1 . In the first half of 2022, scientists studying animal communication discovered that some dogs connect objects with words at a similar level to babies. Then what about cats, which are commonly believed to be unconcerned about human affairs?

Saho Takagi, a researcher at Azabu University, doubted cats’ seeming unconcern. “Cats don’t appear to listen to people’s conversations, but in fact, they do.” According to a past research, cats understand human communication better than expected. Like dogs, they can use human pointing and stares to find food. They even can tell the difference between human facial expressions and attentional states, according to a 2021 study. However, cats can do more than that.

Another study showed that cats can discriminate their human-given name from the names of their cat friends (those that live in the same house). The researchers believed that cats learned to connect names with other cats by observing communication between their owners and their cat friends.

In a recently published study, Takagi and her colleagues compared two groups of cats: one group was made up of house cats and lived with at least two other cats; the other was made up of cats that lived in “cat cafés”, which had up to 30 cats. They used a simple, two-phase(阶段) test. During the name phase, the study participant(参与者) was softly placed in front of a laptop computer. Then the researcher played a recording of its owner saying the name of its cat companions(同伴).

Immediately after the name phase came the face phase. A cat’s face appeared on the monitor. Sometimes, the cat that appeared on the screen matched the name spoken; other times the name and the picture did not match. If cats knew the names of their cat friends, they would investigate by staring doubtfully at the monitor when the name and the picture did not match. House cats had a significantly longer stare than café cats, indicating that house cats generally expected an exact cat’s face upon hearing the cat’s name.

“This is the first to show that house cats link human words and their social companions through daily experiences,” the researchers wrote, “However, we could not recognize the mechanism(机制) for learning. But with more and more scientists becoming interested in cats who are much smarter than we praise them, this question is sure to be solved.”

5 . Every year, Arctic terns (北极燕鸥) migrate from the Arctic to the Antarctic — a round-trip of about 80,000 kilometers. New research finds that these far-flying birds use just a few select routes for their travels.

“The Arctic tern is well-known to people as a record holder. To be exact, it holds the world record for the longest migration of any animal, and therefore interacts with a variety of ecosystems along the way,” lead author Joanna Wong, from the University of British Columbia, says.

“They are an indicator species that can tell us so much about the different ecosystems that they travel through,” Wong continues. “If they don’t make it to their destination in one year, then you know there might be an environmental problem somewhere along their route.”

Globally, Arctic terns are declining. Their crossing such a wide geographic range has made it hard for researchers to see where the problem is. “These birds are difficult to study because they are either residing in polar environments, or on the go,” Wong says.

So in order to track them, Wong and her colleagues attached light-level geolocators to the legs of 53 Arctic terns from five breeding colonies (繁殖群落) throughout North America. These geolocators are actually small computers that record surrounding light intensities. “The length of daylight can tell us the latitude (纬度), while the time of solar noon can tell us the longitude, so we are able to estimate positions of birds,” Wong says.

Researchers compared the routes taken by the birds they followed and the migration timing to other Arctic terns that had previously been tracked. They determined that most Arctic terns use common migratory routes. So terns breeding in different areas such as Canada, the United States. Norway, and Greenland, all end up taking similar routes both when they head south and when they return north.

Some other seabirds also use the same paths, which suggests that the routes aren’t specific just to the Arctic terns and that protecting them may be beneficial to other species.

7 . Afroz Shah, a lawyer in Mumbai, hasn’t had a weekend off in four years. But he hasn’t spent this time preparing for _________.

His mission? Saving the world’s oceans from _________ pollution.

It’s a calling he found in 2015 after moving to a community in Mumbai called Versova Beach. He had played there as a child and was_________to see how much it had _________. The sand was no longer _________ because it was covered by a layer of garbage more than five feet thick — most of it plastic waste.

“The whole beach was like a_________of plastic,” he said. “It hurt me. The _________ mess.” What Shah had seen is part of a global environmental crisis. More than 8 million tons of plastic _________in the world’s oceans each year. It’s predicted that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. “Plastic in the ocean is a _________. And the sea species have no choice at all, ” Shah said. “We are ______________ their habitats.”

In October 2015, Shah began ________________ up plastic waste from the beach every Sunday morning. At first, it was just him and a neighbor, and then he began calling on others to join in. Word ________________ and with the help from social media, more volunteers got ________________.

For Shah, the work has always been a ________________ journey, but it has earned global attention. After he was ________________ as a Champion of the Earth by the United Nations in 2016, Shah now devotes nearly all of his free time to this ________________.

He’s now spent 209 weekends on this mission, ________________ more than 200,000 volunteers, some of whom are young students, to join him in what’s been called the world’s biggest beach cleanup. By October 2018, Versova Beach was ________________ clean and Shah’s cleanups expanded to another beach as well as a stretch of the Mithi River and other regions of India.

“This world talks too much. I think we must talk ________________ and do action more, ” he said when interviewed by CNN in October 2019.“We are a smart species. Well adapt. We’ll learn. And with these youngsters rising up, I see ________________.”

8 . As people are becoming more socially conscious about where their food comes from and how it impacts the planet, they are choosing animal-free plant-based options. Cow-free meat has been around for quite some time and the popularity of brands like Beyond Meat and cultivated meat from Aleph Farms and others are soaring. While there are a large number of plant-based milk substitutes, none of them have the same taste of cow’s milk. Now, an Israeli food-tech startup Remilk created real dairy products without harming a single cow or the planet.

The company stresses that their product Remilk is not a milk substitute but rather is the real deal. Made from a special process called microbial fermentation (微生物发酵), milk is manufactured in a lab instead of in a cow. And the end product is very healthy. “In a very simple way, we take the gene that encodes for the milk protein,” said Aviv Wolff, CEO of Remilk.”The gene functions as an instruction book for the production of the protein it encodes. And so, we insert the gene into a microbe that we’ve developed and it instructs our microbe to produce the specific protein in a very efficient way.”

The company says that the lab-produced milk tastes identical to the real thing and they hope to eventually replace cows by creating every dairy product sold. They expect to roll out plant-based cheese and yogurt in addition to milk. “Remilk was founded with the mission to stop using animals to produce our food because, as dairy lovers, we realize that giving up on milk is not an option,” Wolff said. “But today’s milk comes with an unreasonable price tag. The dairy industry is destructive to our planet, our health, and our animals, and is simply not sustainable anymore.”

The environmental price tag of dairy farming is way too high. According to the World Wildlife Fund, dairy cows add a huge amount of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere and contribute to global warming and climate change as well as foul the air around them. Dairy operations consume large amounts of water and run-off of manure (粪肥) and fertilizers from these farms get into local waterways. The production of Remilk uses only 5 percent of the resources and produces only 1 percent of the waste of producing cow’s milk according to the company. And they accomplish this by being 100 percent cruelty-free unlike dairy farms.