, all about the environment.

Ada and Bill headed to the Central Park, where they spent time brainstorming ideas with students on how to deal with environmental issues. Ada said, “Education is such an important part of protecting our planet. We must inspire the next generation with the optimism, confidence and enthusiasm to chase those solutions and continue building a more sustainable future.”

Ada and Bill helped the students generate more than 60 ideas to help the environment. Ada said, “Young children already identify the climate as one of their biggest worries, and our organization aims to educate them that we can find the answers by working together.”

Their visit came ahead of an award ceremony, in which five winners will be announced in the first round of the environmental prize pioneered by Ada. Ada and Bill will appear at the ceremony on the next weekend, when they will walk the “green carpet” with activists committed to environmental causes.

Though their time with the children was part of a larger initiative, environmentalist Steve Johnson said, “They didn’t come there for a photo, but to sit, talk to and listen to kids. It is from the heart and people get that.”

【推荐3】Sitting along Chicago’s southern edge are Ridge’s two elementary schools and one middle school. Here, one nurse travels among the three schools, and the two elementary schools share an art teacher and a music teacher.

“We simply can’t afford more staff,” says Kevin Russell, Ridge’s head teacher. “The Chicago Ridge School District in Illinois just spends $9,794 per child. It’s well below the national average of $11,841.”

Rondout School sits less than an hour north, in Chicago’s Rondout District. It has 22 teachers and 145 students, and spends $28,639 on each student. Class sizes in Rondout School are small, and every student has an individualized learning plan. Nearly all teachers have a decade of experience and earn, on average, more than $90,000.

This inequality isn’t specific to Illinois. It plays out across the US and can even date back to the birth of the nation.

In 1647, settlers in Massachusetts were worried that their children wouldn’t be able to read the religious texts. So they created a remarkable law: Neighborhoods of more than 50 families hire a teacher and the teacher be paid by the people living in each neighborhood.

“This law reflected the idea that the local community was responsible for the education of all children because the whole community depended on it, ”says Ben Justice, a professor at Rutgers. “Today, our school funding system is more complex, but is still based on the same idea.”

Nowadays, school funding comes from a combination of three sources: 10% from the federal(联邦的)government, 45% from the state government and 45%from local property tax, which is based on the value of the houses at the time they were purchased.

This brings us back to where we began this story: Why is it that one district only has $9, 794 to spend on each of its students, while another, nearby district has three times that? The answer is straightforward: Since property values vary a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood, district to district. And with them, the fund the schools in different districts receive differs greatly.