1 . To reduce coffee cup waste, Cup Club is already replacing millions of takeaway cups in the UK, while Recup in Germany, has performed a deposit system that simply adds a small extra fee to any coffee cup which is returned to the buyer after the cup is deposited in any registered collection point.

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2 . Nick Verel, a 53-year-old kidney transplant (肾脏移植) recipient in Ohio, should have been near the top of the list to receive a COVID-19 vaccine (疫苗). Yet like millions of others, he wasn’t having any luck scheduling an appointment. Nick would sit with computers on his lap trying for hours to book an appointment on different sites, which ended up in vain no matter how concentrated he was. “I felt hopeless,” Nick says.

Then he heard about Zwinggi, a 40-year-old mother of three who was helping to secure appointments for vulnerable individuals like Nick. So he messaged Zwinggi on Facebook: Can you help? Thirty-five minutes later, Zwinggi reported back — Nick successfully had an appointment to get the vaccine.

3 . If you are of the “no regrets” school of life, you may think that all this regret is a recipe for unhappiness. But that isn’t the case. Letting yourself be overwhelmed by regret is indeed bad for you. But going to the other extreme may be even worse. To extinguish your regrets doesn’t free you from shame or sorrow but causes you to make the same mistakes again and again. To truly get over our guilt requires that we put regret in its proper place.

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4 . In the study, the researchers sought to understand how the brain uses this following information to adjust our perception of what we initially heard. To do this, they conducted a series of experiments in which the subjects listened to isolated syllables and similarly sounding words. Their results produced three primary findings: The brain’s primary auditory cortex (听觉皮层) is sensitive to how ambiguous a speech sound is at just 50 milliseconds after the sound’s appearance. The brain “replays” previous speech sounds while interpreting the following ones, suggesting re-evaluation as the rest of the word unfolds. The brain makes commitments to its “best guess” of how to interpret the signal after about half a second.

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5 . After rescuing the lonely animal, Sam and Vera found it extremely emotional to have to release her back out into the wild to fend for herself — even though they knew it was the right thing to do. But after having such a strong bond with an animal, it was really difficult to see her go. They had put so much time, effort and energy into raising her but to see her walking in a herd of blesboks made it all worthwhile.

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6 . Since there was usually not enough time for a bystander pig to become involved in the heat of a conflict, though this did occur, Dr Norscia looked at what happened in the three minutes immediately following a fight. Sometimes, he found, the fighters reconciled with each other on their own. The more distantly related the fighters were, the more frequently this happened. Dr Norscia guessed that relations between close relatives are more secure to start with, so rebuilding friendly relations rapidly is less necessary for them.

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7 . Bennett, 57, held on through 60 tomorrows, far longer than any previous patient who’d received a heart from another species. His remarkable run offered new hope that such procedures, known as xenotransplantation (异种移植), could help relieve the shortage of replacement organs, saving thousands of lives each year.

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8 . If the test is already set, the best way to prepare for it is with a battery of activities that most closely look like the test itself. And so as the Big Standardized Tests have spread, publishers have cranked out varieties of coaching workbooks that are all collections of short excerpts accompanied by a set of multiple choice questions. Instead of teaching students how to read a whole book, we teach them how to take a standardized test.

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9 . “Let’s take a break,” partway through the meeting, my boss stood, saying. “I need more coffee.” I picked up my empty cup. “I do, too,” I said, and handed it to him across the table. “Thanks,” I added, looking at him expectantly. The boss was staggered for a moment, and then took the cup from me.

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10 . But Oreos don’t attract you with taste alone; scents have a huge impact on the eating experience. When you bite into an Oreo, chemicals in the cookie release odor ants into the air inside your mouth. These scents flow to your nasal cavity (鼻腔), where they interact with smell receptors (感受器) and enter your brain’s decoding (解码) process. Your brain is likely to find those smells delightful, says Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the UK’s University of Oxford. Spence says chocolate and vanilla are two of the world’s most liked smells.

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