2 . On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted that 42% of Americans could be overweight by 2030. Our expanding bodies not only lead to a medical problem, but also endanger personal safety in some situations — in an airplane crash, for example, according to a recent article in The New York Times.

The New York Times’ Christine Negroni reports that engineers and scientists are questioning whether airplane seats are designed to protect overweight travelers. Government standards (标准) for airplane seat strength — first set more than 60 years ago — require that the seats be made for a passenger weighing 170 pounds. Today, the average American man weighs nearly 194 pounds and the average woman 165 pounds.

Negroni reports:

“If a heavier person completely fills a seat, the seat is not likely to behave as designed during a crash,” Robert Salzar, the leading scientist at the Center for Applied Biomechanics at the University of Virginia. “The energy that is built into the aircraft seat is likely to be overpowered and the passengers will not be   protected properly” .

“Nor would the injury be limited to that passenger only,” Dr. Salzar said. “If a seat or a seat belt fails,” he said, “those people who are seated nearby could not be safe from ‘the uncontrolled movements of the passenger’.”

Most complaints about airplane seats focus on their lack of comfort and high ticket price, and whether overweight passengers should be made to buy two seats. But The New York Times’ article brings up another reason to feel anxious about flying. Investigators got in touch with the airplane seat and seat belt makers, but they refused to talk about the problem. Experts agreed that crash testing should be done with over-weighted dummies (人体模型). Both airplane seats and seat belts should be tested, they said.

Fortunately, however, according to Nora Marshall, a senior adviser at the National Transportation Safety Board, the board’s investigators have never seen an accident involving a commercial plane in which the weight of a passenger was a problem.

4 . The Age of Information is bulging: if you tried to download all the data available today, you’d need more than 180 million years to do so. But you are wrong to assume that all information would stimulate a boost of innovation to match the output of data. Indeed, the last time we found ourselves in a period of significant innovation was over 120 years ago, called the Age of Insight.

Innovations, big or small, start with a new idea. Often, these ideas occur as a moment of insight — the result of a novel connection in our brains made between existing and new information. Studies show insights involve quiet signals deep in the brain. Anything that helps us notice quiet signals can increase the chance of insights. However, it’s becoming more challenging to find those signals today, every moment filled with an endless supply of content.

Besides, we also want to increase the quality of them to sort through big new ideas and find the really valuable ones that can be hard to measure. Launched in 2015, the Eureka Scale (尤里卡量表) allows us to assess the strength of our insight experiences on a five-point scale, namely, intense emotions, motivation, memory advantage, aftershocks, and following ideas. The Scale combines these five variables into a single value to define the importance of a new idea and has broad applications for measuring and improving individual and organizational performance. Even it can be used to measure the impact of different kinds of work environments and learning approaches on participants’ growth. The level-5 insight, involving the richest emotion, motivation, and lasting impact, holds the greatest significance.

In order for organizations to benefit from another age of insight, it’s not enough to try to access more data or increase the number of insights we generate. Instead, it’s about making space for the biggest ideas to emerge from all the information. Using the Scale as a way to measure how important ideas are will enable better decision-making toward practical and competitive outcomes. If we’re to enter a new age of insight, we must make timely and necessary changes to design our environments for the best insight possible to surface.

5 . How do oceans affect you? If you live far from the coast, you might think they don’t. But life on this planet depends on the ocean. It covers almost three-quarters of the planet and holds 97% of Earth’s water. The phytoplankton (浮游植物) that live on the oceans’ surface produce half of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Oceans are a vital source of food and other resources and an economic engine for many communities.

For all the ocean provides us, we haven’t always been so responsible in our stewardship (管理). “The ocean was considered as a dumping ground for so long,” says Caitlyn Toropova of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). “There was a sense that there was no way we could harm it because it is so vast.”

But human activities are having a negative impact on many of the world’s oceans, jeopardizing marine life, habitats, and ecosystems. These threats include overfishing or destructive fishing, coastal development, pollution and water runoff, and the introduction of non-native species. Climate change is also having a big effect by causing warming seas and ocean acidification.

Realizing that something needs to be done to stem or reverse the damage has led to the creation of marine protected areas (MPAs). There are approximately 5,000 designated (指定) MPAs around the world but many more that are not officially recognized. That may sound like a lot, but less than 1% of the world’s oceans is protected. “Countries around the world have committed to protecting 10%. But even though there’s been an increase in the past ten years, at the current rate, it would take 100 years to reach that goal,” Toropova says.

6 . Are you frequently overwhelmed by the feeling that life is leaving you behind, particularly when you look through social media sites and see all the exciting things your friends are up to? If so, you are not alone.

FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, refers to the perception that other people’s lives are superior to our own, whether this concerns socializing, accomplishing professional goals or generally having a more deeply fulfilling life. It shows itself as a deep sense of envy, and constant exposure to it can have a weakening effect on our self-respect. The feeling that we are always being left out of fundamentally important events, or that our lives are not living up to the image pictured by others, can have long-term damaging psychological consequences.

While feelings of envy and inadequacy seem to be naturally human, social media seems to have added fuel to the fire in several ways. The reason why social media has such a triggering effect is tied to the appeal of social media in the first place: these are platforms which allow us to share only the most glowing presentations of our accomplishments, while leaving out the boring aspects of life. While this kind of misrepresentation could be characterized as dishonest, it is what the polished atmosphere of social media seems to demand.

So how do we avoid falling into the trap of our own insecurities? Firstly, consider your own social media posts. Have you ever chosen photos or quotes which lead others to the rosiest conclusions about your life? Well, so have others and what they’ve left hidden is the fact that loneliness and boredom are unavoidably a part of everyone’s day-to-day life, and you are not the only one feeling left out. Secondly, learn to appreciate the positives. You may not be a regular at exciting parties or a climber of dizzying peaks, but you have your health, a place to live, and real friends who appreciate your presence in their lives. Last of all, learn to shake things off. We are all bombarded daily with images of other people’s perfection, but really, what does it matter? They are probably no more real than the most ridiculous reality TV shows.

10 . One by one, prejudices are disappearing in the West. People may harbor private suspicions that other people’s race or sex makes them inferior—but to say so openly is totally taboo. One old prejudice remains respectable, though. Just ask a childless person.

They are not charged to special taxes, as they were in Soviet Russia; nor are they driven from their homes, as they still are in some poor countries. The childless nonetheless come in for a lot of criticism. Some point out that non-parents are failing to produce the future workers who will pay for their pensions. Childless politicians are charged with not having a proper stake in society. “He talks to us about the future, but he doesn’t have children!” complained Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founder of the National Front party, of Emmanuel Macron, who went on to win the French presidency. Similar attacks on Theresa May and Angela Merkel also failed but researchers find that many voters quietly agree.

The charges against the childless should be thrown out, along with other social prejudice. In many rich countries, between 15% and 20% of women, and a slightly higher proportion of men, will not have children. The share is rising. Some have medical problems; others do not meet the right person in time; still others decide they do not want them. Whatever the cause, the attacks on the childless are baseless.

If non-breeders are selfish, they have a strange way of showing it. They are more likely to set up charitable foundations than people with children, and much more likely to donate money to good causes. According to one American estimate, the mere fact of not having children raises the amount a person leaves to charity by a little over $10,000. The childless are thus a small but useful counterweight to the world’s parents, who stop social immobility by passing on their social and economic advantages to their children.

The fact that so many senior politicians lack offspring ought to put to rest the idea that they do not care for society. Five of the G7 countries are led by childless men and women. Mr. Macron, Mrs. May, Mrs. Merkel, Shinzo Abe and Paolo Gentiloni have their faults, but they are not notably less able than Justin Trudeau (who has three children) let alone Donald Trump (who has five). Their opportunities for nepotism are limited. And they spare their countries dynastic politics.

The charge that childless people fail to pull their weight in population is correct, but is less serious than it appears. Those who do not have children do put pressure on public pension systems. Governments have to do unpopular things like making pensions less generous, as Japan has done, or accepting more immigrants, as some Western countries have done. But to sustain public pensions in the long term, countries do not actually need more parents. What they need instead is more babies. It is possible to combine a high rate of childlessness with a high birth rate, provided people who become parents have more than one or two children. That was the pattern in many Western countries a century ago. Ireland, yet another country with a childless leader, still manages it today.

The childless also do everyone else a favour by creating wonderful works of art. British novelists have been especially likely to have no offspring: think of Hilary Mantel, P.G Wodehouse and the Bronte sisters. In September last year Britain put Jane Austen on its ten-pound note. That decision was controversial, though it was hard to see why. Few people have written as shrewdly about money or about families even though Austen did not marry, and had no children.