1 . A bill to conserve endangered species was passed by the U.S. House in a 231-to-190 vote on Tuesday.

The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would create an annual fund of more than $1.3 billion, given to states, and territories for wildlife conservation on the ground. While threatened species have been recognized and protected under the Endangered Species Act since 1973, that law does not provide constant funding to actively maintain their numbers.

The effort comes as scientists and international organizations sound the alarm about accelerating species decline.

“Too many people don’t realize that about one-third of our wildlife is at increased risk of extinction,” said lead House sponsor Debbie Ding-ell, echoing (呼应) a recent study about climate change.

In the United States, there are more than 1,600 endangered or threatened species, but state agencies have identified more than 7 times that number in need of conservation assistance in their wildlife action plans.

“The bottom line is, when we save wildlife we save for ourselves,” said Collin O’ Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, which supports the bill. He said species loss threatens everything from the insects that pollinate (授粉) plants in the food chain, to sea life that helps to reduce damages to coastlines from storm.

The bill would improve a 1937 law, the Pittman-Robertson Act, which was passed in response to decreasing game and waterfowl species. That law allows states to tax hunting supplies to pay for wildlife and habitat restoration, but that money is not enough to do the same for non-game species.

The act would also invest more in conservation than the existing program for threatened non-game species, called the State Wildlife Grant Program, which awarded states a total of $56 million this year.

2 . Mirthy hosts over 80 online events every month. You can enjoy them from the comfort of your home. All you need to do is visit our dedicated page on the Mirthy website.

Participants will learn a brief history of rug hooking. Participants will also be encouraged to try their hand at this multi-generational art form, have two weeks to complete the small project and then come back to the second session to learn how to finish it off and prepare it for display.

In 2001, Sam Eedle was approached by an elderly woman in Tewkesbury. Her uncle, Heneage Bloxham, had disappeared on the Western Front and nobody in her family was able to tell her what actually happened to him. By accessing the available records, maps and war diaries, and by taking a diversion to the battlefield while on a trip to France, Sam was able to find out what happened to the woman’s uncle.

African dance allows us to express ourselves individually while also being part of a collective. Creative expression is encouraged and our uniqueness is celebrated. Kenzi will be reminding you that movements can be adapted and explored to find a way that works for your body and movement style. Making a wild foraged wreath Monday 28th November at 2:30 pm

In this workshop, you will be learning how to make a wreath! Through winding twigs and vines to find forest textures into a festive sampling of nature, this will be an artistic nature-based experience. The wreath is free-form and adds a naturalistic winter atmosphere to your door with a minimal, organic style.

3 . There’s no doubt that football is the global sport. Though basketball, tennis, and other sports are popular too, nothing comes close to football. Being played in every country in the world, football provides dozens of superstars. The numbers are greater when compared to any other sport, and this drives the popularity of football up. Have you ever wondered when the sport started and became popular?

Football has its origin (起源) in China and has a history of more than 2,000 years. However, modern football originally appeared in Britain in the 19th century. Folk football matches had been played before in many cities and towns, but never on a professional level.

Football became a winter sport game played in different schools. The rules were carried out by each school, and this made it difficult for players to play an official game with each other. It all changed in 1849 at the University of Cambridge that invented a set of standard rules known as the Cambridge rules of football. From that moment, a new star sport was born.

By the early 20th century, football had spread all across Europe. In 1904, FIFA was set up. There are seven original members, including France, Denmark and Spain, FIFA became the governing body for many associations in Europe.

England’s international success improved the popularity of the sport in the country. The league (联赛) in Britain was set up in 1992. From the 1990s, it became a truly impressive piece of football organization, becoming the world’s top football league in the process.

Football is obviously the most popular sport in the world. It is impossible for any other sport to take its place, especially with leagues spending billions of pounds every year to stay in the focus.

5 . A brown leather cap, worn by pioneer pilot Amelia Earhart during her record-breaking flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928, had sold for $825,000 online, according to the Heritage Auctions (拍卖) website. The leather cap was expected to sell at around $80,000, but on Saturday, a person purchased it at about ten times the amount.

Anthony Twiggs, a retired photographer in Minnesota, put the helmet up for auction after experts confirmed its authenticity, according to The New York Times. Twiggs had received the cap 20 years ago from his mother, Ellie Brookhart, who claimed she got from a friend in 1929 following the first Women’s National Air Derby, an all-female race, in which Amelia finished third.

When the pilot was talking with reporters after the race, Ellie Brookhart and her friend were among the greeting crowd. The friend spotted the cap on the ground and presented the leather helmet—with the name “A. Earhart” printed on the inside—to Twiggs’ mother in an attempt to impress her. “My mother decided to keep it for Amelia,” Twiggs tells The New York Times. But Amelia was too busy with reporters then and when his mother tried to give it back to her a bit later, she had already left.

For the next 90 years, the cap was kept in a closet in Brookhart’s home, where she would bring it out occasionally over the years to show her four children. After his mother’s death, Twiggs tried to interest museums and collectors in acquiring it. However, he hit a wall. No one believed the story.

Now 67, Twiggs sent photos to John Robinson of Resolution Photomatching to verify (核实) the flying cap’s authenticity. After comparing images of Earhart wearing the hat with the current photos of the artifact, Robinson gave him a positive answer.

6 . School Activities for Kids and Teens

July is a month of fun-filled activities for kids and teens as long as you know where to find them. When you want some fun activities for July, consider these ideas happening this month.

7 . People use laughter to connect and bond with others. It’s how we tell friends that we find their jokes funny, or how kids in a park show that they are having fun. Laughter is so important to humans, even if they belong to different cultures or speak different languages. What about animals? Scientists are studying if there is a connection between animals’ laughing and playing.

Sasha Winkler, from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), studies biological anthropology (人类学)，including the study of animal behavior. She noticed that the small monkeys she worked with, liked to play together by chasing each other. While having fun together, they made panting (喘气) sounds, almost like they were out of breath, which reminded Winkler of their quiet laughter. This made Winkler wonder whether other animals did so while they were playing.

To find out whether other animals laugh and play, Winkler teamed up with another scientist named Greg Bryant, a professor and vice chair in the Department of Communication at UCLA. Together, they found and read dozens of reports written by other scientists who study animals. Winkler and Bryant looked for any mentions in any animal of sound signaling like the panting of the monkeys during their playing.

In April 2021, Winkler and Bryant published their findings in a science journal. Through their research, they identified 65 species or groups of animals, which laugh while playing. The animals that laugh the most include primates (灵长类) like monkeys and apes, rodents (啮齿动物) like rats, and mammals that live in the ocean like dolphins. Their work won’t only help us understand animals better but it could also help us understand how humans develop or change over time. Next, they will carry on more study to find more.

8 . Four Seasonal Best-Sellers Online

Are you among the parents who are seeking books for your children during the coming winter vacation? The following seasonal best-sellers may be on your list of choices.

Salt

Salt, in which Helen Frost tells a story about friendship between Anikwa and James, was set in a time of war. Anikwa and James spent their happy days together in the forests of the Indiana Territory until facing the cruel war. As a children’s literature, it was once considered as a Kirkus Reviews Best Book in 2013.

Now

Now was set in the present day. This is the final book in Morris Gleitzman’s series that began with Once, continued with Then and Now. In the novel, Felix, a successful man with painful memories of his childhood recalls his time with his granddaughter Zelda. It has been popular with teenagers since it came out. Now is one of Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Books of 2012.

Green

Die-cut (模切的) pages bring surprise after surprise in this magical new book. How many kinds of green are there in the world? Laura Vaccaro Seeger shapes a respect to a single color that will delight and quite possibly shock you. Green was considered as Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Book of 2012 and a 2013 Caldecott Honor Book.

Holes

In this wonderfully creative novel, Louis Sachar makes up a puzzle about Stanley Yelnats, a boy who was sent to juvenile detention center (少年管教中心) Camp Green Lake, and forced to dig a hole a day, five feet across in the hard earth of the dried-up lake bed. It is a darkly humorous tale. The book wins the Winner of the National Book Award and was one of the best sellers among children.

9 . The Curb-cut Effect (路缘坡效应) refers to the fact that supporting small groups of people often ends up helping much larger ranges of society.

Curb cuts: Easing the walking

In the 1940s, hundreds of thousands of World War Ⅱ soldiers returned home with disabilities. Disappointed by the difficulties they faced, Jack Fisher of Kalamazoo, Michigan, as one of them, asked his city government to build an experimental curb cut-a gentle slope that brings the end of a sidewalk down to meet the level of the street-at the corners of several blocks downtown. A few months later, Fisher reported that even residents without wheelchairs were enjoying the impact of the little slopes.

Reading machines: Getting the message

In 1976, technologist Ray Kurzweil invented a machine for the blind and visually damaged to change images into text that it then read aloud. Smart speakers with those voices are now in roughly one-quarter of US homes. By detecting street signs and house numbers, it is helping build the maps that self-driving cars use to navigate the world.

Closed captions (字幕): Following the conversation

Sears launched the first TV with a built-in equipment that allowed deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers to read along with their favorite programs in 1980. In the 1990s, text became increasingly common as DVDs and, later, streaming services added the ability to switch the words on at will. A 2006 survey found that only around 20 percent of the people using captions had hearing problems.

DeafSpace designs: Keeping things quiet

More than 150 designs of the DeafSpace Project came from architect Hansel Bauman. One aim is to clear distracting noises, which can make it difficult for people to use their limited hearing abilities. By keeping conversations and other sound disturbances from walking and jumping around the room, these ways also make it easier for all sorts of students and workers to focus.

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10 . A “Quick Response Code”, also known as QR code is a type of barcode that Denso Wave developed, a Japanese barcode developer, in 1994.

The use of technology saves people's efforts in labor. In the early 1960s, the economy of Japan entered high economic growth. During this period, supermarkets and convenience stores thrived and were selling a wide variety of goods ranging from food to clothing. To keep up with the demand for checkout counters, cash registers（收银机）were widely used. Due to the heavy workload, cashiers on the checkout counters experienced numbness on their wrists and developed a kind of disease. As a solution to the problem, the Point of Sales (POS) system was developed and included the use of barcodes.

In the long run, developers noticed the problem barcodes held. The limit of 20 alphanumeric characters was not long enough in holding a product's information and the position of how a barcode is scanned leads to scan failures. Denso Wave stepped in and invented a new type of barcode that could hold more information and could be scanned in any scanner direction. Thus, QR code was introduced in 1994 and has made history up to today.

Today, QR codes are generally used in advertising, business, health care, and education. There are two types of QR codes: Static QR codes and Dynamic QR codes. Static QR codes are QR codes that are free and permanent. This type of QR code is not modifiable （可修改的） and therefore cannot change the data stored in the QR code. Dynamic QR codes are QR codes that are modifiable in content and can store more data even after you have printed it into the paper.