1 . Steven Stein likes to follow garbage trucks. His strange habit makes sense when you consider that he’s an environmental scientist who studies how to reduce litter, including things that fall off garbage trucks as they drive down the road. What is even more interesting is that one of Stein’s jobs is defending an industry behind the plastic shopping bags.

Americans use more than 100 billion thin film plastic bags every year. So many end up in tree branches or along highways that a growing number of cities do not allow them at checkouts(收银台). The bags are prohibited in some 90 cities in California, including Los Angeles. Eyeing these headwinds, plastic-bag makers are hiring scientists like Stein to make the case that their products are not as bad for the planet as most people assume.

Among the bag makers’ argument: many cities with bans still allow shoppers to purchase paper bags, which are easily recycled but require more energy to produce and transport. And while plastic bags may be ugly to look at, they represent a small percentage of all garbage on the ground today.

The industry has also taken aim at the product that has appeared as its replacement: reusable shopping bags. The stronger a reusable bag is, the longer its life and the more plastic-bag use it cancels out. However, longer-lasting reusable bags often require more energy to make. One study found that a cotton bag must be used at least 131 times to be better for the planet than plastic.

Environmentalists don’t dispute(质疑) these points. They hope paper bags will be banned someday too and want shoppers to use the same reusable bags for years.

2 . Do the colors that surround you influence how you feel? Can the colors on your walls and on your clothes affect your moods? Some researchers believe the answer is a decisive yes, while others aren’t so sure.

Yet many marketers, interior designers, medical professionals and others swear by an informal field of science known as color psychology. Color psychology is defined as “the study of how the colors we perceive impact our thoughts and feelings.”

Marketers use the science of color to persuade us to buy things. When choosing paint, furniture and wall art, interior designers act on the theory that colors can arouse certain feelings in us. Dentists are often advised to use light blue paint on their office walls to help calm apprehensive patients.

We should keep in mind, though, that only by considering cultural preferences are we able to fully understand the science of color. For instance, in the West, white is for brides and black is for funerals. But in ancient Asia, white was sometimes worn for funerals. In Japan yellow represents courage while in the United States, it represents happiness. Additionally, many variables including gender, age, background and more must be considered before making color assumptions when one is studying the effects of color.

After taking color variable into account it’s safe to consider some mainstream theories about specific colors and their meanings. Here are just a few:

Red symbolizes love, energy, passion and danger. Red is also believed to increase one’s hunger, which might be the reason why McDonald’s and Coca-Cola chose red as their major branding color.

Brown, a color from nature, best represents things that are honest, trustworthy and dependable. It seems a perfect fit as the branding color for the package delivery company UPS.

Blue-in addition to representing peace and calm-also means integrity and competence. It’s no surprise that PayPal and American Express both use blue as their branding color.

Green-another color from nature-represents health, growth and freshness and is the perfect branding color for Starbucks.

Pink symbolizes love, romance, innocence and femininity (女性特质). The popular doll company that makes Barbie uses pink as its major branding color.

If color psychology advocates are correct, then our emotions and decisions are truly influenced by the colors around us. With this knowledge, we can effectively harness (驾驭) color power to create positive school, work and home environments.

3 . Scientists say record heat has cost reef half of corals

The Great Barrier Reef, one of the earth's most precious habitats, lost half of its coral populations in the last quarter-century, a decline that researchers in Australia said would continue unless drastic action is taken to reduce the effects of climate change.

Colony sizes were smaller, there were fewer “big mamas," or older large corals that produce baby corals; and there were fewer of those babies, which are vital to the reefs future ability to_________. "Our results show the ability of the Great Barrier Reef to recover — its resilience (恢复力) — is weakened_________ the past, because there are fewer babies, and fewer large breeding adults," Dr. Andy Dietzel, the lead author of the study, said in a statement.

_________ a process in which corals turn white as water temperatures rise — contributed to sleep losses of Barrier Reef in 2016 and 2017. The southern part of the reef was also_________ to record — setting temperatures in early 2020. Researchers cited climate change as one of the major_________ of disturbances to reef.

“There is no time to_________ they said in a statement. "We must sharply decrease greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.”

Researchers were disappointed about what they saw as a lack of attention to the study from government leaders in Australia, the world's biggest coral exporter. The government has _________ calls to reduce carbon emissions even as heat waves, drought and fires continue to reveal the country ,s situation of being hurt by climate change.

The Great Barrier Reef, which _________ a vast array of marine life, has between 300 and 400 coral species and stretches for thousands of kilometers across the Australian coast.

"You can_________ see it from space," said Deron Burkepile. a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Coral reefs worldwide are ____________ for billions of dollars is tourism and provide habitats for fish that feed close to one billion people on the planet, he said.

“The situation is serious," Professor Burkepile said. But people should not feel ____________ about the future of coral reefs, he said, even as they wait for world leaders to take more ____________ steps to control the effects of climate change.

At the local level, ____________ nitrogen (氮) pollution — which ____________ fading — can be controlled by reducing fertilizer and sewage runoff, according to a study that Professor Burkepile conducted with other researchers at his university. "The other thing that we need to take away is that coral reefs are amazing resilient," he said. "If we don't continually damage them, they will________________.

4 . Far below every town and city lies an invisible network of pipes crucial to the lives of their residents. Once water disappears down a pipe or toilet, people rarely think about what happens to it. It’s out of sight, out of mind. The water flows into pipes that carry excess rainwater, wastewater and solid waste away, keeping the city clean.

There are three main types of sewers (下水道): sanitary (卫生的) sewers, storm sewers and combined sewers. Taipei has both sanitary and storm sewers where rainwater and sewage are collected using different pipes.

This sewer system functions as a city’s veins (静脉). Water containing human and industrial waste is collected in sanitary sewers and conveyed to sewage treatment plants, the heart of the sewer system, where waste is treated. There, the solid waste is separated from the water, which is then cleaned before being released back into the environment. It will be reused for industrial, agricultural or environmental purposes or to produce energy. Furthermore, the mud and gas from sewage treatment can be used to produce energy. They not only contribute to a healthy environment and good quality of life, but also achieve the goal of sustainable development.

While wastewater collection and treatment are critical to the health of urban residents, storm sewers also play an important role in the city. Green space has given way to concrete during the island’s rapid development and extensive building projects over the past few decades. As a consequence, there has been a loss of the land’s natural water as concrete cannot absorb rainwater. When an extreme weather event like a severe storm or typhoon brings heavy rain, storm sewers must cope with the water, so it does not flood the city. However, storm sewers are only part of the measures for water management and flood prevention.

To reduce flooding, an integrated urban drainage management plan has been adopted, where all the factors-storm sewers, land planning and economic development — are considered together. Engineering innovations, additional flood discharge facilities and increased green space requirements in new development projects have improved water maintaining in cities.

Who knew that sewers help improve urban public health, prevent urban flooding and boost environmental protection? Together they protect vital water resources and maintain the safety of people and property.

5 . Animal-rights activists often complain that cute beasts get more sympathy than equally deserving ugly ones. If so, one would think a lovely creature like the mink (貂)would be easy to protect. Yet in the Netherlands, mink is the only animal that can still legally be farmed for their fur. That is about to change. On August 28th the government brought forward to this year a ban on mink-farming that had been scheduled to take effect in 2024. The timetable was sped up not because mink had become more adorable, but because they can contract covid-19 and spread it to humans.

Dutch farmers normally raised about 2.5 million minks a year, making the Netherlands the world's fourth-largest producer after Denmark, China and Poland. In April, a couple of minks and the farm hands who tended them were diagnosed with covid- 19. Genetic tracing showed that at least two workers had probably been infected by mink, rather than the other way around. The affected animals were destroyed and stricter hygiene rules imposed, but by summer the virus had spread to a third of the country's farms. In June, parliament voted to shut down the industry as soon as possible, and the cabinet agreed.

That was a win for the Netherlands Party for the Animals, which has four seats in the 150-memeber parliament. In 2013, it helped pass the law that gave mink farmers until 2024 to get out of the business.

Now the party and its supporters object to the generous compensation （补偿）the government has offered for bringing forward the deadline: $150 million, or $1 million per farmer. Some members of parliament claim that the compensation paid for destroying the infected minks was higher than the market price for their fur.

Fur farmers any modern standards allow minks to be raised humanely, and that they are not a big reason for the spread of the virus. But minks tend to live by themselves instead of living in groups: animal-rights advocates say they cannot be raised humanely in small cages. As for covid-I9, the worry is that mink could serve as a medium for it to attack human immunization （免疫）programs. The industry's value is modest （framers put it at $150 million 0 $200 million, activists at under $100 million）, and polls show the public overwhelmingly opposes it. "In a democratic country, that widespread belief has to translate into a political decision to ban fur farming,"   says Esther Ouwehand, leader of the Party for the Animals. The farmers accept they are shutting down. The remaining argument is over money.

10 . The ocean bottom - a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth - is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 36, 000 meters deep. In complete darkness and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom is an unfriendly environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as outer space.

Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments (沉淀物) for over a century now, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) . Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill in very deep waters, pulling out samples of sediment and rock from the ocean floor.

The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983. During this time, the vessel logged 600, 000 kilometers and took almost 20, 000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger's core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics (板块构造学说) and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that have come to shape the Earth.

The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also produced information critical to understanding the world's past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record that stretches back for hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion (侵蚀) and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change—information that may be used to predict future climates.