3 . In need of some encouragement? Students at West Side Union Grade School in California are providing just that in recorded messages on a free telephone hotline.

Peptoc is an art project created by teachers Asherah Weiss and Jessica Martin of this school. Peptoc is how Martin’s son, a first-grader at the school, spelled “pep talk”, which refers to a speech attempting to input enthusiasm and determination in a team.

The project consists of student-made motivational flyers (海报), and a hotline with pre-recorded pep talks and life advice from kids aged 5 — 12.

Dial 707-998-8410 and you will be greeted with the following message: “If you’re feeling mad, depressed or nervous, press one. If you need words of encouragement and life advice, press two. If you need a pep talk from kindergarteners, press three. If you need to hear kids laughing with delight, press four.”

Since its launch last month, the hotline has been receiving up to 9,000 calls per hour. Martin said she had signed up for the cheapest hotline provider she could find, thinking the kids would be excited to hear 100 people had called in a month. “And then two days later, we’re getting 500 an hour, and now we’re getting 9,000 an hour.”

Patients at Johns Hopkins Medical Center had been regularly calling the hotline. Rima Meechan, the school’s principal, heard from a woman with cancer who called during her treatment. Weiss said she had seen the school’s office manager in tears on the phone with the administrator of an elder care facility, where most patients are over 90 years old. The administrator was calling to thank all of the kids, because he played it for everyone who was part of that facility, and he said, “I haven’t heard laughter like that from them in years.”

Weiss and Martin said it’s more than just the messages. “Adults support children, but we don’t really celebrate how much they support us,” Martin said, “And to be able to be consoled by them gives us great hope that maybe we’re all going to be okay.”

4 . If you have a chance to talk with a historical figure, who would you like it to be? What would you like to know about the past or share from today? China in the Classics, a new TV show based on Chinese classics started by China Central Television (CCTV) in February, is exploring such possibilities.

In the first episode, the host of the show, Sa Beining, meets ancient Confucian scholar Fu Sheng, who interpreted Shangshu — The Book of Documents. Regarded as one of the five classics of ancient Chinese Confucianism masterpieces, the book records many firsts in the country. Even the expression zhongguo (China) is used there first.

The episode ends with the host bringing Fu to today’s modern society, where the scholar is happy to find children learning the same things he had learned in his childhood. It increased the rating of the series with viewers giving it 9 out of 10 on Douban, a film and TV show reviewing website popular among young people.

The success of China in the Classics doesn’t surprise Shen Haixiong, head of the China Media Group. Shen said in an article in the journal Qiushi, “We are happy to see the program is popular among the public, but we are prouder to find that innovative interpretation of Chinese classics is arousing young people’s interest in Chinese culture.”

Therefore, TV channels have been making bold attempts in recent years to attract today’s younger generations. The Nation’s Greatest Treasures, CCTV’s cultural show in 2017, showcased China’s history and culture through antiques in the top-class museums, and fired up the audience. The treasures include the 3,300-year-old Yinxu Ruins in Henan Province and the 1,300-year-old Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region.

CCTV should make a variety of programs showcasing classics and cultural traditions to appeal to the young generation’s aesthetics, said Zhou, a professor at the School of Arts and Communication, Beijing Normal University.

5 . A new delicious food is available in Wyoming. It is fresh and cheap — but probably a little gamey (味道强的). Last month it became legal for Wyomingites to collect roadkill that they accidentally hit themselves, or that they happened upon. In fact, other states, such as Montana, have also made the similar law.

Officials are not sure how many Wyomingites will take part in the roadkill-salvage (救助) programme. But Montana’s Fish and Wildlife Commission issues roughly 1,000 roadkill-salvage permits each year.

Although some may fear at the idea of dragging the body of a deer off the road and onto the dinner table, the law has several benefits. First, roadkill is a source of fresh meat for poor communities. State officials in Alaska distribute roadkill to charities. PETA, an animal-rights group, argues that eating roadkill is healthier and more moral than buying meat raised for killing. Second, allowing people to harvest roadkill themselves may cut down on the time the creatures spend on the road. In thinly populated states, it may take days for transport workers to collect a dead animal.

Lastly, roadkill-salvage programmes provide states with important data. Wyomingites must report the location of their find, showing officials where crashes with wildlife happen. Roadkill data may help the state figure out where to build highway overpasses or put up “wildlife crossing” warning signs.

Not everyone is licking (舔) their lips. Some are upset that people will end up eating gamey meat. “It’s really the burden of the person who chooses to collect roadkill if they eat it or not,” says Sara DiRienzo of Wyoming Game and Fish. Others worry the laws will encourage hunters to use the roadkill programme as cover for killing animals they should not.

6 . In 2000, famed evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould said, “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. We’ve built everything we call culture and civilization with the same body and brain.” Now, 22 years later, most evolutionary biologists beg to differ. Natural selection is still operating on humans, they say — and they have evidence to back up the claim.

Sarah Tishkoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, cites an example of natural selection still going on today. Some people have a genetic variant that protects them from malaria (疟疾),   which infects and kills millions of people every day. These people will be more likely to live and pass on that variant to their children.

Scientists have been able to discover many examples of ongoing natural selection thanks to a technology: the ability to sequence (测定序列) the human genome quickly and inexpensively. But not all the tools that uncover such evidence are so high tech. Church records that list births, marriages, and deaths offer a unique window into evolution on a population.

Scott Solomon, an evolutionary biologist at Rice University, dug into this type of data and found that natural selection favors an earlier start to reproduction — in other words, more time to have children. The more children, the more chances are for evolution.

There’s another important actor in this evolutionary play: culture. When people move from one population to another, they take their genes with them, and that changes the genes in both the populations they leave and the ones they join. “That is actually one of the most important systems for modern human evolution,” Scott says. “In the last couple of hundred years, and certainly in the last century, human populations have been mixing like never before.