3 . Flight Shaming: # stayontheground

For the environmentally conscious, boarding a flight can be a source of mild stress or guilt, considering the large amounts of carbon footprint that comes with it.     1    

Flight shaming, or flygskam, is a movement that originated in Sweden in 2017. Back then, singer Staffan Lindberg declared his intention to give up flying to and from his concerts in favor of travel by train, bus, car, or boat.     2     Before long, a substantial portion of the general public had happily jumped on board. The following year, the hashtag # jagstannarpamarken — which translates as # stayontheground started gaining popularity on the Internet, and by 2019, annual air travel in Sweden had fallen by 5%.

Although “shame” has a relatively negative meaning associated with it, the overall outcome of the flight shaming movement has been undeniably positive. No longer restricted to Sweden alone, the trend has spread throughout Europe.     3     Besides, the movement is less about shaming other people out of flying than it is about changing one’s own travel habits for the benefits of the Earth.

An interesting side effect of the flight shaming movement is that those who observe it often rediscover the novelty of slow, purposeful travel. When traveling by land, one can take in the variety of sights, sounds, and smells along the way.     4     Without doubt, travelers willing to take on the challenge of flygskam have the opportunity to experience local culture in ways that passengers flying thousands of miles above could only dream of.

4 . Dogs have facial expressions to use on humans

Scientists have discovered that dogs produce more facial movement when a human is paying attention to them—including making their eyes appear bigger—than when they _________(ignore).

This new research goes _________ the belief that animal facial expressions are largely unconscious reflections of internal feelings—rather than a way to communicate.

“Facial expression is often seen as _______ driven by emotion, instead of something that animals can change _______(depend) on their circumstances,” said Bridget Waller, professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Portsmouth, and an author of the study.

The research joins a number of studies exploring the extraordinary relationship between humans and their dogs, including some research that suggests that dogs understand not only words spoken by humans—but also the tone of voice.

A study published _________ Scientific Reports describes the use of a video camera to record the facial movement of 24 dogs. In this experiment, humans _________ faced the animals, or faced away, and presented the dog with tasty food, or did not.

The recordings were then examined by the team frame by frame _______ (determine) changes in the facial muscles of the dogs. The results reveal that the dogs produced far more facial expressions when the humans were facing them,   _________ when they turned away.

“The research tells us that their facial expressions are probably responsive to humans—not just to other dogs,” said Waller. He also said that it told us something about how domestication had shaped dogs, and _______ it had changed them so that they __________ be more communicative with humans.

6 . On a recent sunny day, 13,000 chickens roam over Larry Brown’s 40 windswept acres in Shiner, Texas. Some rest in the shade of a parked car. Others drink water with the cows. This all seems random, but it’s by design, part of what the $6.1 billion U.S. egg industry bets will be its next big thing: climate-friendly eggs.

These eggs, which are making their debut now on shelves for as much as $8 a dozen, are still labeled organic and animal-friendly, but they’re also from birds that live on farms using regenerative agriculture — special techniques to cultivate rich soils that can trap greenhouse gases. Such eggs could be marketed as helping to fight climate change.

“I’m excited about our progress,” says Brown, who harvests eggs for Denver-based NestFresh Eggs and is adding more cover crops that draw worms and crickets for the chickens to eat. The birds’ waste then fertilizes fields. Such improvements “allow our hens to forage for high-quality natural feed that will be good for the land, the hens, and the eggs that we supply to our customers.”

The egg industry’s push is the first major test of whether animal products from regenerative farms can become the next premium offering. In barely more than a decade, organic eggs went from being dismissed as a niche product in natural foods stores to being sold at Walmart. More recently there were similar doubts about probiotics and plant-based meats, but both have exploded into major supermarket categories. If the sustainable-egg rollout is successful, it could open the floodgates for regenerative beef, broccoli, and beyond.

Regenerative products could be a hard sell, because the concept is tough to define quickly, says Julie Stanton, associate professor of agricultural economics at Pennsylvania State University Brandywine. Such farming also brings minimal, if any, improvement to the food products (though some producers say their eggs have more protein).

The industry is betting that the same consumers paying more for premium attributes such as free-range, non-GMO, and pasture-raised eggs will embrace sustainability. Surveys show that younger generations are more concerned about climate change, and some of the success of plant- based meat can be chalked up to shoppers wanting to signal their desire to protect the environment. Young adults “really care about the planet,” says John Brunnquell, president of Egg Innovations. “They are absolutely altering the food chain beyond what I think even they understand what they’re doing.”

8 . Almost all animals sleep, but do they dream? We certainly can't ask animals if they dream, but we can at least ________ the evidence that they might. There are two ways in which scientists have gone about this seemingly ________ task. One is to look at their physical behaviour during the various stages of the sleep cycle. The second is to see whether their sleeping brains work similarly to our own sleeping brains.

The story of how we ________ how to look into the minds of sleeping animals begins in the 1960s. Back then, reports began to appear in medical journals describing people acting out ________ in their dreams. This was curious, because during so-called REM sleep(rapid eye movement), our muscles are usually paralysed.

Researchers realised that causing a similar state in ________ could allow them to explore how they dream. In 1965, French scientists Michel Jouvet and J F Delorme found that removing a part of the brainstem, called the pons, from a cat's brain ________ it becoming paralysed when in REM. The researchers called the condition "REM without atonia" or REM-A. Instead of lying still, the cats walked around and behaved aggressively. This hinted they were dreaming of ________ from their waking hours.

________ movement is not the only way of looking into dreams, though. Researchers can now ________ look into the electrical and chemical activities of brain cells in animals while they sleep. In 2007, MIT scientists Kenway Louise and Matthew Wilson recorded the activity of neurons in a part of the rat brain called the hippocampus, a structure known to be involved in the formation and encoding of memories. They first recorded the activity of those brain cells while the rats ran in their mazes. Then they looked at the activity of the very same neurons while they slept. Louise and Wilson discovered similar patterns of firing during ________ and during REM. ________ , it was as if the rats were running the maze in their minds while they were sleeping. The results were so clear that the researchers could infer the rats' precise ________ within their mental dream mazes and map them to actual spots within the actual maze.

Does the behaviour of cats in science experiments actually ________ dreaming? Do rats have any subjective awareness that they' re running their mazes in their minds while they nap? We can say with a reasonable amount of ________ that the physiological and behavioural features of dreaming in humans have now been seen in cats, rats, and other animals. Yet what it's actually like to ________ a dream if you' re not human remains a mystery.

9 . Otters, are cute, this no one can deny. They have big eyes, short and flat noses and claws (爪子) like tiny hands. They look even cuter when they wear hats and throw food balls into their mouths as if they were bar snacks, like Takechiyo, a pet otter in Japan. Documenting Takechiyo’s funny behavior has earned his owner nearly 230,000 followers on Instagram, a photo-sharing app.

Takechiyo’s fame reflects a craze across east and South-East Asia for keeping the cute creatures as pets. Enthusiasts in Japan visit cafés where they pay to hug them; Indonesian owners parade their pets around on leads or go swimming with them, then share their pictures online. But these enjoyable photos mask a trade that is doing a lot of damage. Even before they became fashionable companions for humans, Asia’s wild otters faced plenty of threats. Their habitats are disappearing. They have long been hunted for their coats, or killed by farmers who wish to prevent them consuming fishes. The pet trade, which began picking up in the early 2000s but appeared to speed up a few years ago, has made things worse. The numbers of wild Asian small-clawed otters and smooth-coated otters, two species that are in highest demand, have declined by at least 30% in the three decades to 2019.

The international agreement that governs trade in wildlife, known as CITES, now prohibits cross-border trade in these species. But laws banning ownership are often poorly implemented, as in Thailand, or full of holes, as in Indonesia. And the otter-keeping craze has been dramatically improved by the internet, says Vincent Nijman of Oxford Brookes University. In 2017 TRAFFIC, a British charity that monitors the wildlife trade, spent nearly five months looking at Facebook and other social-media sites in five South-East Asian countries. During that time, it found around 1,000 otters advertised for sale online.

In any case, otters do not even make particularly good pets. Every year the Jakarta Animal Aid Network, a charity in Indonesia’s capital, receives some ten otters from people who have struggled to look after them. Faizul Duha, the founder of an Indonesian otter-owners’ group, admits that his two animals emit a “very specific” (read: fishy) smell. They bite humans and chew on furniture. Their scream can be heard blocks away. And their cages need cleaning every two-to-three hours. That is how often they empty their bowels (肠道).

Now, Mount Everest is actually an interesting comparison of a new approach     1    how we deal with garbage produced in the course of space exploration, as it’s often given the dubious hono r(耻辱) of being the world’s highest garbage dump. Decades after the first conquest of the world’s highest peak, tons of rubbish left behind by climbers     2     (start) to raise concern, and you may have read in the news that there’s expectation     3    Nepal will crack down on mountaineers with stricter enforcement of penalties and legal obligations. The goal, of course, is to persuade climbers to clean up after themselves, so maybe local not-for-profits will pay climbers who bring down extra waste, or expeditions might organize voluntary cleanup trips. And yet still many climbers feel that independent groups     4    police themselves. There’s no simple or easy answer, and even well-intentioned efforts at conservation often run into problems. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do     5    is in our power to protect the environments that we depend on, and like Everest, the remote location and inadequate infrastructure (基础设施)of the orbital environment make waste disposal a challenging problem. But we simply cannot reach new heights and create an even higher garbage dump,     6    out of this world.

The reality of space is that     7    a component on a satellite breaks down, there really are limited opportunities for repairs, and only at great cost. But what if we were smarter about     8    we designed satellites? What if all satellites, regardless of what country they were built in, had to be standardized in some way for recycling, servicing or active deorbiting (脱离轨道)? What if there actually were international laws that enforced end-of-life disposal of satellites instead of moving them out of the way as a temporary solution? Or maybe satellite manufacturers need     9    (charge) a deposit to even launch a satellite into orbit, and that deposit would not be returned     10    the satellite was disposed of properly. Or maybe a satellite needs to have technology on board to help accelerate deorbit.