1 . Most young people these days expect a reasonably diverse workplace - but those who take up the seafaring (航海的) career are still unlikely to find many female colleagues. It’s hard to find a line of work with a smaller percentage of women in it than seafaring- in the UK. Professional beer inspectors are one of the few workforces with a smaller percentage of females.

Nautilus professional and technical officer David Appleton said that British shipping clearly has a problem, with just 1% of engineer officers being women, and the intake of female employees failing to move beyond 5% in each of the last three years.

He said the industry needs to do more to get rid of misconceptions that can discourage women from going to sea or make companies unwilling to take them on.

“There are plenty of other jobs out there that have strict fitness requirements where women have to meet exactly the same standards as men - - and the majority of these have far more females than the merchant navy (商船队),”he pointed out. Some 7% of the London firefighters are women, he noted.

Many opinions on women’s instability in careers surely do not stand up, Mr Appleton added. Research into “career mapping” shows that about one- quarter of new women seafarers determine to remain at sea until retirement and more than one-third plan to come ashore within 15 years of starting out.

Mr Appleton said the industry needs to adopt measures if it is serious about recruiting (招夢) more women. “It means identifying and promoting role models and getting the good news stories out there.”

Captain Susan Thomson, who now serves ashore with BP Shipping, said, “I think we sometimes concentrate on the negative and only hear about women in shipping when it is bad. It would be naive (天真的) to think bad stories don’t exist, and the industry needs to be more inclusive.”

2 . Actor Justin Baldoni once remarked that “Girls are weak, and boys are strong”, a message that has unconsciously influenced millions of children, including himself. As a child, Justin desperately sought acceptance from others, causing him to pretend to be strong when he was weak and confident when he was insecure. But is this a healthy way to live?

Unfortunately, some people believe so. They propose to “prevent the feminization of male youths” and request that schools hire more physical education teachers to cultivate manliness in students. However, this idea has sparked a heated debate online, with many arguing that it reinforces gender stereotypes.

But what exactly is manliness, and why is it so controversial? At its core, “manliness” refers to qualities traditionally associated with men, such as strength, courage, and emotional control. However, these seemingly admirable qualities can be taken to unrealistic extremes. Boys are human and should not be blindly asked to control their emotions “like a man” as it can lead to long-term psychological damage.

As an educator with years of experience teaching in China, I believe that physical education is essential for students, not just for physical fitness but also to develop lifelong skills such as leadership and communication. However, focusing solely on manliness as a reason for doing so is misguided. It is unnecessary for all boys to build up their muscles, but it is crucial that they learn to be strong on the inside. Boys should be allowed to cry and show their vulnerability without fear of judgment.

Instead, schools ought to prioritize imparting essential life skills and values to students, rather than reinforcing outdated stereotypes. As the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV put it, “Education is not simply about cultivating men and women. It's more important to develop a willingness to take responsibility.” It is time to move beyond harmful gender norms and embrace a more open and diverse approach to education.

4 . Slowness has been a sweeping trend in sustainability. Slow food celebrates local produce and traditional cooking methods; slow fashion is made with a focus on people and the planet. You may have even heard of the slow city, a campaign to restore local cultures and turn cities back to their natural environments.

Slow design developed from the larger slow movement. Although the term was only recently introduced, the idea of thoughtful design looks back to a time when buildings and furniture were made with great craftsmanship (手艺) and by hand-before the mass-produced throwaway furniture took over. You can think of the term “slow” as a celebration of timelessness: both the timelessness of a piece and the timelessness of the relationship between that piece and its owner.

One example of slow design today is what’s been dubbed the brown furniture revival (复兴). Brown furniture refers to the heavy wooden furnishings that were popular in your grandparents’ day but suddenly fell out of style at the turn of the century. Brown furniture is often associated with dark woods, such as trees like mahogany, walnut, and teak, that take decades to reach maturity and true craftsmanship to transform into functional pieces.

Today’s furniture industry is dominated by the $13.1 billion-and-growing global ready-to-assemble(RTA) furniture market. RTA furniture is usually constructed from low-quality fiberboard, which lasts a small part of traditional furniture’s lifespan (寿命).The weight of furniture landfilled in 2018 was 9. 7 million tons, 4. 5 times what was landfilled in 1960.

In a less direct way, the idea of timelessness also lends itself to a lower environmental impact. Besides their demonstrated physical durability, slow materials and design are meant to outlive trends and never be thrown out simply because they’re out of style.

As second-hand shopping becomes more appealing to today’s young generation-because of its low environmental impact and affordability-the brown furniture of yesteryear is making a comeback.

5 . According to scientists, biscuits can give you cancer. But don’t worry, research shows that sunshine can cure cancer. Hang on. Ignore previous findings that suggest it might actually cause cancer. But whatever you do, don’t shave, because that’s been shown to increase the risk of cancer, along with other everyday household products like hairspray baby powder and sausages. It’s a wonder that any of us are still alive. According to scientists, the world we live in is a death trap.

So many of my patients come to me saying how worried they are about some health scare they’ve heard about in the news. Though the claims seem to be backed up by scientific evidence, even a rough look brings up contradictions and inconsistencies. It’s easy to blame the journalists for twisting science to chase headlines. But I’ve felt that is extremely unfair. The chilling fact is that these health stories come from scientists, not journalists. In fact, a study in the British Medical Journal found that many of the exaggerations that later made it into health reports originated from a press release, Over a third of the press releases, for example, made exaggerated claims of the impact of the research for humans when in fact the study was carried out on animals. A third also made exaggerated claims of causation when in fact the study found an association only. Particularly worrying was that many of the exaggerated claims appear to have been written or at least approved by scientists themselves.

But, you could argue, aren’t journalists to blame for not going back to the original papers and checking out the claims themselves?

The fact is that journalists, like the public at large, have tended to believe what the scientists have told us. Why would we ever assume they’d lie? The very nature of their job is the search for the correct answer. The problem though is that they have funding to worry about and these days, an article hitting the front page headline making bold claims about your research is as important for securing future funding as getting it into top medical journals is. It’s also worth mentioning that every research facility or university now has a press department to do the job.

I think that this is a good reason to make understanding and interpreting a scientific paper a fundamental part of science in school. That way we encourage more people to examine the claims themselves and, hopefully, improve the public’s understanding of basic scientific principles.

Now, recent research has shown that work can increase your risk of premature death so with this in mind, I'm signing off.

The impact of pandemic (流行病) on life expectancy (预期寿命), one of the most widely used standards to assess population health, was assessed by a study    1    (publish) in the Informational Journal Epidemiology. The study    2    (conduct) by the Oxford University's Leverhulme Centre for Demographic (人口的) Science.

The study revealed that women from 15 countries and men from 10 ended up    3    a lower life expectancy at birth in 2020 compared to 2015.     4    biggest drops in life expectancy, however, were witnessed in men instead of women in most countries. American men were the worst off, with 2.2 years shaved off their life expectancy at birth. Men in Lithuania faced the second    5    (large) impact on their life expectancy, with a cut of 1.7 years.

Reductions in life expectancy overall    6    (occur) in 27 of the 29 countries analyzed by the study. Only men and women in Denmark and Norway and women in Finland managed to    7    (successful) avoid drops in life expectancy, the study said. Non-pharmaceutical interventions and strong healthcare systems in these countries were cited as    8    (factor) that could help explain this.

All the countries    9    life expectancy dropped had taken an average of 5、6 years    10    (achieve). Just a one year increase in life expectancy. The pandemic wiped out of this progress, the study said.

9 . New emojis (表情符号) appear every year. The updates come from a California-based nonprofit called Unicode Consortium. Each year, the emoji committee releases new emojis that will update the existing keyboard.

Jennifer Duniel, chair of the committee, says that it’s not the organization coming up with these new characters. It’s the public.

The first emoji keyboard was created in Japan in the 1990s by mobile phone company designer Shigetaka Kurita. Kurita created emojis because the company offered email communications that were limited to 250 characters and an emoji is only one character each but can be used to say more. Emoji have become popular around the world— 92 percent of the online population uses them.

“They aren’t tied to any language. They aren’t tied to any region of the world.” she says.

Anyone is allowed to submit (提交) new emojis, and if they make a strong enough case, Unicode will accept them. “We do get suggestions in lots of different languages from around the world,” says Daniel.

An emoji idea has to meet certain criteria (标准). These criteria include its clear differences, whether it can be used with existing emojis and whether it can have multiple meanings. The popular face with “tears of joy” emoji, for example, is easy to identify, which makes it distinct. You can pair it with many other emojis to convey how you are feeling. Additionally, this emoji has adopted many meanings.

Kids today are very familiar with emojis and how to use them. And the keyboard has got more than 3,600 emoji characters. “They became more and more comfortable and confident using emojis, which means they’re more willing to take risks,” Daniel says of younger generations who grow up with the keyboard.