【推荐2】For the past three weeks, students across India’s capital have been attending a new course: happiness. The Delhi government introduced “happiness classes”.     1    . In a country that uses normal testing to determine student success, offers a limited number of seats in top universities and sets high expectations, educators have been seeing mental health effects.     2    . He said, “It will address the growing concern, which is that levels of happiness and well-being are decreasing.”

“We have given best-of-the-best talents to the world,” Sisodai said, according to The Washington Post. “    3    . We have been successful so far. But have we been able to deliver best-of-the-best human beings to society, to the nation?”

The Washington Post says children came out of their first happiness class with some excitement. “We should work happily,” 11-year-old Aayush Jha, a seventh grader at a public school in Delhi, told the paper. “When you work sadly, your work will not be good.”

Sisodai hopes to deliver these tools to help students live more happily inside and outside of the classroom, whether or not they’re achieving their academic standards. “I don’t know if happiness can be learned, but yes, it can be practised,” he says. “    4    .”

One in four Indian children aged 13 to 15 struggles with low spirits, the World Health Organization reported last year. As journalist Susan Brink reported, “The government has made changes after noticing that some young people under great stress to do well in school tended to commit suicide (自杀) if they felt they did poorly.” “In South India, they observed higher suicide rates after exam periods among schoolchildren who failed,” Alexandra Fleischmannn, a project coordinator for the WHO’s Preventing Suicide report, told Brink. “    5    , and that reduced suicides.”

Children seem to care so much about their names. A study showed that 25% of young children feel they couldn’t live any more if you took away their name. Another study shows that about one third of all young people wish their parents had given them a different name.

Some people choose to change their names when they grow up. Many people in show business don’t use the names their parents gave them. Have you ever listened to Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta? No? The answer could be “yes” if we called her Lady Gaga instead! You may never heard of Margaret Hookham. But if we re-name her Margot Fonteyn, you might know her as a famous dancer.

In many cultures, there are special ideas about how to choose a name. For example, many people choose a name that has been in their family for many years. It tells the child where he or she has come from.

Choosing a good name isn’t easy. Many parents search books that tell them the meanings of names. They could choose a name that carries a message. For example, Edith means “valuable gift”. Amanda means “love”. And Fara means “joy”.

Names like these tell family and friends how happy they are with their new baby. Other names can say something about the events during the birth of the child. In Africa, a first born son may have the name Mosi and the name Ama means “born on Saturday”.

But can our names influence our lives? Some experts say that they can but others disagree. Is every girl called Malak like an angel? Is every boy called Curitis polite? And is every girl called Mahira quick and full of energy? No parent can tell what kind of person their child will grow up to be. Just because parents name a boy Fahim, it doesn’t mean he will be clever. All they can do is hope.

【推荐1】The beautiful monarch butterfly is facing an unprecedented decline (前所未有的减少) and Utah State University (USU) wants to make sure that doesn’t happen.

To help the struggling butterfly, USU students have been capturing and tagging (给……贴标签) monarch butterflies in the Uintah Basin.

Tagging butterflies will allow researchers to know their migration path and protect their feeding grounds. Every year, monarch butterflies start “3,000-mile migration, traveling south to Mexico each fall and back up Canada in the spring,” according to the National Wildlife Federation (NWF).

Because of habitat loss and increased pesticide (杀虫剂) use, monarch butterflies have experienced a population decline upwards of 90%, according NWF.

“Monarch butterflies are facing a large historical decline over the last 40 years,” says USU senior Carson Liesik, a student on the project. “The population, as of the beginning of 2020, was about 30,000 monarchs in the Western United States, which is about a 99% drop as compared to information from the 1980s. We are hoping to learn how to help the monarch butterfly population recover from its historical decline. This project is an important step.”

When tagging the butterflies, students record information about each one including its wing condition and location of discovery. Then students map migration path as well as habitat use and activity. They tag each butterfly with unique number so that if it is recaptured at a later date, they can know growth stage. With the collected information students get an idea of where these monarch butterflies are and how they are using the resources around them.

Researchers say the public can help protect the monarch butterfly population, too. “The best way is by growing milkweed plants wherever you may have space. Milkweed is the main food source that monarch butterflies depend on. If you plant milkweed in your yard, you might be lucky enough to see monarchs stop and breed (繁殖).” says the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR).

【推荐3】Artificial light should be treated like other forms of pollution, research says. Human illumination (照明) of the planet is growing in range and intensity by about 2% a year, creating a problem that can be compared to climate change, according to a team of biologists from the University of Exeter. Hormone levels, breeding cycles, activity patterns and vulnerability to predators are being affected across a broad range of species, they write in a paper published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

From reduced pollination (授粉) by insects and trees budding earlier in spring, to seabirds flying into lighthouses and sea turtles mistakenly wandering inland to bright hotels in search of the dawn sun, their study brings together 126 previous papers to assess the extent of the impact.

In all the species examined, they found reduced levels of melatonin — a hormone that regulates sleep cycles — as a result of artificial light at night. Rodents (啮齿动物), which mostly search for food at night, were active for a shorter duration, while birds started singing and searching for worms earlier in the day. However, the outcomes were not purely negative. Owing to night-time light, some plants grew faster and some types of bats thrived. But the overall effect was disruptive, particularly to the insects drawn to hot bulbs or fast-moving car lamps.

“What stands out is how ubiquitous the effects are. The effects are found on microbes, invertebrates (无脊柱动物), animals and plants,” said the lead author, Kevin Gaston, a professor at the university's Environment and Sustainability Institute. “We need to start thinking about lighting in the way we think of other big systemic pressures like climate change.”

According to Gaston, there has been an increase in studies in the past five to ten years as the amount of lighting in the world has increased and the effects have become more evident. Satellite images of the Earth at night show how rapidly the problem is expanding geographically, and lights are also becoming more intense as expensive bulbs with yellow light are replaced by greater numbers of cheap bright white LEDs. This is biologically problematic because the white light has a wider spectrum, like sunlight.

Gaston urged governments, companies and individuals to be more discriminating. “At the moment, we just take lighting for granted. But we need to think in terms of using it only when we need it, where we need it and how we need it,” he said. “It is another pollutant.”

Unlike the climate crisis, however, he said solving the lighting problem would save rather than cost money. If people use fewer lights, it would mean lower costs, less electricity and lower emissions.

“At the heart of this is a deep-rooted human need to light up the night. We are still in a sense afraid of the dark,” he said. “But the ability to turn the night-time into something like the daytime is something we have pursued for beyond the necessity of doing so.”

【推荐2】Sawyer Current’s first visit to Isla Mujeres, a small island off the coast of Cancun, Mexico, was meant to be a getaway. But instead of relaxing on white sand beaches, Current was disappointed at the number of unwanted animals wandering the streets. “Dogs were everywhere, coming out of the bushes and along the sides of the road,” she recalls of that trip 25 years ago. “They were dirty and covered with fleas and scars.” “It was sad,” she says. “I just couldn’t stand to watch it.”

Current decided to help fix it. She built a second home on Isla Mujeres in 2000, and beginning with a skinny, toothless cat she rescued from the streets, she went on to find homes for more than 2,000 dogs and cats. Today, thanks to Current’s efforts, the island no longer has a wild-dog problem, and “people are more aware of their pets’ needs,” says Marcelino Velazquez, 34, a property manager from Isla Mujeres. “They vaccinate them and don’t abandon them on the streets. The way of thinking has changed.”

For Current, it was a hard-fought transformation. “At first I was angry and thought it was horrible,” Current says of the conditions on the island when she began her work. “But these weren’t bad people. They were people without resources.” When she first arrived, the community had no small-animal vet, and animal control consisted of a team of government workers who’d round up street dogs in a truck and kill them. “I used to follow the truck, and when they’d go for lunch, I’d let the dogs out,” she says. “One time I let the air out of their tires.”

At one point she was caring for more than 65 rescued dogs in her home, and she estimates she has spent about $1 million of her own savings on her efforts. “It was exhausting,” she admits. Now Isla Animals has an on-site shelter with a small staff, and many volunteers and donors among the island’s tourists. Each year the group re-homes more than 170 pets, many of which fly with volunteers to families in the U.S. and Canada.

“There’s nothing in the world like finding a starving dog, nursing it back to good health and finding it a loving home,” Current says.