In today’s cost-of-living crisis, the demand on charities is greater than ever. Here are a dozen innovative ways people around the world are giving back.

Commu App, Finland

How do people wanting to volunteer connect with groups needing help? In 2021 in Finland, three 20-something entrepreneurs founded Commu, an app that makes it easy for individuals to offer help to those in need or to ask for help in their communities. It works in Finnish, English, Ukrainian, German and Norwegian and features a special area on the app that focuses on the needs of Ukrainian refugees (难民) in Finland.

Frigos Solidaires, France

Imagine if those in need could help themselves to food with anonymity (匿名) and dignity. Solidarity Fridges was started with that aim by Dounia Mebtoul, a young restaurateur in Paris. Now, 130 fridges installed in front of places such as shops and schools offer free food to the hungry across France.

Donation Dollar, Australia

Motivating people to donate is the objective of a unique one-dollar coin created by the Royal Australian Mint (RAM). Featuring a green centre with a gold ripple design, the coin reminds people who find it in their change to donate it to charity. It estimates that by the end of last year, about $2 million had been donated to charities and people or businesses in need.

Stuff A Bus, Canada

In Edmonton, the transit service parks vehicles in front of supermarkets for its annual “Stuff a Bus” campaign each November. Volunteers collect food and cash donations from shoppers to fill buses heading for food banks. Since 1995, the campaign has collected 553,000 kilograms of food and roughly half a million dollars for those in need.

Plastic, which is now common, contains endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs (内分泌干扰物), that has been linked to increased risk of many chronic diseases. Parental exposure to EDCs, for example, has been shown to cause metabolic (新陈代谢的) disorders, including obesity and diabetes, in the later generations.

Led by Changcheng Zhou, a professor of biomedical sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California, the researchers investigated the impact of fathers’ exposure to a phthalate called dicyclohexyl phthalate, or DCHP (邻苯二甲酸二环己酯), on the metabolic health of first generation (F1) and second generation (F2) in mice. Phthalates are chemicals used to make plastic more durable.

The researchers found that fathers’ DCHP exposure for four weeks led to high insulin (胰岛素) resistance and impaired insulin signaling in F1. The same effect, but weaker, was seen in F2 .

“We found fathers’ exposure to EDCs may have intergenerational and transgenerational detrimental effects on the metabolic health of their later generations, ”Zhou said. “To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to demonstrate this.”

In the case of fathers’ exposure in the study, intergenerational effects are changes that occur due to direct exposure to a stressor, such as exposure to DCHP of fathers (F0 generation) and his F1 generation. Transgenerational effects are changes passed down to later generations that are not directly exposed to the stressor (for example, F2 generation).

“This suggests that fathers’ DCHP exposure can lead to sex-specific transgenerational effects on the metabolic health of their later generations,” Zhou said.

Zhou stressed that the impact of exposure to DCHP on human health is not well understood, even though DCHP is widely used in a variety of plastic products and has been detected in food, water, and indoor particulate matter.

“It’s best to minimize our use of plastic products,” Zhou said. “This can also help reduce plastic pollution, one of our most pressing environmental issues.”

Face blindness, a mystifying condition that can trick us into believing we recognize people we’ve never met or make us fail to recognize those we have, has been previously estimated to affect between 2 and 2.5 percent of people in the world.Now, a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the VA Boston Healthcare System is providing fresh insights into the disorder, suggesting it may be more common than currently believed.

Published in February 2023 in Cortex, the study findings indicate that as many as one in 33 people may meet the criteria for face blindness, or prosopagnosia (面孔失认症).“This translates to more than 10 million Americans,” the research team said.

The study found similar face-matching performance between people diagnosed with prosopagnosia using stricter vs looser criteria, suggesting that diagnostic criteria should be expanded to be more inclusive. That could lead to new diagnoses among millions who may have the disorder but don’t realize it.

The study results are based on a web-based questionnaire and tests administered to 3,341 individuals.First, the researchers asked participants whether they experience difficulties recognizing faces in their everyday lives.Then they administered two objective tests to determine whether they had difficulties learning new faces or recognizing highly familiar famous faces.

The results showed that 31 individuals out of the 3,341 had major prosopagnosia, while 72 of the 3,341 had a milder form. The researchers also observed that there were no neatly divided separate groups of people with poor or good ability to recognize faces. Rather, the ability to recognize faces appeared to lie on a continuum (连续体).

Finally, the researchers compared face-matching scores among people with prosopagnosia diagnosed using different criteria and found that using stricter diagnostic cutoffs did not correspond with lower face-matching scores.

In the new study, the researchers provide diagnostic suggestions for identifying mild and major forms of prosopagnosia based on guidelines for major and mild neurocognitive disorders in the DSM5, the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Summer is the swimming season. As fun as a swimming pool can be, it’s also a major safety risk if you don’t take the appropriate precautions (预防措施). Here are some tips for a safe swimming season.

    1     If children or inexperienced swimmers are in the pool, it’s very important to have close supervision. Supervisors should be an adult who can swim well and knows how to save others in a swimming pool. They mustn’t be distracted with their cellphone, or a conversation with another adult. They must take that role very seriously.     2    . More children aged 1 to 4 die from drowning than any other causes of death.

Keep a variety of flotation devices in and around the pool like a life jacket plus pool noodles or a paddle board. That helps when accidents happen.     3    .

Supervisors should also learn basic CPR.

The steps are:

1. Place the person on his back and gently lift his chin and tilt (倾斜) his head back.

2. Place one hand over the other, place them over the patient’s breastbone and administer 30 chest presses.

3. Pinch their nose and place your mouth tightly over their mouth and administer two short breaths

Start again until the patient starts breathing.

    4     Emergency department staff sometimes see significant head injuries and spinal cord injuries that come from careless diving. This happens more among teenagers and young adults. Prevent this by making sure people are only using existing diving boards that are designed to dive into deep water.

Another risk is a condition called “dry drowning”. This happens after a near-drowning event in which water gets into someone’s lungs.     5    . Call 120 or go to the emergency department right away. This is very rare, but can be fatal (致命的).

That day I walked in the post office with a huge smile. My story had been accepted for _________ in a Chicken Soup. After months of stressful life events, I had (a) _________ in my step and a lightness in my heart.

Grasped _________ in my hand was the form giving permission to print my story. As the clerk stuck the form to my envelope, she said, “Ten dollars, _________ only. Our system is dead today.” I fished through my _________. But without luck. Tears clouded my vision.

Then a deep voice behind me said, “I’ll take care of it.” I turned and met a man’s _________ gaze as he held out a ten-dollar bill. “Just pay it forward,” he said.

That often-overused phrase sent _________ down through my toes. _________ his kindness, I was walking back to my car when I noticed something glowing in the sun. It was a credit card.

_________ to find the owner, I played detective for several blocks. Then I __________ a young mother with three children. She was __________ through some bags in the back. I approached and asked, “Are you Jessica Slate?” Her eyes got round. “Yes!” “I believe this is yours,” I handed her the card. “You __________ my day,” she wiped away tears, “Truly.”

While driving home, I mused that being kind on both the receiving and the giving end felt __________ good. First with cash, then with credit, I had __________ a literal interpretation of paying it forward. When it comes to acts of kindness, all forms of __________ are acceptable.