2 . Apps play tricks on you to turn an activity into a habit. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to encourage healthy behaviors such as exercising or playing word games.    1    . Here’s how to recognize when your tech habit might be an unwelcome obsession (着迷), and practical steps for you to take back control.

Do a cost-benefit analysis.    2    That’s why we need to try doubly hard to do self-assessments of how features such as streaks (打卡时间) or leaderboards are helping and hurting us. Think over whether the behavior they inspire in you contributes to or detracts from your welfare.

Build in “cheat days”. They are like days off from a strict diet.    3    It can also help to schedule days off from our habits—whether it’s running, reading the news or scrolling Instagram.

    4    Especially for young people, it can be helpful to plan in advance activities that might be a distraction. If your teen knows he’s allowed one hour on YouTube at 7 p.m., then he can relax without thinking about when he’ll be able to hop on his favorite app.

    5    Tech companies, schools, social institutions and governments all have a responsibility to help reset standards of technology use. For example, schools have experimented with locking up students’ phones so they can’t use them during the school day. And the government in some countries have restricted the time young people are allowed to spend playing video games or using social media apps.

4 . Science reporting on climate change does lead Americans to adopt more accurate beliefs and support government action on the issue, but these gains are fragile, a new study suggests. Researchers found that these accurate beliefs fade quickly when people are exposed to coverage skeptical of climate change.

“It is not the case that the American public does not respond to scientifically informed reporting when they are exposed to it,” said Thomas Wood, associate professor of political science at the Ohio State University. “But even truly accurate science reporting recedes from people’s frame of reference very quickly.”

Results showed that accurate science reporting didn’t persuade only politicians and people who initially rejected human-caused climate change also had their opinions shifted by reading accurate articles. The study involved 2,898 online participants who participated in four waves of the experiment during the fall of 2020.

In the first wave, they all read authentic articles in the popular media that provided information reflecting the seientifie views on climate change. In the second and third waves, they read either another scientific article, an opinion article that was skeptical of climate science, or an article on an unrelated subjeet. In the fourth wave, the participants simply were asked their beliefs about the science of climate change and their policy attitudes.

To rate participants’ scientific understanding. the researchers asked after each wave if they believed that climate change is happening and has a human cause. To measure their attitudes, researchers asked participants if they favored government action on climate change and if they favored renewable energy.

“What we found suggests that people need to hear the same accurate messages about climate change again and again. If they only hear it once, it recedes very quickly,” Wood said. It was significant that accurate reporting had positive effects on all groups, including those who originally rejected climate change. But it was even more encouraging that it affected attitudes.

5 . Throughout history, many species of animals have been threatened with extinction. When Europeans first arrived in North America, more than 60 million buffalo (水牛) lived on the continent. Yet hunting the buffalo was so popular during the 19th century that by 1900 the animal’s population had fallen to about 400 before the government stepped in to protect the species. In some countries today, the elephant faces a similar challenge, as illegal hunters kill the animals for the ivory in their tusks.

Yet not all animals with commercial value face this threat (威胁).The cow, for example, is a valuable source of food, but no one worries that the cow will soon be extinct. Why does the commercial value of ivory threaten the elephant. while the commercial value of beef protects the cow?

The reason is that elephants are a common resource, while cows are private goods. Elephants wander freely without any owners. The hunter has a strong motivation to kill as many elephants as he can find. Because illegal hunters are numerous, each has only a slight motivation to preserve the elephant population. By contrast, cattle live on farms that are privately owned. Each farmer makes great effort to maintain the cattle population on his farm because he harvests the benefit of these efforts.

Governments have tried to solve the elephant’s problem in two ways. Some countries, such as Kenya and Uganda, have made it illegal to kill elephants and sell their ivory. Yet these laws have been hard to put into effect, and elephant populations have continued to dwindle. By contrast, other countries, such as Malawi and Namibia, have made elephants private goods and allowed people to kill elephants, but only those on their own property.

With private ownership and the profit motive now on its side, the African elephant might someday be as safe from extinction as the cow. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out the problem with common resources: “What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.”

7 . When it comes to my fathering lessons, few adventures compare to the motorcycle trips I’ve shared with my daughter, Ewa.

Our first_______, in August 2017, was a winding (蜿蜒的) ride around the Catskills and Finger Lake districts of New York state. We _______ big highways and spent the week on_______ scenic back roads. At one point, I found myself _______along a Catskills meadow (草地) not far from Woodstock, keeping pace with a deer and shouting, “Go Bambi, go!”

On our second day, we _______ in a small town for ice cream. I asked the woman at the picnic table next to us: “What’s the_______ of this town?” “Interlaken,” she answered.“Where are you trying to get to?”

Me: “We don’t know. ”

It _______ to me then that I’d always wanted to do this no-schedule kind of trip, when you ride just for riding. Ask any middle-aged _______: We’ve all dreamed about doing the Easy Rider (逍遥骑士) thing, throwing our wristwatches into the ditch and heading toward the horizon without a_______. Now, travelling with no plan became a________ of my rides with Ewa.

Since we almost ________ knew where we were going, we were almost never ________ when we arrived, pulling ________ the road at the end of each day with satisfaction. The reason to celebrate? We________! The truth is that life on a motorbike is one close call (死里逃生) after another. On the way, riders must stay ________ 100 percent of the time. A tiny stone can be deadly. I used to be nervous, but Ewa had a different take: “To me, motorcycling is like meditation(冥想). ”

10 . Discoveries at the famous Sanxingdui ruins in Southwest China show that the region’s ancient Shu Kingdom Civilization shared similarities with the Maya.

The Sanxingdui ruins belonged to the Shu Kingdom that existed at least 4,800 years ago and lasted more than 2,000 years, while the Mayan civilization built its city-states around 200 AD.

The bronze-made remains of tress unearthed at the ruins of the Shu Kingdom resemble the sacred ceiba tree, which symbolized the union of heaven, earth and the underworld in the Mayan civilization. “They are very important similarities,” says Santos, a Mexican archaeologist (考古学家) stressing that “the representations of tress in both cultures provide a symbolism that is very similar”.

The findings at the Sanxingdui ruins, considered one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, also show a new aspect of Bronze Age culture, indicating the ancient civilization already had technologies that were thought to have been developed much later.

While the lime span between the Shu kingdom and the Mayan culture is great, the findings highlight the closeness between the two civilizations. They developed in areas with comparable climates and reflected their worldview through related symbols. “In the end, man is still man, independent of time and space. What we have is that, at this latitude (纬度), both the Shu people and the Mayans looked at the same sky and had the same stars on the horizon,” the expert says.

One notable feature of the recent discoveries at Sanxingdui was the cross-subject work and technology applied by teams of Chinese archaeologists, which allowed the unearthing of artifacts as fragile as silk remains, which other types of less careful digging methods would not have been able to register.

Cooperation between Chinese and Mexican archaeologists could benefit projects in the Mayan world, where the rainy climate and humidity are problematic for the conservation of ruins.

“Every time our cultural knowledge increases, regardless of whether we speak one language or another, what it shows us is that we continue to be sister cultures and, therefore, the exchange of such knowledge is fundamental,” says Santos.