2 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.

At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.

In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.

Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.

3 . Who is a genius? This question has greatly interested humankind for centuries.

Let’s state clearly: Einstein was a genius. His face is almost the international symbol for genius. But we want to go beyond one man and explore the nature of genius itself. Why is it that some people are so much more intelligent or creative than the rest of us? And who are they?

In the sciences and arts, those praised as geniuses were most often white men, of European origin. Perhaps this is not a surprise. It’s said that history is written by the victors, and those victors set the standards for admission to the genius club. When contributions were made by geniuses outside the club—women, or people of a different color or belief—they were unacknowledged and rejected by others.

A study recently published by Science found that as young as age six, girls are less likely than boys to say that members of their gender(性别)are “really, really smart.” Even worse, the study found that girls act on that belief: Around age six they start to avoid activities said to be for children who are “really, really smart.” Can our planet afford to have any great thinkers become discouraged and give up? It doesn’t take a genius to know the answer: absolutely not.

Here’s the good news. In a wired world with constant global communication, we’re all positioned to see flashes of genius wherever they appear. And the more we look, the more we will see that social factors(因素)like gender, race, and class do not determine the appearance of genius. As a writer says, future geniuses come from those with “intelligence, creativity, perseverance(毅力), and simple good fortune, who are able to change the world.”

4 . In recent years, researchers from diverse fields have agreed that short-termism is now a significant problem in industrialised societies. The inability to engage with longer-term causes and consequences leads to some of the world’s most serious problems: climate change, biodiversity collapse, and more. The historian Francis Cole argues that the West has entered a period where “only the present exists, a present characterised at once by the cruelty of the instant and by the boredom of an unending now”.

It has been proved that people have a bias (偏向) towards the present, focusing on loud attractions in the moment at the expense of the health, well-being and financial stability of their future selves or community. In business, this bias surfaces as short-sighted decisions. And on slow-burning problems like climate change, it translates into the unwillingness to make small sacrifices (牺牲) today that could make a major difference tomorrow. Instead, all that matters is next quarter’s profit, or satisfying some other near-term desires.

These biased perspectives cannot be blamed on one single cause. It is fair to say, though, that our psychological biases play a major role. People’s hesitancy to delay satisfaction is the most obvious example, but there are others. One of them is about how the most accessible information in the present affects decisions about the future. For instance, you might hear someone say: “It’s cold this winter, so I needn’t worry about global warming.”Another is that loud and urgent matters are given too much importance, making people ignore longer-term trends that arguably matter more. This is when a pop star draws far more attention than, say, gradual biodiversity decline.

As a psychologist once joked, if aliens (外星人) wanted to weaken humanity, they wouldn’t send ships; they would invent climate change. Indeed, when it comes to environmental transformations, we can develop a form of collective “poor memory”, and each new generation can believe the state of affairs they encounter is nothing out of the ordinary. Older people today, for example, can remember a time with insect-covered car windscreens after long drives. Children, on the other hand, have no idea that insect population has dropped dramatically.

6 . Quantum ( 量子 ) computers have been on my mind a lot lately. A friend has been sending me articles on how quantum computers might help solve some of the biggest challenges we face as humans. I’ve also had exchanges with two quantum-computing experts. One is computer scientist Chris Johnson who I see as someone who helps keep the field honest. The other is physicist Philip Taylor.

For decades, quantum computing has been little more than a laboratory curiosity. Now, big tech companies have invested in quantum computing, as have many smaller ones. According to Business Weekly, quantum machines could help us “cure cancer, and even take steps to turn climate change in the opposite direction.” This is the sort of hype ( 炒作 ) that annoys Johnson. He worries that researchers are making promises they can’t keep. “What’s new,” Johnson wrote, “is that millions of dollars are now potentially available to quantum computing researchers.”

As quantum computing attracts more attention and funding, researchers may mislead investors, journalists, the public and, worst of all, themselves about their work’s potential. If researchers can’t keep their promises, excitement might give way to doubt, disappointment and anger, Johnson warns. Lots of other technologies have gone through stages of excitement. But something about quantum computing makes it especially prone to hype, Johnson suggests, perhaps because “‘quantum’ stands for something cool you shouldn’t be able to understand.” And that brings me back to Taylor, who suggested that I read his book Q for Quantum.

After I read the book, Taylor patiently answered my questions about it. He also answered my questions about PyQuantum, the firm he co-founded in 2016. Taylor shares Johnson’s concerns about hype, but he says those concerns do not apply to PyQuantum.

The company, he says, is closer than any other firm “by a very large margin ( 幅度 )” to building a “useful” quantum computer, one that “solves an impactful problem that we would not have been able to solve otherwise.” He adds, “People will naturally discount my opinions, but I have spent a lot of time quantitatively comparing what we are doing with others.”

Could PyQuantum really be leading all the competition “by a wide margin”, as Taylor claims? I don’t know. I’m certainly not going to advise my friend or anyone else to invest in quantum computers. But I trust Taylor, just as I trust Johnson.

7 . We live in a town with three beaches. There are two parts less than 10 minutes’ walk from home where neighborhood children gather to play. However, what my children want to do after school is pick up a screen — any screen — and stare at it for hours. They are not alone. Today’s children spend an average of four and a half hours a day looking at screens, split between watching television and using the Internet.

In the past few years, an increasing number of people and organisations have begun coming up with plans to counter this trend. A couple of years ago film-maker David Bond realised that his children, then aged five and three, were attached to screens to the point where he was able to say “chocolate” into his three-year-old son’s ear without getting a response. He realised that something needed to change, and, being a London media type, appointed himself “marketing director from Nature”. He documented his journey as he set about treating nature as a brand to be marketed to young people. The result was Project Wild Thing, a film which charts the birth of the World Network, a group of organisations with the common goal of getting children out into nature.

“Just five more minutes outdoors can make a difference,” David Bond says. “There is a lot of really interesting evidence which seems to be suggesting that if children are inspired up to the age of seven, then being outdoors will be on habit for life.” His own children have got into the habit of playing outside now: “We just send them out into the garden and tell them not to come back in for a while.”

Summer is upon us. There is an amazing world out there, and it needs our children as much as they need it. Let us get them out and let them play.

8 . We all know that unpleasant feeling when we’re talking about something interesting and halfway through our sentence we’re interrupted. But was that really an interruption? The answer depends on whom you ask, according to new research led by Katherine Hilton from Stanford University.

Using a set of controlled audio clips (录音片段), Hilton surveyed 5, 000 American English speakers to better understand what affects people’s perceptions of interruptions. She had participants listen to audio clips and then answer questions about whether the speakers seemed to be friendly and engaged, listening to one another, or trying to interrupt.

Hilton found that American English speakers have different conversational styles. She identified two distinct groups: high and low intensity speakers. High intensity speakers are generally uncomfortable with moments of silence in conversation and consider talking at the same time a sign of engagement. Low intensity speakers find it rude to talk at the same time and prefer people speak one after another in conversation.

The differences in conversational styles became evident when participants listened to audio clips in which two people spoke at the same time but were agreeing with each other and stayed on topic, Hilton said. The high intensity group reported that conversations where people spoke at the same time when expressing agreement were not interruptive but engaged and friendlier than the conversations with moments of silence in between speaking turns. In contrast, the low intensity group perceived any amount of simultaneous (同时) chat as a rude interruption, regardless of what the speakers were saying.

“People care about being interrupted, and those small interruptions can have a massive effect on the overall communication,” Hilton said. “Breaking apart what an interruption means is essential if we want to understand how humans interact with each other.”

9 . Thanks to in-depth reporting by the Wall Street Journal, we now know that Facebook has long been aware its product Instagram has harmful effects on the mental health of many adolescent users. Young girls, in particular, struggle with their body image thanks to a constant stream of photos and videos showing beautiful bodies that users don’t think they can attain.

While the information the Journal covered is essential and instructive, it does not tell the whole story. Deep down, this is not an Instagram problem; it’s a people problem. Understanding that distinction can make the difference between a failed attempt to contain a teen’s interest in an addictive app and successfully addressing the underlying problem leading to mental distress induced (诱发) by Instagram.

Critics were quick to shame Facebook for sitting on the data and not releasing it to researchers or academics who asked for it. Others criticize the social media giant for not using the research to create a safer experience for its teen users. The anger, while understandable, is misplaced.

While I’m reluctant to defend Facebook, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to blame the company for withholding data that would hurt its business. Have you ever binge-watched (狂看) a Netflix series? I assure you it wasn’t a healthy endeavor. You were in active, likely did nothing productive, mindlessly snacked and didn’t go outside for fresh air. It is an objectively harmful use of time to stare at a TV or laptop for a full weekend. Should we respond by shaming Netflix for not alerting us to how damaging an addictive product can be?

While it’s reasonable to say Instagram makes esteem issues worse, it strains credulity (夸张到难以置信) to believe it causes them in the first place. You create your own experiences on social media. For the most part, you choose which accounts to follow and engage. If you’re already vulnerable to insecurities and self-sabotage (自损) — as many teens are — you will find accounts to obsess over. And this isn’t a new phenomenon.

Before social media, there were similar issues fueling self-esteem issues. Whether the target be magazines, movies or television shows depicting difficult-to-attain bodies, there has been a relatively steady chorus (异口同声) of experts nothing the damage new media could cause young viewers.

Self-esteem issues have an underlying cause — one that’s independent of social media use. Instagram merely enhances those feelings because it provides infinitely more access to triggers than older forms of media. It’s more worthwhile to address those underlying factors rather than to attack Facebook.