1 . The International Federation of Pickleball, with 60 member countries and counties, is working to make sure pickleball will be part of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.     1    

“Pickleball comes from tennis, badminton and table tennis,” says Hope Tolley, managing director of USA Pickleball.       2     And it uses square paddles (球拍) and a small plastic ball that’s similar in size to a tennis ball, but much lighter.

Unlike tennis, you can score only when it’s your turn to serve. What you should do is keep the ball in the air, and if your opponent(called the receiver)fails to return the ball over the net, you get the point.     3     If not, you’ll end up with a shot that fails to reach the net. Matches can be played in doubles or singles, and games are played to 11 points.

    4     Because the game can vary the intensity-going all out or taking a slower pace-pickleball suits professional athletes and beginners alike. It’s a great workout and it’s a low-influence sport, so it’s easy on players’ joints (关节).

People who are really into the sport can join tournaments at various levels. The first World Pickleball Games will be held next summer in Austin, Texas.     5    

3 . Antibiotics, which can destroy or prevent the growth of bacteria and cure infections, are vital to modern medicine. Their ability to kill bacteria without harming the patient has saved billions of lives and made surgical procedures much safer. But after decades of overuse, their powers are fading. Some bacteria have evolved resistance, creating a growing army of superbugs, against which there is little effective treatment. Antimicrobial (抗菌的) resistance, expected to kill 10 million people a year by 2050 up from around 1 million in 2019, has been seen as a crisis by many.

It would be unwise to rely on new antibiotics to solve the problem. The rate at which resistance emerges is increasing. Some new drugs last only two years before bacteria develop resistance. When new antibiotics do arrive, doctors often store them, using them only reluctantly and for short periods when faced with the most persistent infections. That limits sales, making new antibiotics an unappealing idea for most drug firms.

Governments have been trying to fix the problem by channeling cash into research in drug firms. That has produced only limited improvements. But there is a phenomenon worth a look. Microbiologists have known for decades that disease-causing bacteria can suffer from illnesses of their own. They are supersensitive to attacks by phages, specialized viruses that infect bacteria and often kill them. Phages are considered a promising alternative to antibiotics.

Using one disease-causing virus to fight bacteria has several advantages. Like antibiotics, phages only tend to choose particular targets, leaving human cells alone as they infect and destroy bacterial ones. Unlike antibiotics, phages can evolve just as readily as bacteria can, meaning that even if bacteria do develop resistance, phages may be able to evolve around them in turn.

That, at least, is the theory. The trouble with phages is that comparatively little is known about them. After the discovery of penicillin, the first antibiotic, in 1928, they were largely ignored in the West. Given the severity of the antibiotic-resistance problem, it would be a good idea to find out more about them.

The first step is to run more clinical trials. Interest from Western firms is growing. But it is being held back by the fact that phages are an even less appealing investment than antibiotics. Since they are natural living things, there may be trouble patenting them, making it hard to recover any investment.

Governments can help fun d basic research into phage treatment and clarify the law around exactly what is and is not patentable. In time they can set up phage banks so as to make production cheaper. And they can spread awareness of the risks of overusing antibiotics, and the potential benefits of phages.

I spent 15 years trying to make it in the music industry. When I was a teenager, I did any odd job to afford time in a recording studio. I knocked at managers’ doors and sent out demo (录音样带) after demo, but I got nowhere. In 2010, aged 27, I was doing a job in a restaurant when I wrote a song called Dream Goes On. It was a song about never giving up. I just let out all of my frustrations at the keyboard.

Over the next five years, the music career never materialized but I persisted. Then, in 2019, I uploaded Dream Goes On to a music-sharing website. I just wanted someone to notice my music.

Later that year, I received an email out of the blue from Music World from South Korea, requesting a license for the song. They had chosen my song from the millions on the music-sharing website for a theme tune for one of their shows. I was amazed and negotiated a contract for $5,000 for the use of the song and signed up straight away. I was pretty excited, but didn’t think anything more would come of it, so I focused on my job in the restaurant.

This February, Music World organized a musical festival in Seoul and my song Dream Goes On was also chosen as the theme tune for the festival. I watched on YouTube as my song was being played to a huge crowd of people. It was amazing.

After three days of the festival, I was contacted by Music World and they asked if I’d like to go to Seoul to sing Dream Goes On in a concert. They flew me out there the next day. I was welcomed like a celebrity—everyone I met thought I was a big name in England. I had to break the news to them that I wasn’t a pop star.

I had never performed the song live, and hadn’t been on stage for years.

After the concert, I had photographers and journalists battling to interview me.

5 . What is the most shocking about the heatwave affecting the Pacific Northwest is not that it has hit a usually mild area, nor that so many long-standing temperature records are being broken. It is that those records are being broken by such large margins (幅度). In Portland, Oregon, temperature reached 46.6℃(116°F) — making it one of several cities in the region where former records have been beaten by a full 5℃(9°F). At the same time, heatwaves are also hitting central Europe and even Siberia.

Heatwaves may become headlines, but less attention is paid to them. In 2018 about 300,000 people over the age of 65 died as a result of extreme heat, mainly in India, a 54% increase since 2000, according to a report in the Lancet, a medical journal. The report also shows that, unlike storms and floods, heat does not lead to dramatic before-and-after pictures or widespread damage to belongings. It is a silent killer. As many as 70,000 people died due to a heatwave in Europe in 2003.

Heat also kills by worsening health conditions such as heart problems, so not all the deaths it causes may be directly attributed (归因) to it. Climate change will make heatwaves more common and more extreme. Even if greenhouse-gas emissions (排放) are cut to zero by the middle of this century, temperatures will go on rising for decades. So other measures are needed to protect people against extreme heat.

Governments can set up early warning systems to alarm health workers, shut down schools and stop outdoor activities. They can provide the public with forecasts of coming heatwaves, explanations of the dangers and detailed advice on what to do. Improved facilities can also help. This includes providing shaded areas, water parks and “misting stations” to help people cool down, and get to airconditioned “cooling centers” where they can find shelter and sleep if necessary.

The world is, undoubtedly, facing a big health challenge right now. There is no excuse for ignoring heatwaves and their effects.