2 . Do you see a bird right now? Can you hear one singing? If so, you might be getting a mental health boost. A recent study found that being in the presence of birds made people feel more positive.

Andrea Mechelli, a psychologist at King’s College London and one of the paper’s authors, admitted himself studying the natural world by accident. “I don’t have a particular agenda focused on nature myself. I wasn’t thinking we were going to demonstrate nature has a strong effect,” says Mechelli. Instead, he was searching for answers to why people who live in cities seem to be more likely to suffer from mental illness, particularly psychosis(精神病).

In 2015, he created the smartphone app Urban Mind to search for patterns in users’ environments. How crowded was their city? Did they feel safe in their neighborhood? Could they see trees? “Our first finding was that nature has a very powerful effect,” says Mechelli. He and his colleagues then wondered if some aspects of nature were more beneficial than others.

Their latest study included 1,292 participants, mainly in the United Kingdom and Europe, some of whom revealed a professional mental health diagnosis such as depression. For two weeks, study participants using Urban Mind were reminded to fill out a questionnaire three times a day. They were asked questions about their surrounding environment and their mental state. The data were recorded at the same time.

With the data collected, Mechelli performed a statistical analysis that found an obvious improvement in well-being when birds were present, even when removing other factors like the presence of trees or waterways. The mental health benefit was true both for people with diagnosed depression and those without any diagnosed mental health conditions.

Nature, Mechelli notes, isn’t a cure all. The presence of trees and birds, for example, didn’t result in a better sense of well-being if participants also noted their neighborhood felt unsafe.

3 . We humans have an outsize influence on this planet, and our winged, finned, and four-legged neighbors are in their tough time. Many animals have died out in response to the pressures, but some survivors are adapting. Some animals are showing off never-before-seen behaviors, shifting their diets, and even evolving different shapes, sizes, and colors.

The shifts can’t be avoided and are likely permanent: There’s no going back to when wildlife was still completely wild. “There’s no place anywhere on the planet in its original condition. There are micro plastics at the bottom of the ocean, and Antarctica is melting. The world has changed because we’re in it,” says Tag Engstrom, a biologist at California State University.

African elephants in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park are some daring members of the animal kingdom, who have found a will and a way to change right along with it.

Normally elephants use their 6-foot-long tusks to dig wells in search of water, lift objects, rip bark off trees, and even battle lions. In other words, the ivory appendages (附属品) are not just impressive to look at — they are highly useful tools. So it might seem strange that a significant number of African elephants in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, once an illegal hunting wildlife area, are now being born without tusks.

According to a 2021 DNA analysis published in the journal Science, that the elephants are born without tusks is no coincidence. After decades of being shot by ivory brokers, the leading elephants in some herds have passed down a trait that prevents the females’ prize possessions from growing in — and helps them avoid being hunted. No one knows yet how widespread these genes might be in the greater population of African elephants, or how the loss of tusks might affect the mammals’ survival overall. But the findings are a powerful, if depressing, reminder of the extremes a species might endure to escape from extinction.

6 . Carley Coca is a dog lover. When she saw a post about three _______ dogs—Chance，Zeus，and Lily—living on the street，she knew she had to give _______.So she rushed to the scene immediately.

After Coca arrived，she _______ got Zeus and Lily to climb into her car. However，Chance _______ to follow. In fact，he didn’t _______ want to come near Coca or the car，Coca tried to _______ Chance little by little，but he just backed off and eventually _______.It broke her heart to see him go，but she could tell he was too scared to _______ a human. So，she brought Zeus and Lily to safety，and promised Chance she would _______.

The next day，Coca came back. Just like their first encounter(相遇)，Chance wanted ________ to do with her. She had ________ this，so she came prepared with some burgers for him，hoping to gain his trust.________ Chance gladly ate the burgers，he still showed ________ and didn’t come near Coca. So，Coca came with food every day.

When Coca arrived on the 6th day，something ________ happened. She found Chance waiting for her. Usually，he would ________ himself when she came. Coca knew she was making ________.On the 8th day，Chance licked(舔) her hand—he was not as ________ as he used to be！Finally Chance let Coca ________ him. She picked him up and brought him into her car.

Chance will stay at Coca’s home for 3 months. Then Chance will be up for ________ and Coca will help him find his forever family. She hopes that ________，his time with her will help him feel more comfortable around people.

8 . Slat's life began to change after a holiday trip to Greece with his family when he was 16. What he actually saw in the ocean was an awful lot or plastic waste. From that moment on, Slat dived into a project to find a solution to this alarming problem. Struck by the idea of a floating barrier that could collect plastic, he founded his company, The Ocean Cleanup, at the age of 18. Although the idea was named one of the best inventions of 2015 by TIME magazine, he received negative feedback from the specialists in environmental issues.

Slat was not discouraged and saw his mission as a race against time. It is estimated that up to 14 million tons of plastic enter the oceans from land every year. Plastic gradually breaks down into very small pieces called microplastics, which can eventually enter the food chain.

After five and a half years' hard work, the Dutch inventor launched the world's first ocean plastic cleanup system: System 001. The U-shaped pipe, about 609 meters in length, snakes its way out under the Golden Gate Bridge into the Pacific. These floating barriers will capture plastic waste as the ocean currents flow past. Ships will collect the waste and bring it to land for recycling every few months. According to Slat, if all goes to plan, an array of 60 systems could reduce the amount of plastic there by as much as 50 percent by 2025.

However, there remains a problem: What will happen to the plastic brought back to shore from Slat's systems? It's likely that lots of the waste will eventually be recycled into more single-use plastics that end up back in the oceans. That doesn't mean Slat will give up.

9 . Stephen Warren, study leader at the University of Washington, has been on the case of the green icebergs for more than 30 years. He first took samples from one of these green hunks of ice in 1988, near the Amery Ice Shelf, East Antarctic. Most glacial ice occurs in shades of white to brilliant blue. The bluer the ice, the older it is. Typically, compression (压缩)from accumulating layers of snow pushes air bubbles out of the ice, reducing the scattering of white light. The compressed ice absorbs most of the light except for blue, creating the blue color seen in the hearts of icebergs and glaciers.

The green ice was similarly bubble-free, and yet it looked green instead of blue. Warren and his team soon found that the green ice came not from glaciers, but from marine ice. That's the ice from the undersides of floating ice shelves.

At first, the team thought that organic material in the marine ice was causing the green color. But further research showed that the green marine ice didn't have a higher — than — usual amount of organic impurities. Now, a new study finds that a different sort of impurity may be the root cause of the green ice. Warren and his colleagues report that the marine ice at the bottom of the Amery Ice Shelf has 500 times more iron than the glacial ice above.

This iron comes from the rocks under the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which are turned into fine powder as glaciers move over them. The icebound iron oxidizes (氧化)as it contacts seawater. The resulting iron oxide particles take on a green color when light scatters through them. When icebergs break off the larger ice shelf, they carry this iron-rich ice with them. It's like taking a package to the post office. The iceberg can deliver this iron into the ocean far away, and then melt and deliver it to other living things that can use it as a nutrient.

10 . When it comes to global warming, we know that the real problem is not just fossil fuels — it is the logic of endless growth that is built into our economic system. If we don't keep the global economy growing by at least 3% per year, it will get into crisis. That means we have to double the size of the economy every 20 years, just to stay afloat. It doesn't take much to realise that this need for fast growth makes little sense given the limits of our planet.

Rapid climate change is the most obvious symptom of this contradiction, but we're also seeing it in the form of deforestation (滥伐森林) and mass extinction, with species dying as a result of the loss of their habitats. It was unthinkable to say this even 10 years ago.

The question is what to do about it. How can we redesign the global economy to bring it in line with the principles of ecology? The most obvious answer is to stop using GDP to measure economic progress and replace it with a more thoughtful measure-one that accounts for the ecological and social impact of economic activity. Outstanding economists like Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz have been calling for such changes for years and it's time we listened.

But replacing GDP is only the first step. While it might help refocus economic policies on what really matters, it doesn't address the main driver of growth: debt. Debt is the reason that the economy has to grow in the first place. Because debt always comes with interest, it grows fast — so if a person, a business, or a country wants to pay down debt over the long term, they have to grow enough to at least match the growth of their debt. Without growth, debt piles up and eventually lead to an economic crisis.