1 . Stuck inside his room at an assisted living center, Bob Coleman knew he could not go out in public with the epidemic (疫). But he was not cut off from outside: he shared his love for country music over the Internet. “Hello, everybody. It’s a bright day in Tennessee,” he said into his microphone. “This is Bob Coleman, coming to you from Room3325…”.  Then Coleman began to play the music he loves-hits from country music stars. The 88-year-old carefully chooses each song.

Coleman and several other retirees have turned into DJs (流行音乐播音员), for a new online radio hour known as “Radio Recliner.” A marketing company called Luckie came up with the idea of Radio Recliner. Listeners can send song requests in honor of family or friends. For example, listeners might hear a message like this: “Hey, Granny. This is your favorite granddaughter Amy. We just wanted to call in and say we love you.” The 60-minute show started with retirees in middle Tennessee. It has since expanded, with residents of assisted-living centers in other states taking part in the project. Many jumped at the chance to work as a DJ to ease the loneliness of social distancing rules.

Mitch Bennett serves as Luckie’s chief creative officer. He says the idea was to provide a sense of community to older people. “For this generation, radio was the original social media,” Bennett said, “Dedicating a song to someone you love and having them hear it along with everyone else is a special way of connecting.”

In Georgia, 80-year-old Ed Rosenblatt, who had made full preparations for his show, said an hour he spent playing songs on Radio Recliner resulted in a flood of text messages, emails and calls from family and friends, and many of the messages were from people he had not heard from for years.

2 . Well, to pick up where we left off last time. I’m certain that you know all too well the dangers hiding on the World Wide Web. And whether it’s for schoolwork, entertainment, or just socializing with friends, the Internet will surely be a major part of your child’s life. So, it’s important to secure their online stays.

It’s not the easiest thing, but keeping open lines of communication is primary. Let them know they can share their online activities with you. Talk to them about their online presence as early as possible, ideally before they begin to use email, social media, or a smartphone. Discuss what they find interesting online and learning from them about popular websites and apps; this will create understanding and allow you to identify potential risks.

Next, monitor without spying. Most kids learn to understand boundaries, like respecting others’ personal space, or not opening the cookie jar without asking. Internet use is no different. It’s helpful for kids to have ground rules as to which websites they can visit,which apps they can use, and what they can share online. Remind them that if they feel uneasy with anything that occurs online, they need to alert an adult immediately.

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3 . Perhaps you think you could easily add to your happiness with more money. Strange as it may seem, if you're unsatisfied, the issue is not a lack of means to meet your desires but a lack of desires — not that you cannot satisfy your tastes but that you don't have enough tastes.

Real riches consist of well-developed and hearty capacities (能力) to enjoy life. Most people are already swamped (淹没) with things. They eat, wear, go and talk too much. They live in too big a house with too many rooms, yet their house of life is a hut.

Your house of life ought to be a mansion (豪宅) , a royal palace. Every new taste, every additional interest, every fresh enthusiasm adds a room. Here are several rooms your house of life should have.

Art should be a desire for you to develop simply because the world is full of beautiful things. If you only understood how to enjoy them and feed your spirit on them, they would make you as happy as to find plenty of hamburgers and eggs when you're hungry.

Literature, classic literature, is a beautiful, richly furnished room where you might find many an hour of rest and refreshment. To gain that love would go toward making you a rich person, for a rich person is not someone who has a library but who likes a library.

Music like Mozart's and Bach's shouldn't be absent. Real riches are of the spirit. And when you've brought that spirit up to where classical music feeds it and makes you a little drunk, you have increased your thrills and bettered them. And life is a matter of thrills.

Sports, without which you remain poor, mean a lot in life. No matter who you are, you would be more human, and your house of life would be better supported against the bad days, if you could, and did, played a bit.

Whatever rooms you might add to your house of life, the secret of enjoying life is to keep adding.

4 . The scientist’s job is to figure out how the world works, to “torture (拷问)” Nature to reveal her secrets, as the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon described it. But who are these people in the lab coats (or sports jackets, or T-shirts and jeans) and how do they work? It turns out that there is a good deal of mystery surrounding the mystery-solvers.

“One of the greatest mysteries is the question of what it is about human beings — brains, education, culture etc. that makes them capable of doing science at all,” said Colin Allen, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University.

Two vital ingredients seem to be necessary to make a scientist: the curiosity to seek out mysteries and the creativity to solve them. “Scientists exhibit a heightened level of curiosity,” reads a 2007 report on scientific creativity. “They go further and deeper into basic questions showing a passion for knowledge for its own sake.” Max Planck, one of the fathers of quantum physics, once said, the scientist “must have a vivid and intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction (推论), but by an artistically creative imagination.”

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As long as our best technology for seeing inside the brain requires subjects to lie nearly motionless while surrounded by a giant magnet, we’re only going to make limited pro gress on these questions,” Allen said.

5 . Crime fiction books have been popular with readers for many decades-so popular, in fact, that at a recent London Book Fair sales of the genre (类型) overtook general fiction for the first time ever, a development that had been widely anticipated. Commercial success, of course, does not impress everyone and there are those who believe crime fiction should not be held in such high regard. Well-known in this group is Sebastian Franklin, who has argued that most crime fiction books look more like crossword puzzles than literature. However, increasingly this is a minority opinion as crime fiction is becoming recognized as a rich and dynamic literary genre in around the world.

Crime writing really came to the public’s notice in the 1920s and 1930s with the books of the British author Agatha Christie. Christie was a productive writer, publishing more than 60 detective novels over a 50-year period, beginning in 1920.

Without a doubt, there are certain elements that tend to be repeated in Christie’s books. The stories generally focus on a well-off circle of people, whose peaceful lives are thrown into chaos by an unexplained crime. The location is often a restricted space of some sort: a train, an island, a boat, or a village. This is quite different, for example, to the world of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who often has the entire city of London as his hunting ground.

The books are also action-packed just like today’s most popular thrillers (惊悚小说). Christie mastered the art of the page-turner: events unfold so quickly and unpredictably that we keep reading to find out what happens next. The most significant consequence is that it is so simple to overlook vital clues.

It is worth reading a Christie book a second time just to notice how carefully she hides crucial information about the criminal’s identity.

A survey of contemporary crime writing shows that Agatha Christie’s legacy (遗产) is more important now than at any time previously, at the very point when crime writing has become the most popular of all book genres.

6 . California has lost half its big trees since the 1930s, according to a study to be published Tuesday and climate change seems to be a major factor (因素).

The number of trees larger than two feet across has declined by 50 percent on more than 46, 000 square miles of California forests, the new study finds. No area was spared or unaffected, from the foggy northern coast to the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the San Gabriels above Los Angeles. In the Sierra high country, the number of big trees has fallen by more than 55 percent; in parts of southern California the decline was nearly 75 percent.

Many factors contributed to the decline, said Patrick McIntyre, an ecologist who was the lead author of the study. Woodcutters targeted big trees. Housing development pushed into the woods. Aggressive wildfire control has left California forests crowded with small trees that compete with big trees for resources (资源).

But in comparing a study of California forests done in the 1920s and 1930s with another one between 2001 and 2010, McIntyre and his colleagues documented a widespread death of big trees that was evident even in wildlands protected from woodcutting or development.

The loss of big trees was greatest in areas where trees had suffered the greatest water shortage. The researchers figured out water stress with a computer model that calculated how much water trees were getting in comparison with how much they needed, taking into account such things as rainfall, air temperature, dampness of soil, and the timing of snowmelt (融雪).

Since the 1930s, McIntyre said, the biggest factors driving up water stress in the state have been rising temperatures, which cause trees to lose more water to the air, and earlier snowmelt, which reduces the water supply available to trees during the dry season.

7 . Not all fat is created equal. The fat most people picture is known as white fat, since it looks white or white-yellow when you see it under the skin. But you’re also born with brown fat, which, unsurprisingly, looks brown.

Brown fat — found in the neck and shoulders of newborns — is metabolically (新陈代谢地) efficient, in that it burns lots of calories, which serves the purpose of keeping you warm (important for newborns). We lose most of our brown fat as we age. By age six, we have less than five percent of the brown fat we were born with; the fat we gain over time is almost all white fat. One of the major causes of shortened lifetime and illnesses like type 2 diabetes and many cancers is the increasing level of white fat. So scientists have long tried to find ways to activate that fat or turn white fat into brown fat.

However, one roadblock to using brown fat is that all the good stuff that brown fat does has to be programmed into the previously white fat, but that has proved doable. A group in Delaware has activated brown fat in a few women with an already approved medication. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) have put white fat in test tubes and turned it into brown fat. They then injected the brown fat into fat sheep. As hoped, the sheep with more brown fat got thin and lost their metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

The timetable for this game-changing ability to turn white fat to brown fat is predicted to be less than five years away after human studies start. If scientists find a way to replace white fat with brown fat, it will likely mitigate risks of diseases like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and brain disorder greatly and provide increased energy levels. That is, you become operationally younger. Bring it on!

8 . New research links outdoor air pollution — even at levels considered safe — to an increased risk of diabetes (糖尿病) globally, according to a study from the VA St. Louis Health Care System. The findings raise the possibility that reducing pollution may lead to a drop in diabetes cases in heavily polluted countries such as India and less polluted ones such as the United States.

Diabetes is one of the fastest growing diseases, affecting more than 500 million people worldwide. The main drivers of diabetes include eating an unhealthy diet, having a sedentary lifestyle and obesity, but the new research indicates the extent to which outdoor air pollution plays a role.

“Our research shows a significant link between air pollution and diabetes globally,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington. “We found an increased risk, even at low levels of air pollution currently considered safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the World Health Organization (WHO). This is important because many industry lobbying (游说) groups argue that current levels are too stringent and should be relaxed. Evidence shows that current levels are still not sufficiently safe and need to be tightened.”

While growing evidence has suggested a link between air pollution and diabetes, researchers have not attempted to quantify that burden until now. “Over the past two decades, there have been bits of research about diabetes and pollution,” said Al-Aly. “We wanted to thread together the pieces for a broader, more solid understanding.”

The researchers also found that the overall risk of pollution-related diabetes tilted (倾斜) more toward lower-income countries such as India that lack the resources for environmental mitigation systems and clean-air policies. For instance, poverty-stricken countries facing a higher diabetes-pollution risk include Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea and Guyana, while richer countries such as France, Finland and Iceland experience a lower risk. The US experiences a medium risk of pollution-related diabetes.

9 . IT’S A TYPICAL morning: you wake up, take a shower, brush your teeth, and then prick (刺；扎) your arm with a tiny needle. Wait, what? Unless you have a serious disease such as diabetes, you probably haven’t ever tested your own blood. But in the future, that might change.

The company Cor already sells a system for home blood testing. You stick your arm using a supposedly painless, one-off , blood-drawing cartridge (针筒) about the size of a lipstick. Then you stick the cartridge into a device that looks like the base for an electric toothbrush. A few minutes later, an app on your phone buzzes with updated information, including your current health data and tips on what to eat and how to exercise during the day.

It’s true that blood contains a wealth of information about a person’s health. Blood tests can show if a person is infected with a disease or at risk for a variety of problems, including a heart attack or a stroke. But most people don’t test their own blood until a doctor says it’s time. Healthy young adults get regular blood tests about every five years. These tests happen at a lab, where a technician or a nurse sticks a long needle into the arm to draw out several tubes full of blood. Cor and similar companies, such as WellnessFX, are trying to change all that. They think people deserve access to more information about their own health.

But not everyone is convinced that regular blood testing for healthy people is a great idea. Cor’s system is expensive and may pot offer much benefit. “The lightest result here is that you lose your money and then you’re reminded to get more sleep and to eat more fruits, vegetables, and fish,” Pieter Cohen of Harvard Medical School told the New York Times. “The worst result is that you end up getting frightened by probably abnormal results that are actually completely normal for you.”

Plus, the results of a home blood test might be wrong. It’s hard to get accurate results from a tiny amount of blood. So what do you think? Is monitoring your own health via pinpricks the way of the future? Or is it better to leave blood testing to medical professionals?

10 . Fallen leaves are everywhere as winter comes. Traditionally, people sweep up the fallen leaves, put them in bags and send them to landfills. But there is a growing movement to leave leaves on the ground. They’ll naturally break down over the winter into rich organic matter. The matter also shelters some insects.

But some leaves prevent the growth of other plants. Black walnut (黑胡桃), for example, contains a poison in its leaves that kills many plants, including apples, peppers, tomatoes and potatoes. Besides, whole leaves should not be permitted to remain on walkways, where they could make the path dangerously slippery. They should also not be left on grass lawns, where they are likely to cause disease. In areas that experience snow cover, water would become trapped between grass and leaves. In areas without snow, whole leaves that cover grasses block water and sunlight from reaching the soil below.

Many people choose to break up the leaves using a machine and let the pieces fall between pieces of grass. Then the pieces break down further in the soil. However, this treatment can kill insects and their eggs.

Another method is to take the leaves off the lawn and spread them lightly to cover garden beds. The leaves mostly break down by spring and almost entirely by summer. But if not, they should be removed before spring growth begins.

Leaves also can be used to make leaf mold (腐叶土), a type of fertilizer made entirely from leaves. Just put the leaves in a corner, add nitrogen fertilizer (氮肥), and then water them to keep them wet inside. It may take a year or two, but the leaves will break down into a nutritious soil.

Fallen leaves build rich soil, protect plant roots and shelter wildlife, in your garden, and elsewhere. Done correctly, leaving the leaves is one of the best ways to turn yard waste into free fertilizer, which is good for plants, the environment, and saving money. Why waste that important resource?