2 . The topic “slash youth”,   referring to those refusing to be defined or bound by just one personal identity and choosing to undertake multiple careers, has fueled heated debate on social media. On Douban, a Chinese social networking platform, the topic has attracted about 11,000posts and has been viewed over 400 million times. China’s young people are keen to share their slash youth stories online, presenting themselves as multiple and sometimes distinct identities, such as a nurse and model, a teacher and stand-up comedian, and an engineer and musician.

Xing Eryang, a 31-year-old female resident in Beijing, founded the Douban topic in 2021.While staying diligent about her daytime work, she is developing her hobbies, including stand-up comedy and vlogging, into secondary careers during her spare time. And she is amazed to find her “slash life” philosophy followed by so many of her peers.

Weiheng, a 26-year-old woman in Guangzhou, and Tang Yuhan, a 27-year-old man in Xuancheng city, Anhui province, are both participants in the topic, with their stories earning thousands of likes so far. The two are both musicians in their spare time, even though they are thousands of miles apart and have different jobs in media and finance. Their passion for music has grown since college and they didn’t abandon their enthusiasm, even after entering the workplace.

Their reaction showed the gap between the young and former generations. “My parents used to say,   ‘music cannot earn you money’,   so the band thing was regarded as a waste of time. However,   we want to pursue whatever we love and are willing to pay for it.” says Weiheng.

“The ‘slash life’ mania(狂热)shows that, along with China’s economic development, our society is becoming more and more diversified and inclusive, and it welcomes everyone’s self-fulfillment,” says Shi Yanrong, an   associate researcher from Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences. “Young people no longer have to rely on work and money for their sense of self-worth. They tend to practice a carpe diem(活在当下)philosophy and create their own identities.”

3 . 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.

4 . Good Morning Britain (GMB) launches special “listening benches” in order to solve loneliness. EastEnders star Maisie Smith joined Susanna and Martin in the studio to talk about her involvement in a special part of the 1 Million Minutes campaign — GMB’s special “listening benches” across the country.

Six special “listening benches” have been designed by six celebrities, and can be found in six cities across the UK — and they’re in place to encourage people to strike up a conversation. Maisie joined the show to share why the campaign is important to her.

“I’m always very open about mental health,” Maisie explained. “It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, what you have — everyone is going through something and I just think the world would be a kinder place if everyone understood that.”

“I think especially growing up in the limelight (引人注目) as a teenager, you’re very judgemental of yourself when you do see comments of other people judging you. It can add to the stress of the things you re already going through. I think people do think I’m confident because I cover my nerves with a big smile and that’s what I’ve been doing in my whole life.”

Susanna asked Maisie if she had a technique for dealing with her nerves. “It depends on what it is,” said Maisie. “A lot of the time — and it’s going to sound really stupid — but I write a script. I write down all of the questions that I could be asked and try to come up with something so that my brain won’t go blank when I’m under pressure.

5 . Many people try to make society change for the better. The real challenge is how to get good solutions to scale up(按比例放大)for major change. New research suggests that social change may depend on the relationship between beneficial behaviors and policies.

The research, conducted by the University of Maine, University of Vermont and Université Laval in Quebec, Canada, attempted to understand how society can accomplish major, transformative social change, particularly the kind of social change necessary to solve the growing problem of climate change.

The researchers studied a behavior that benefits groups, but does not spread without pol- icy support, such as a costly measure to relieve the effects of climate change. They created a mathematical model, which simulates (模拟) a society where agents live in groups and adopt the beneficial behavior of peers. That behavior, given the right conditions, can spread like viral, but not if the institutional costs are too high.

“Large-scale social change is not just policy or behavior, but the emergence of a new self- reinforcing (自我强化)system that combines both. This allows us to ask new questions, such as “how would a new pattern of behavior and policy spread?’” says Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, lead author on the study.

The results showed that both behavioral change and policy change are required to achieve large-scale social change-and that they need to happen together. Though neither can get the job done on its own, policy change is especially critical. They found that sometimes the beneficial behavior can spread too far. In some cases, the spread of behavior beyond groups with supporting policy can reduce its perceived success and slow the spread of the policy, thereby limiting beneficial social change overall.

In future research, the team aims to apply these types of models to all sorts of beneficial social change, particularly the challenge of tackling climate change.

6 . How will this age be remembered? What material or innovation will most define the current era? According to a new exhibition at London’s Design Museum, the typical feature isn’t a game-changing material but rubbish.

Waste Age, the theme of the exhibition, is a wake-up call, not so much to the consumers but to the producer and most importantly the government. lt is not intended to be a criticism of buying that take away coffee on your way to the museum or forgetting your cotton bag, but an eye opening look at the people working on creative solutions. “We want to show how design is best placed to address rubbish issues,” says Justin McGuirk, the exhibition leader.

A striking item on display is created by Ibrahim Mahama, who has built a giant wall of old TV monitors that play videos where workers burn abandoned electrical cables (电缆) to harvest precious metal. Mahamahas asked them to cast the recycled metal in the form of surrounds, which surround the giant wall on display.The poisonous burning scenes in the videos are desperate, but the message is clear; waste is precious.

“In many ways ‘waste’ is a category error,” says McGuirk. It’s often perfectly good material that simply undervalued.” The exhibition attracts designers who are already working on what a future of above-ground mining might look like and exploring how objects and buildings can be taken apart and their parts reused. There is the work of the pioneering Belgian group Rotor, a team of architects who set up a company to carefully remove materials and components from buildings scheduled for the breaking hammer.

The final section of the exhibition moves beyond fixing and recycling to imagine a post-waste world where materials are grown rather than extracted (提炼), like sea stone “on display, a concrete-like material made from seashell pieces. But such biodegradable (可生物降解的) solutions come with a problem: how many times have you thrown a biodegradable container in the garbage can before realizing it is actually compost (混合肥料)? However, we can adjust behaviour and expectations to meet the promising new bio-future.

7 . Talking to your children about the misinformation they may find online is a great idea. Children don’t always have the judgment or critical thinking skills to test what they read or watch, but they’ll develop these abilities quickly if you help them figure out how to separate fact from fiction. We’re here to help you do just that!

Don’t wait for your kids to approach you with questions——instead, take a few minutes to sit down with them. Let them know that there’s a lot of content out there on the Internet, and not all o£ it is true. With everything going on in the world, remind your kids that they might be seeing a lot of confusing, false information going around on social media and other parts of the web.

It’s a good idea to turn news reports and TV shows into teachable moments. Look for small opportunities to start helpful conversations about misinformation with your kids. Take a TV show or newspaper article and transform it into a helpful, easy way to understand what misinformation is₉ and how to avoid it.

Misinformation can be really upsetting and stressful for your kids to think about. Let them know that you’re always available to listen and answer their questions if they’re feeling confused. Reassure your kids that there are no stupid questions, and that you’re always willing to explain something for them.

Teach your kids a few tricks to fact-check misinformation online. Remind your kids to be on the lookout for strange-looking website like those ending with co. Tell them to read through the headline. If it has a lot of mistakes, or if it’s written in all capital letters, there’s a good chance that it might be misinformation. Additionally, introduce your kids to official websites, which are quick and easy ways to fact-check information.