3 . Despite their endless social activities, closely packed urban environments often come with the hidden phenomenon of increased loneliness. According to Dr. Vivek Murthy, United States Surgeon General, the global “loneliness epidemic” is an overlooked consequence of urban living that carries serious risks, associated with heart disease, depression, anxiety, and dementia.

While there are many ways to overcome loneliness, such as redesigning urban architecture to help facilitate social interactions or making it easier for people to own pets, a new study also recommends adding nature into the mix.

The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, follows a review of assessments provided by more than 750 U. K. residents who volunteered to use a custom-built smartphone app for two weeks. The participants were questioned randomly three times a day using a technique called an “ecological momentary assessment”. In addition to questions about overcrowding and social inclusion (融入), the volunteers were asked about their natural surroundings, such as “Can you see trees, plants and water right now?” Feelings of “momentary loneliness” were then ranked on a five-point scale.

According to the more than 16, 600 assessments received, overcrowded environments increased feelings of loneliness by a shocking 38%, regardless of age, gender, education level, or occupation. When people were able to interact with green spaces or hear birds or see the sky, however, loneliness dropped by 28%. Social inclusivity, defined by the research team as feeling welcomed by a group or sharing similar values, also dropped loneliness by 21%.

These findings appear to correlate with previous research into the mental benefits of walking through natural areas. Johanna Gibbons, leader of the research team, further indicates that high-quality green and blue spaces such as parks and rivers in dense urban areas, which are often viewed as a key weapon in the fight against climate change, can also be critical to improving our own well-being and reducing feelings of isolation. She said, “I believe deep in our souls, there are really deep connections with natural forces.”

5 . Recently, campaigners have encouraged us to buy local food, trying to persuade people to reduce “food miles”, that is, the distance food travels from the producer to the retailer. They reason that the higher the food miles, the more carbon emissions. Buying local food, therefore, has a lower carbon footprint and is more environmentally friendly.

However, the real story is not as simple as that. If our aim is to reduce carbon emissions, we must look at the whole farming process, not just transportation. According to a 2008 study, only 11% of carbon emissions in the food production process resulted from transportation, and only 4% originated from the final delivery of the product from the producer to the retailer. Other processes, including fertilization, storage, heating and irrigation, contributed much more.

In fact, imported food often has a lower carbon footprint than locally grown food. Take apples, for example. In autumn, when apples are harvested, the best option for a British resident is to buy British apples. However, the apples we buy in winter or spring have been kept refrigerated for months, and this uses up a lot of energy. In spring, therefore, it is more energy-efficient to import them from New Zealand, where they are in season. Heating also uses a lot of energy, which is why growing tomatoes in heated greenhouses in the UK is less environmentally friendly than importing them from Spain, where the crop grows well in the local climate.

Recently, some supermarkets have been trying to raise awareness of food miles by labelling foods with stickers that show they have been imported by air. But ultimately, the message this gives is too simple. Lots of different factors contribute to a food’s carbon footprint besides the distance it has travelled. And even if we only buy local food which is currently in season, there are ethical-related things. What’s more, our diets would be more limited.

8 . It’s peak cold and flu season, which means taking a lot of preventative measures. Frequent hand-washing is a must, as is avoiding co-workers or friends who are sick. But we humans are not the only animals that change behaviors to keep diseases at bay. So do ants.

“So there are the foragers (工蚁) and the nurses — it’s two different groups of work,” said Natha of the University of Lausanne. She and her colleagues observed ants to see their reaction to the presence of a disease.

“The nurses being made of young workers typically, stay inside the nest and take care of the eggs. And the foragers are all the workers spending most of time at outside of the nest to collect food and defend the territory.”

Forager ants are at greater risk of getting exposed to diseases because they leave the safety of the nest. So the researchers sprayed a common virus on a small group of forager ants and then followed their movements to see the way other ants reacted.

“We marked all ants in the colony with individual labels, which carries these two-dimensional bar code marks like QR code which is automatically detected and recorded using a tracking system.”

After the infection, the nurse and forager ants stayed within their working places and interacted less outside of their work group. The researchers also saw that forager ants spent more time outside of the nest. “They increase that amount by 15 percent, so by quite a large amount.”

Isolating behavior stops the spread of the virus. “Something that’s quite interesting in these ants that’s been shown by the study is that in their ability to avoid infecting other members of the community, ants may be more advanced than we are,” Natha said.

9 . My, what a big beak you have!

For humans, adapting to climate change will mostly be a matter of technology. More air conditioning, better-designed houses and bigger flood defenses may help to make the effects of a warmer world less harmful.     1     In a paper published in Trends & Evolution, a team led by Sara Ryding, a PhD candidate at Deakin University, shows that is already happening. Climate change is already altering the bodies of many animal species, giving them bigger beaks (喙), legs and ears.

In some species of Australian parrot, for instance, beak size has increased by between 4% and 10% since 1871. Another study, this time in North American dark-eyed juncos, another bird, found the same pattern.     2    

All that is perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory. “Allen’s rule”, named for Joel Asaph Allen, who suggested it in 1877, holds that warm-blooded animals in hot places tend to have larger body parts than those in temperate (温带的) regions.     3     Being richly filled with blood vessels, and not covered by feathers, beaks make an ideal place for birds to get rid of heat. Fennec foxes, meanwhile, which are native to the Sahara Desert, have strikingly large ears, especially compared with their Arctic cousins.

Ms. Ryding is not the first researcher to take that approach. But it is hard, when dealing with individual species, to prove that climate change was the cause of an anatomical (解剖学的) changes. All sorts of other factors, from changes in prey to the evolving reproductive preferences of males or females, might have been driving the changes.     4     The team combined data from different species in different places. Since they have little in common apart from living on a warming planet, climate change is the most reasonable explanation.

    5     That may change as warming accelerates. Since any evolutionary adaptation comes with trade-offs (妥协), it is unclear how far the process might go. Bigger beaks might make feeding harder, for instance. Larger wings are heavier, and bigger legs cost more energy to grow.