1 . In much of the western United States, drought and access to fresh water is a critical issue. However, recently California came up with a novel solution. The state approved regulations that allow agencies to purify wastewater for drinking. This recycled wastewater may be consumed in homes, schools, and businesses.

As the population in California has exploded in recent decades, the state has struggled to meet demands for fresh water. Recycled wastewater will allow the state to increase access to the precious resource.

Recycled wastewater is not new to the state. It has previously been used in ice hockey rinks (冰球场), for crops, and to generate artificial snow. But now, water agencies will have the option to put recycled wastewater back into pipes for drinking. California is only the second state to allow purified wastewater to be consumed. The first was Colorado in 2022.

While the idea of drinking recycled wastewater may be off-putting, regulators spent more than a decade developing rules and regulations to ensure safety. Independent panels of scientists also reviewed the state’s rules around recycled wastewater consumption. All water will be treated for pathogens (病原体) and viruses before being available for consumption.

So far, the state’s plan has been met with approval from large water agencies. Many of them have plans to construct wastewater recycling plans over the next few years. In Southern California, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has set a goal aiming to produce 150 million gallons of direct and indirect recycled water per day. This water will be in the pipes of the 19 million people throughout the six counties that the agency serves.

Officials are aware that a certain amount of public convincing may still be necessary. However, they remain optimistic about the future of the project, reminding consumers that the water is safe, and that recycled water is already in use in California.

2 . Rising food prices have taken a big bite out of what Canadians are able to serve up for dinner but food economists say our ability to cope has been deteriorated by our common decline in cooking skills. “We are less able to cook than we were 30 or 40 years ago, and so it’s much more difficult for us to adapt our diet,” said Mike von Massow, an associate professor at the University of Guelph.

A 2010 federal government report called Improving Cooking and Food Preparation Skills, the most recent of its kind, said that all across the population, processed and pre-prepared foods have been permitted. “Related to this permission is the potential lack of transference of basic, traditional cooking and food preparation skills from parents to children and adolescents,” the report reads.

Moreover, the quality of pre-prepared foods in the market remains uneven, with problems related to the lack of detailed labelling on such products, as well as difficulties in logistics and distribution.

Annie Belov, a 21-year-old student, has taught herself a lot about cooking since food prices started shooting up. “When the inflation (通货膨胀) wasn’t as bad, I was constantly eating out,” said Belov. That might mean food on campus or picking up a prepared item at Safeway when the price was still around $5, she said.

Belov now often makes dishes such as Caesar salad, as well as hearty pasta salads that combine carbs with vegetables and a bit of chicken. Belov said she’s a lot more efficient in the kitchen thanks to building her skills through trial and error. “Now, definitely more than before, I can kind of look in the pantry or in the freezer and be like, ‘OK, yeah, I can make a meal quickly and easily.’”

It’s important to note, however, that cooking skills alone cannot solve the affordability problem, said Elaine Power. And in 2023, Food Banks Canada says food insecurity is rising with inflation and the high cost of living. So while cooking skills can better position people to feed themselves and their families as best they can in forced circumstances, “that doesn’t, and can’t, make up for income that is inadequate in the first place.”

3 . Smart phones provide a palm (手掌)-size window to the world, enabling us to do almost anything at the touch of a button. Smart homes look after themselves, and virtual meeting s mean that for many, time spent commuting is a thing of the past.

So we should have more free time. Time which is now spent sleeping, relaxing or simply doing nothing-right? We recently interviewed 300 people across Europe to understand how they used digital devices in day-to-day life. This research showed that people want to avoid empty periods of time in their lives, so they fill those periods performing tasks, some of which wouldn’t be possible without technology.

Whether it was waiting for a bus, waking in the morning, or lying in bed at night, our research reported that time which would previously be “empty” was now filled with brain training apps, creating lists of things they should do or try based on their social media feed, and other life admin.

On the face of it some of these tasks may seem like examples of tech saving us time. In theory, online banking should mean I have more time because I no longer need to go to the bank in my lunch break. However, our research suggests that this is not the case.

If the idea that you have more time than ever before is making you choke on your coffee, you are not alone. There is growing evidence that while digital technology may help us to save some time, we end up using that time to do more and more things. For many people, it is no longer enough to simply eat dinner, watch TV or maybe do an exercise class. Instead, in an attempt to avoid wasting time, these activities are performed while also browsing the web in search of the ingredients for a more perfect life and trying to develop a sense of achievement.

It seems that people still see going for a walk or actually being with friends as more valuable than being online. Maybe if we put down the phone a little more, we would have the time to actually cook those recipes we watch online.

5 . Flip-flops (人字拖) are the most popular type of shoe in the world. They’re comfortable, they’re easy to wear and they’re inexpensive. Unfortunately, most of them are also terrible for the environment. In Kenya, this is a huge problem, and around 90 tons of flip-flops wash up on its shores annually.

In the late 1990s, when Julie Church was working as a marine (海洋的) conservationist in Nairobi, she found an entire beach “just covered in flip-flops”. Around that time, Church also noticed children making toys out of the thousands of flip-flops that had made their way to the country’s beaches. She began working with the kids’ mothers to encourage them to not just collect the shoes, but also turn them into artworks. The families could then sell this art at local markets, providing another means of income.

The idea took off, and in 1998, Church founded Ocean Sole as a nonprofit. This year alone, the organization has upcycled more than 750,000 flip-flops and collected more than 47,000 kilos of waste. Additionally, Ocean Sole directly impacts more than 1,000 Kenyans, many of whom work as flip-flop collectors or artists, and contributes 10% to 15% of overall income to career and educational programs for residents, as well as beach cleanup and conservation efforts.

Ocean Sole is continuously growing and looking to keep waste off Kenya’s beaches and out of its water. When it comes to growing the Ocean Sole organization, Church has three “mantras (真言)”: trust to trade, trade to awareness, and awareness to protection. Church would like to put together toolkits and other resources to bring this concept to other places around the world that have similar problems. Ocean Sole is also encouraging companies to use more eco-friendly materials when making flip-flops. “I think it’s time for us to start looking for an alternative shoe, or an alternative material, to fit that kind of fashion need,” Church has said. “Our products need to develop.”

6 . The 2023 EF English Proficiency (水平) Index (EPI) that measures English language ability worldwide shows a worrying problem about English language proficiency. The index is based on test results from 2.2 million people in 113 countries.

Results were reported for the first time in 2015. Since then, the English proficiency of young people has decreased by 89 points. The EPI defines young people as being 18 to 20 years of age, and it notes that they are mostly stable with big decreases in a few large countries. India, Indonesia and Mexico showed the largest ability decreases among youth.

The report noted that the decrease appears to have taken place when the COVID-19 pandemic impacts normal education. There has been a decrease in Mexico for nearly 10 years. However, working adults, about 26 years old and older, have been improving their English since 2015. It is still widely acknowledged that the value of a shared language is most recognized in the workplace. English creates possibilities for individuals and productivity for organizations.

Results also show a difference between men and women, which is called a gender gap. Men’s English ability has improved by 14 points since 2015, while women’s has decreased by 19 points. The lack of women in international jobs is one reason for the gender gap. But the gender gap among those aged 18 to 25 might demonstrate a problem caused by educational systems themselves or a social problem schools are failing to address.

There are different opinions about why the decrease exists. Many people think artificial intelligence (or AI) tools could also be a key reason. Jeannie Tse is a country manager at EF Hong Kong and Macau. He thinks that while AI has changed the way young people work and learn, the importance of schools, teachers and face-to-face instruction remains. “I don’t believe that AI can completely replace language learning, but educators can use AI to enhance language learning methods,” said Jeannie Tse.

7 . Recently, I was walking with some parents when we came across a five-pound note lying on the ground. We stood around it for a moment, a bit awkwardly, until someone suggested putting it on a nearby bench. Then one of the parents remarked that we’d probably have behaved differently — that is, we would have just taken the money — had we been alone.

This relates to a classic question in studies of human generosity: do we behave more selfishly when we aren’t being observed? The debate goes on across the psychological and biological sciences, as well as in popular culture, about whether kindness can exist in a competitive world.

Yom Kippur is a Jewish (犹太人的) religious holiday when Jewish people fast and ask for forgiveness for the wrongs they’ve committed. One of the points of Yom Kippur is to behave better regardless of who is watching. There’s an evolutionary beauty to the teachings of Yom Kippur, which are the products of thousands of years of cultural changes and evolution.

The Maasai people of Kenya practice osotua: relationships between people that operate based on need. When someone forms an osotua relationship with another, they enter into an unwritten contract to help their partner in times of need. And hunter-gatherer groups, which can represent the circumstances our species evolved in, have many similar examples.

Cultural evolution helps to explain the existence and complexity of these systems. Cultural changes are far faster than biological evolution, allowing intelligent species like humans to develop behavioral adaptations for managing complex social environments. Osotua, or any other practice that helps to maintain good treatment of others in society, is the result of tens of thousands of years of cultural trial and error. The customs passed down over time are those that help us to develop as cultural groups.

The study of those changes has helped us to understand how we successfully spread around the world as cooperative groups. Biological evolution has helped humans be more cooperative, but cultural changes have accelerated this process.

Cultural evolution helps us to overcome our selfish natures. Try to understand rules before you ignore them — and next time you find a fiver on the ground, you might think about the awkward situation your discovery represents.

10 . In the days before the Internet, critical thinking is the most important skill that we could have. To think critically, we need to read carefully, consider the credibility (可信度) of sources, and reason out conclusions on our own. But in the digital age, according to Anastasia Kozyreva, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute of Human Development, a more important skill is “critical ignoring”.

“With so much information, we need to first sort the wheat from the chaff, deciding what’s worth our attention and time, and what’s not. Now, we live in an ‘attention economy’ in which we are no longer consumers. Rather, we’re the products whose attention is being sold on the advertising marketplace. That means each link we click on is a sale of our time and attention, often with little or no benefit to ourselves. To protect ourselves, we need to develop new ways of interacting with information,” she said.

Kozyreva advocates learning the skill of critical ignoring, in which readers intentionally control their information environment to reduce their exposure to false and trash information.

By developing our critical ignoring skills, she thinks we can enjoy the benefits of the Internet while avoiding falling victim to those who try to control our attention, our time, and our minds. Here are three of the strategies recommended by her to avoid the traps of attention economy.

The first strategy is self-control. Of course, we need to stay informed of world events and be in touch with others, so we can’t just ignore the Internet altogether. When we do go into social media, Kozyreva recommends setting time limits. Limiting ourselves in this way prevents us from losing track of time as we click on one attractive link after another.

The next strategy is in-depth reading. For example, headlines are often designed to attract attention, not provide information. The contents of the articles may be completely contrary to what the headlines show.