1 . If there’s one cliché (陈词滥调) that really annoys Danah Boyd, a specialist researcher who has made a career from studying the way teenagers use the web, it’s that of the digital native. “Today the world has computer-mediated communications. Thus, in order to learn about their social world around them, teenagers are learning about those things too. And they’re using that to work out the stuff that kids have always worked out: peer (同龄人) sociality, status, etc.” she says.

It’s no surprise Boyd takes exception, really. As one of the first digital anthropologists to dig into the way teenagers use social networking sites, she gained insights into the social web by taking a closer look at what was going on.

Lately, her work has been about explaining new ways of interpreting the behavior we see online. She outlined some examples at a recent conference in San Francisco, including the case of a young man from one of the poorest districts of Los Angeles who was applying for a top American college. The applicant said he wanted to escape the influence of violence, but the admissions officer was shocked when he discovered that the boy’s MySpace page was covered with precisely the violent language he claimed to hate. “Why was he lying about his motivations?” asked the university. “He wasn’t,” said Boyd. “In his world, showing the right images online was a key part of surviving daily life.”

Understanding what’s happening online is especially important, for today’s teenagers have a vastly different approach to privacy from their parents. She says, “Adults think of the home as a very private space. That’s often not the case for teenagers because they have little or no control over who has access to it, or under what conditions. As a result, the online world can feel more private because it feels like there’s more control.”

The concept of control is central to Boyd’s work, and it applies to pointing out the true facts about teenage behavior. Boyd suggests control remains in the same places as it always did.

“Technologists all go for the idea of techno-utopia (乌托邦), the web as great democratizer (民主化)”, she says. “But we’re not actually democratizing the whole system; we’re just shifting the way in which we discriminate.”

It’s a call to arms that most academic researchers would tend to sidestep, but then Boyd admits to treading a fine line between academics and activists. “The questions I continue to want to ask are the things that are challenging to me；having to sit down and be forced to think about uncomfortable social stuff, and it’s really hard to get my head around it, which means it’s exactly what I should dive in and deal with, ” she says.

2 . When you were at school, the last thing you probably wanted to do was to spend your weekends going to work. There was homework to do, sports to play and fun to have. But our parents probably persuaded us to find a job to earn some money and get some life experience. When I was a teenager I delivered newspapers to people’s homes. I then progressed to a Saturday job in a supermarket: stacking shelves and working at the checkout.

Today in the UK you are allowed to work from the age of 13, and many children do take up part-time jobs. It’s one of those things that are seen almost as a rite of passage(成人仪式). It’s a taste of independence and sometimes a useful thing to put on your CV(简历). Teenagers agree that it teaches valuable lessons about working with adults and also about managing their money.

Some research has shown that not taking up a Saturday or holiday job could be deleterious to a person later on. A 2015 study by the UK Commission on Employment and Skills found that not participating in part-time work at school age had been blamed by employer’s organizations for young adults being ill-prepared for full-time employment, but despite this, recent statistics have shown that the number of schoolchildren in the UK with a part-time job has fallen by a fifth in the past five years.

So, does this mean that British teenagers are now afraid of hard work? Probably not. Some experts feel that young people feel going out to work will affect their performance at school, and they are under more pressure now to study hard and get good exam results and a good job in the long term. However, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, told BBC News that “Properly regulated part-time work is a good way of helping young people learn skills that they will need in their working lives.” In reality, it’s all about getting the right balance between doing part-time work and having enough time to study and rest.

4 . Do you ever pull your phone out of your pocket, thinking it is vibrating (振动), only to find that it isn’t?

This phenomenon, which scientists call “phantom ( 幻 觉 的 ) phone vibration”, is very common. Around 80% of people surveyed say they have imagined their phones vibrating when they were actually still.

So, what leads to this universal behavior? According to the BBC, the explanation lies in your brain's ability to discover signals from the outside world.

When your phone is in your pocket, there are two possible states: It is either vibrating or not. Meanwhile, you also have two possible states of mind: the judgment that the phone is vibrating, or that it isn't. Ideally, you match the four states correctly. However, sometimes your braindecides that the consequences of missing a call are more serious than a "false alarm". Therefore, you become more sensitive to vibrations so that you don't miss anything.

This is just like the fire alarm in your home—it can be annoying when it goes off in response to just a tiny bit of smoke. But that's a small price to pay compared to a fire really breaking out because the alarm fails to alert( 警 醒 ) you. Now, you might still ask: why can't our brains just make every judgment correctly without being too sensitive to false signals? The answer is that your brain bears a heavy burden every day. "You get a large amount of sensory information that's coining from your eyes, ears and skin, and you can't deal with all that information all the time, " Michael Rothberg, a researcher at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, US, told Live Science.

For example, the rustling（沙沙声）of clothing or the growling (咕咕声) of your stomach may both lead your brain to believe that they come from the vibration of your phone——it is like trying to hear your name being called in a noisy room.

So, perhaps you should just check your phone whenever you think it's vibrating. It isn't too much trouble to do that, is it?

That's all. Thank you for listening.

6 . How many more people can we squeeze onto our fragile planet?   Surely, the Earth must be full? Pretending that human numbers can grow forever, with no ill-effects, is at best innocent and at worst utterly irresponsible.

Biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, deforestation, water and food shortages — these are all worsened by our huge and ever-increasing numbers. Yet governments and most environmental groups choose to sidestep this giant elephant in the room. The human population was just 2.6 billion in 1950. But it has been 7.7 billion today and according to the UN it will reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by the end of the century. Where will so many people live? How will we feed them?

Unless we diffuse this “population bomb”, by the end of the century we will need several Earths to survive. But we can’t have several Earths, and so we will face a future of increasing poverty, food shortages, conflict and environmental degradation.

Admittedly, not everyone agrees with the UN’s predictions. But even the doubters calculate that the human population will grow to 8 or 9 billion sometime between 2040 and 2060. Ultimately, there has to be a limit.

The good news is that the human populations of about two dozen countries, from Poland and Italy to Cuba and Japan, are now decreasing. But that’s not true of most countries. The cradle of overpopulation is in Africa, which is where more than half of global population growth is expected to occur: from 1.3 billion people in 2020 to 4.3 billion in 2100.

The solution isn’t rocket science. There are two drivers of population growth:   birth rates and longevity. We all aim to grow old, after all, but we can reduce birth rates. That’s not to say that anyone should be denied the right to have many children as they like. But it’s a fact that wherever women are empowered and literated, have help with family planning and have access to medical care, they generally choose to have fewer children. And the birth rate falls.

So why the stony silence? Why such a failure of leadership from governments and environmental groups? I think it’s for two reasons. First, calls for population control are often believed racist: relatively rich people in the developed world   blaming poor people in the developing world. Second, it is often thought insincere. The problem is as much about consumerism as it is about population growth: westerners are consuming more and more, so it appears as if they are blaming the   poor for the excesses of the rich. Most population growth is, indeed, taking place among those who consume almost nothing. But the uncomfortable truth is that we all need to consume much less.

Whatever the complications, we urgently need a UN Framework Convention on Population, just as we have for climate change. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us.

7 . Looking almost as fresh as the day it was bought, this McDonald’s Happy Meal is in fact six months old. Photographed every day for the past six months by Manhattan artist Sally Davies, the kids meal of fries and burger hasn’t any signs of mould(霉菌) or decay(腐烂).

Sally put the Happy Meal on a shelf in her apartment and watched it with increasing shock. Even her dogs stopped trying to steal a free tasty snack.

“I bought the meal on April 10 this year and brought home to see how it changed,” she said. “I chose McDonald’s because it was nearest to my house, but the project could have been about any other fast food. The first thing that shocked me on the second day of the experiment was that it no longer gave out any smell. And my dogs stopped circling the shelf.”

Sally expected the food to go mouldy after a few days. In fact, Mrs. Davies’ surprise turned to shock as the food still had not shown any signs of decay after two weeks. “It was then that I realized that something strange might be going on with this food that I had bought,” she explained. “The appearance of the food did not change as the weeks turned to months. And now, at six months old, the food is plastic to touch. The only change that I can see is that it has become as hard as a rock.”

The experiment has brought her amusement rather than fear. “Maybe I would be frightened at seeing this if I were a meat eater.” she said.

8 . We’ve all been there: in a lift, in line at the bank or on an airplane, surrounded by people who are, like us, deeply focused on their smartphones or, worse, struggling with the uncomfortable silence.

What’s the problem? It’s possible that we all have compromised conversational intelligence. It’s more likely that none of us start a conversation because it’s awkward and challenging, or we think it’s annoying and unnecessary. But the next time you find yourself among strangers, consider that small talk is worth the trouble. Experts say it’s an invaluable social practice that results in big benefits.

Dismissing small talk as unimportant is easy, but we can’t forget that deep relationships wouldn’t

even exist if it weren’t for casual conversation. Small talk is the grease(润滑剂) for social communication, says Bernardo Carducci, director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast. ＂Almost every great love story and each big business deal begins with small talk,＂ he explains. ＂The key to successful small talk is learning how to connect with others, not just communicate with them.＂

In a 2014 study, Elizabeth Dunn, associate professor of psychology at UBC, invited people on their way into a coffee shop. One group was asked to seek out an interaction(互动) with its waiter; the other, to speak only when necessary. The results showed that those who chatted with their server reported significantly higher positive feelings and a better coffee shop experience. ＂It’s not that talking to the waiter is better than talking to your husband,＂ says Dunn. ＂But interactions with peripheral(边缘的) members of our social network matter for our well-being also.＂

Dunn believes that people who reach out to strangers feel a significantly greater sense of belonging, a bond with others. Carducci believes developing such a sense of belonging starts with small talk. ＂Small talk is the basis of good manners,＂ he says.

9 . The online takeaway industry is growing in China along with the rapid development of the Internet economy. But environmental activists complain that the huge volume of plastic utensils (用具), wrapping and containers presents a great challenge to the environment, and that the heavy use of throwaway wooden chopsticks is reducing natural resources.

On September 1, the Beijing No.4 Intermediate People’s Court accepted a lawsuit filed by the Chongqing Green Volunteer League, an environmental non-government organization (NGO), against the country’s three largest food delivery platforms—Baidu Waimai, Ele.me and Meituan. The NGO stated that the companies failed to provide customers with the choice to not receive throwaway plastic utensils along with their food deliveries. Meanwhile, these utensils have created large amounts of rubbish and caused serious ecological damage.

In response, both Meituan and Ele.me, which acquired Baidu Waimai in August, have promised to take measures to reduce plastic waste. Meituan announced that it would appoint a chief environmental officer to oversee environmental issues from plastic waste and upgrade its smartphone app to provide consumers with the option of ordering food without single-use chopsticks, spoons or napkins. Ele.me followed by offering a similar choice and putting forward a plan to introduce suppliers of degradable (可降解的) plastic utensils to restaurants in the long term.

Is there a possible way out? Combined efforts by delivery platforms, consumers, restaurants and government departments are required to address plastic waste pollution.

For platforms, promoting environmental protection and introducing this idea to consumers are a meaningful move. Moreover, in the future, they should also make strict rules on the use of plastic utensils. For example, no more than one plastic bag should be used to wrap soup dishes, and all plastic products should be degradable. It is a long and difficult task for them, and the recent reactions from Ele.me and Meituan are just beginnings.

Considering most takeout food packaging is thrown into garbage bins and then taken away along with other household garbage, sorting of waste also becomes more important. Government departments could play a major role in this, and by recycling some materials, waste pollution could be reduced and resources saved. Furthermore, there have been growing calls that the government should also invest more in developing degradable plastic products or environmentally friendly alternatives.

Though consumers enjoy the convenience yet also suffer exposure to the pollution, many of them have paid little attention to the plastic waste problem. Environmental groups suggest that consumers change their habits a little by using their own utensils and dishes and refusing unnecessary plastic containers.