3 . Just when you thought you were taking care of your health by eating enough fruit and vegetables every day, new research has come out revealing that you might be swallowing microplastic particles (颗粒) along with all those vitamins, minerals, and fiber. A groundbreaking study published in the journal Environmental Research has found that fruits and vegetables absorb microplastic particles from the soil and move them through vegetal tissues, where they remain until eaten by hungry diners, thus getting transferred to human bodies.

The researchers, who are from the University of Catania in Italy, as well as Sousse and Monastir universities in Tunisia, analyzed a variety of common fruits and vegetables —carrots, lettuce, broccoli, potatoes, apples, and pears. These were chosen for the fact that they are frequently consumed, usually one per day, which allowed the researchers to better assess the dietary intakes of MPs (microplastic particles) and NPs (nano-plastics). The samples were purchased from different sources in the city of Catania, including a small fruit vendor and a supermarket.

The researchers found that apples, followed by pears, were the most polluted fruit samples, and carrots were the most polluted vegetable. In the study’s discussion section, the authors wrote, “We can assume that the fruits contain more MPs not only because of the very high vascularization (血管化) of the fruit pulp (果肉) but also due to the greater size and complexity of the root system and age of the tree (several years) compared to the vegetables (60-75 days for the carrot).”

This study is important because it's the first to detect microplastics in fruits and vegetables. They have been found in other sources before, such as sea salt, beer, water (bottled, in particular), shellfish, sugar, soil, and even air, but never inside fresh produce. It’s an alarming discovery that raises yet another red flag about microplastic pollution in the natural environment.

It’s an area that will likely see a lot more attention in coming years, with the study authors calling for further research into the question of microplastic and whether it harms the health of both plants and humans.

If you live in Shanghai, you might have to take a lesson in sorting garbage.     1     is now required that people should sort garbage into four categories —    2     (recycle), harmful, dry and wet waste. However, if people fail to sort their garbage properly, they can     3     (fine) up to 200 yuan.

More cities are introducing similar regulations,     4     (follow) the practice in Shanghai. However, garbage sorting is still a big problem in China. Only 30% of the     5     (participant) think they are adequately sorting their trash. It’s partly because many people lack their willingness to sort their own waste. “It’s     6     must to have a legal guarantee     7     (promote) garbage sorting,” said Liu Jianguo, a professor from Tsinghua University.

Aside from China, many other foreign countries     8     (introduce) garbage-sorting regulations in the past years. In Japan, waste sorting has become a basic survival skill. There is a     9     (fix) time for the disposal of each kind of garbage and littering can result     10     high fines and even jail time. Over 90% of the public believe that garbage sorting is important for the protection of the environment.

6 . Most environmental pollution on Earth comes from humans and their inventions, such as cars or plastic. Today, car emissions (排放物) are a major source of air pollution leading to climate change, and plastics fill our ocean, creating a significant health issue to marine (海洋的) animals.

And what about the electric light, thought to be one of the greatest human inventions of all time? Electric light can be a beautiful thing, guiding us home when the sun goes down, keeping us safe and making our homes bright. However, like carbon dioxide emissions and plastic, too much of a good thing has started to impact the environment. Light pollution, the inappropriate use of outdoor light, is affecting human health, wildlife behavior and our ability to observe stars.

Light pollution is a global issue. This became obvious when the World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness, a computer-generated map based on thousands of satellite photos, was published in 2016. Available online for viewing, the map shows how and where our globe is lit up at night. Vast areas of North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia are glowing (发光) with light, while only the most remote regions on Earth (Greenland, Central African Republic and Niue) are in total darkness. Some of the most light-polluted countries in the world are Singapore, Qatar, and Kuwait.

Sky glow is the brightening of the night sky, mostly over cities, due to the electric lights of cars, streetlamps, offices, factories, outdoor advertising, and buildings, turning night into day for people who work and play long after sunset.

People living in cities with high levels of sky glow have a hard time seeing more than a handful of stars at night. Astronomers are particularly concerned with sky glow pollution as it reduces their ability to view stars.

More than 80 percent of the world’s population, and 99 percent of Americans and Europeans, live under sky glow.

7 . If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal (夜间活动) species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequences — called light pollution — whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels — and light rhythms — to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.

In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze (霾) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night — dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth — is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.

Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.

Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage — the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way — the edge of our galaxy — arching overhead.