As families prepare for the Spring Festival, no Chinese New Year celebration is complete without mandarin oranges.

The     1    (popular) of the fruits during the festive season has a long history. During the Qing Dynasty, Chinese parents would place fruits like oranges, lychees beside the pillows (枕头) of their children, as well     2     red envelopes containing money under the pillows,     3    (keep) away mythical monsters (神话中的怪物). The children would then eat the fruits on     4    (wake) up the next morning.

There are     5    (variety) explanations for why oranges have come to be considered     6     lucky symbol — a major part of which comes from the pronunciation. Some say the Mandarin pronunciation of the fruit (ju)     7    (sound) like the word for “good luck”(ji).

Apart from its lucky name, oranges are valued for their reddish-gold color and round shape,     8     are believed to bring good fortune. They’ve inspired Chinese art for     9    (century). An ancient poem called Ju Song     10    (create) by poet Qu Yuan from the Periodof Warring States, using the fruit and tree as a metaphor (比喻); a letter from Wang Xizhi, a renowned calligrapher from the Eastern Jin Dynasty, included a gift of oranges and remained famous after almost two thousand years.

4 . In recent years, there has been growing recognition that ageing doesn’t always progress at the same speed and certain factors, such as stress and smoking, can speed it up.

Scientists have developed several ways to test the speed of ageing, including measuring the length of telomeres-pieces of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes (染色体) — in cells, examining expressions of genes that are influenced by the environment. “However, the exactness of these measures may be limited if they are used on their own,” says Weiqi Zhang at the Beijing Institute of Genomics in China.

Zhang and her team conducted an all-round study of ageing in women recently, taking advantage of many different measures. 113 healthy women volunteers aged 20 to 66 from Quzhou, a city in southeast China, took part in the study.

Their study found that the volunteers were likely to be biologically “younger” than their age if they had healthy diets that included eating plenty of fruits and grains. It also found that the volunteers around the ages of 30 and 50 usually showed the fastest speed of ageing. “These are often the ages when some women give birth or experience the menopause (更年期), both of which are related to hormonal (荷尔蒙) changes,” says Zhang. Interestingly, the volunteers aged 45and older who were receiving hormone treatment to deal with menopause seemed to show slower ageing than those who weren’t. “Hormone treatment can prevent the drop in hormones, possibly slowing the speed of ageing,” says Zhang.

“However, since the study only included a small number of volunteers, further research is needed,” Zhang says. The team is now planning to conduct a similar study in men to find out if they show different patterns of ageing.

5 . Beginning on January 24, Wyoming residents will benefit from private spaces with Internet and the necessary technology to connect with health care providers through the new telehealth booths (小隔间) recently fixed in some Wyoming libraries. Booths are now available for use at the Natrona County Library, the Park County Library, and the Goshen County Library.

At each location, a soundproof (隔音的) booth is available for customers to schedule for use during telehealth appointments. Technology, including a computer, speakers, and Internet connection, as well as medical equipment, is provided. Library staff can offer support to customers when needed.

These booths are a pilot project of Public Access Telehealth Spaces (PATHS) and were made possible by funding through the Wyoming State Loan and Investment Board, with additional support from the University of Wyoming, College of Education, Counselor Education Program and the College of Health Sciences, Wyoming Institute for Disabilities. PATHS is based on a national model for promoting access to safe, secure, and accessible spaces to connect all community members to fair health and wellness resources and services. Booths in three additional Wyoming libraries are planned as part of a future project.

People can access the State Library website https: //library. wyo. gov/services/wyoming-residents/telehealth/to guide them to specific library websites to schedule an appointment to use a telehealth booth. For further information on telehealth, contact The Wyoming Telehealth Network, Wyoming Institute for Disabilities at (307) 766-2944 or send an email at wy-telehealth@uwyo.edu.

China has launched six improvement plans to boost a flagship high-quality grain project. The plans,     1     involve green storage, brand promotion, quality tracking, mechanization, emergency supply and food loss     2    (reduce), are expected to ensure sustainable national food security.

The green storage plan     3    (propose) building new high-standard granaries (谷仓) and improving warehouses. A system to measure and control grain conditions should     4    (establish), while the ability to clean grain is expected     5    (improve).

The quality and brand improvement plan said that     6     2025, the supply of high quality food will be more abundant, and the amount of high quality grain will see     7     annual increase of 10 percent. The country will cultivate more grain and oil brands with increasing market competitiveness.

The online and offline grain markets, which include emergency supply     8    (center) and staple kitchens, should be improved to progress from “eating enough” to “eating     9    (health) diet”.

The plan aims to improve quality and safety inspection and monitoring by using big data, the internet of things and other information technologies, further     10    (ensure) authenticity and accuracy.

7 . Italian diver and gardener Sergio Gamberini decided to see if he could grow vegetables in a plastic balloon underwater. The experiment was a success—so he decided to dive deeper into the world of underwater agriculture.

Today, Gamberini is the founder of a company using “biospheres” off the coast of Italy to grow a variety of plants, introducing the world to a new type of agriculture. The company’s six “biospheres” are air-filled plastic balloons about two meters wide. Each is fixed to the seabed by chains so that it sits between 15and 36 feet below sea level. The biospheres are equipped with cameras and sensors that allow researchers in the company to monitor CO₂ levels, humidity, temperature, and more from a control tower on the shoreline. There’s also a device to communicate with divers in the biospheres.

Solar panels (太阳能电池板) on the roof of the control tower power the fans that create airflow inside the biospheres, and because the temperature inside and outside the biospheres is consistent, there’s no need to expend energy on the heating or cooling systems needed for traditional greenhouses.

The underwater garden doesn’t require pesticides (杀虫剂) since bugs can’t reach the plants, and though more research is needed, the company notes on its website that the higher-pressure conditions underwater appear to help plants grow more quickly.

The company is now ready to shift from the research phase of development to optimizing (优化) its biospheres for industrialization, with the goal of expanding them off coastlines around the world. To achieve the aim, the startup is now taking advantage of “digital twin” technology to precisely simulate (模仿) every aspect of its underwater garden.

Even with all the optimization potential offered by technology, Gamberini admits it’s hard to imagine the produce grown in his startup’s biospheres ever competing financially with traditionally grown crops. Still, he hopes the system’s sustainability will be enough to draw customers.

8 . A new study finds sales of sugary drinks obviously fell across several US cities, after they carried out soda taxes (汽水税) aiming those drinks — and those changes continued over time. Taxes ranged from 1 to 2 cents. For a 2-liter bottle of soda, that comes out to between 67 cents to $1.30 extra in taxes.

“While prior (先前的) studies have looked at the impact of soda taxes, they usually studied one city at a time. This new study looked at the overall effect of the taxes on several cities to get an idea of what might happen if these taxes were more widespread — or enlarged to the state or national level,” says Scott Kaplan, an economics professor and the study’s lead author.

Kaplan and his co-workers found that prices for sugary drinks went up by 33.1% and purchases (购买量) went down by basically the same amount. So when people had to pay more for sugary drinks, they reduced their purchases — the effect was large and continued.

As Kaplan notes, “Sugary drinks make up a quarter of all the added sugar we see in the average adult American diet. And that’s a really big amount.” Jennifer Pomeranz, a professor at the School of Public Health, says, “Taxes that aim sugary drinks are good public health policy because these drinks have no nutritional (营养的) value, but they are linked with diet-related diseases. Too much added sugar is linked to a host of poor health outcomes, including overweight and heart disease.” Last month, WHO called on countries to increase taxes on sugary drinks as a way to promote healthier diets.

Today, the sugary drink industry’s strategy of offering consumers more choices with less sugar is working, and nearly 60% of drinks sold have zero sugar. The calories that people get from drinks have decreased to the lowest level in decades.

9 . A team of physicists at the University of Edinburgh, working with an infection and immunity specialist, has, via experimentation, validated a theory to explain why paint dries at the same rate regardless of humidity (湿度) levels.     

Generally, paint should dry faster on an outdoor fence on a dry day than when it is humid because evaporation (蒸发) occurs faster when the air around a liquid source is drier. But evidence suggests this is not the case for paint and some other liquids. Chemist Salmon and his colleagues developed a theory to explain why. They suggested it is because large molecules in the liquid are pulled to the surface during evaporation, forming a “polarization layer” that prevents evaporation, and by extension, drying. In this new effort, the research team worked to test this theory.

The researchers drilled five holes into a short cylinder (圆柱体) and inserted glass tubes in a horizontal position — each was then sealed in place. They then added a quantity of PVA, a kind of chemical substance, into the cylinder, which they placed on a scale. They poured a thin layer of oil on top of the liquid to prevent surface evaporation. The final touch involved placing an air flow box over the top of the cylinder to allow for controlling humidity levels. The team then ran multiple 17-hour trials to determine evaporation rates, using the scale to measure how much liquid evaporated from the tubes at different humidity levels, ranging from 25% to 90%.

The researchers found that as expected, evaporation rates remained constant for approximately three hours. But then, rates plummeted, as was theorized by Salmon, regardless of humidity levels. The evaporation rate didn’t decrease as humidity increased during the initial three hours. However, the theory only appeared to hold for humidity levels up to 80% — at rates higher than that, evaporation did slow down, which the team suggested was likely due to some other forces.

The researchers suggested their work could have medical applications as recent research efforts have shown that respiratory droplets (呼吸道飞沫) tend to form skins similar to those seen in the experimental equipment.

10 . Bring a new story home with you today

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Energy Made Easy: Helping Citizens Become Energy-Literate

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Nature Is My Teacher: Baby Steps to Follow Mother Nature

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Mother has been and will always remain the same with love, devotion, and dedication; and giving nature the features of a mother-life-giving and fostering-is simply personification as a caring mother. When Mother Nature teaches, we learn. Nature Is My Teacher reveals the deep emotional connection between human evolution and civilization.