The World Meat Free Day for 2017 falls on 12, June, but what would actually happen if the whole world suddenly went vegetarian(素食的) permanently?

     If vegetarianism were accepted by everyone by 2050, the world would have about seven million fewer deaths every year. No meat would lower the chances of some diseases or even some cancers and so save the world 2-3% global GDP in medical bills. Food-related emissions would drop by around 60%. This would be due to getting rid of red meat which come from methane (甲烷) producing livestock (家畜) — from people's diets. Turning former pastures (牧场) into native habitats and forests would slow climate change and bring back lost biodiversity, including some animals which were previously pushed out or killed in order to keep cattle.

    However, farmers in the developing world could really suffer. Arid and semi-arid lands can only be used to raise animals as there's no or little water in these places, such as the Sahel land strip in Africa next to the Sahara; nomadic (游牧的) groups that keep livestock there would be forced to settle permanently and lose their cultural identities if there were no more meat. Losing meat also means that we also lose traditions. There's no more Christmas turkey. We would need to replace meat with nutritional substitutes, in particular for the world's estimated two billion-plus unhealthy or weak people for lack of nutrients. Animal products contain more nutrients per calorie than staples like grains and rice.

    Everybody currently engaged in the livestock industry would need to be retrained for a new career. This could be in agriculture, reforestation or producing bioenergy. Failing to provide career alternatives could lead to mass unemployment and social problems, particularly in traditionally rural communities.

    If you make a list of the world's top ten most challenging jobs,chances are that being a teacher will not make the cut.But think about the discouraging task millions of educators face each day as they try to shape a group of often bad-tempered,wild kids into intelligent,well-rounder individuals.That surely has to be the toughest job in the world, especially given that there is no promotion or bonus awaiting them even if they are wildly successful!

    What if there all-important individuals that we often take for granted（想当然）disappear from our lives?That was what Project Ed and Participant Media's Teach campaign asked filmmakers of all ages to imagine in their recently-held competition.Entitled "A World Without Teachers",its purpose was to inspire more young people to become teachers.However,the 62 amazing video submissions also serve as a reminder of how horrible things would be if we didn't have these selfless individuals guiding us through life.What was interesting is that even the youngest participants did not appear to be happy at the idea of not having anybody telling them what to do.

    High-school student Savannah Wakefield reflected if art as we know it today would have been different without teachers.Would Monet have discovered his talent for impressionism?Los Angeles-based Miles Horst,who won the 1000 USD prize for the best adult submission imagines a world where teachers are replaced by a “brain box” in his fun lively entry.

    Youth category winner Marina Barham's video represents a fact we all know but often forget.Teachers don't just teach,they inspire something that no electronic device,no matter how smart,can do!So the next time you think your teacher is being "mean" for trying to channel you in the right direction,imagine a life without him/her.We have a feeling it will not appear as rosy!

    On June 23, 2010, a Sunny Airlines captain with 32 years of experience stopped his flight from departing. He was deeply concerned about a power part that might run out of all electrical power on his trans-Pacific flight. Regardless of his concerns, Sunny Airlines pressured him to fly the airplane over the ocean at night. When he refused to put the safety of his passengers at risk, Sunny Airlines' Security removed him out of the airport, and threatened to arrest his crew if they did not cooperate.

    Besides that, five more Sunny Airlines pilots also refused to fly the aircraft, expressing their own concerns about the safety of the plane. It turned out the pilots were right: the power part was faulty and the plane was removed from service and finally fixed. Eventually a third crew operated the flight, hours later. In this whole process, Sunny Airlines pressured their highly experienced pilots to ignore their safety concerns and fly passengers over the Pacific Ocean at night in a plane that needed maintenance. Fortunately for all of us, these pilots stood strong and would not be frightened.

    Don't just take our word. Please research this yourself and learn the facts at www.SunnyAirlinePilot.org. Once you review this shocking information, please keep in mind that while their use of Corporate Security to remove a pilot from the airport is a new procedure, flight crews' lacking confidence is becoming common at Sunny Airlines, with recorded events occurring on a weekly basis.

    The flying public deserves the highest levels of safety. No airlines should maximize their gains by pushing their employees to move their airplanes regardless of the potential human cost. Sunny Airlines' pilots are committed to resisting any practices of damaging your safety for profits. We've been trying to deal with these problems behind the scenes for quite some time; now we need your help. Go to www.SunnyAirlinePilot.org to get more information and find out what you can do.

    Stephen Hawking has said he believes brains could exist independently of the body after people die, but that the idea of a conventional afterlife（传统意义上的死后重生）is a fairy tale. Speaking at the premiere（首映）of a documentary film about his life, Stephen Hawking said: “I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer, so it's theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death.”

    “However, this is way beyond our present scientific and technological level. I think the conventional afterlife is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark.” The author of “A Brief History of Time”, who earlier approved of the right for the deadly ill to end their lives as long as safeguards were in place, suffered from motor neurone(运动神经元) disease at the age of 21 and was given two to three years to live.

    “All my life I have lived with the menace of an early death, so I hate wasting time,” Hawking said on Thursday night, using the computer-created voice he controls with a facial muscle and a blink(贬眼) from one eye. The documentary explores a brilliant schoolboy with unclear handwriting who enjoyed the life of Oxford University before illness led to a lifelong desire of discovery about the origins of the universe, which began as a graduate at Cambridge University and has shocked the world.

    Hawking's sister Mary says in the film that her brother was highly competitive and curious about everything in a household which friends described as very academic, and explains how she received a toy house as a present when they were children, to which Stephen immediately added electricity.

    She said that life with her brother was attractive and exciting. “It's a waste of time arguing with Stephen because he always manages to turn the argument round,” she said. The film goes back to his childhood and his student days and shows the scientist, who uses a wheelchair, at home with break. It also explores his family life with his first wife, Jane, and their three children, the breakdown of their marriage and his marriage to one of his carers.

    Jane appears on camera to explain how the pressures of caring for the children and the increasingly disabled Hawking became even worse once full-time nurses were brought into the home, destroying any privacy（隐私）. His second wife and former nurse, Elaine Mason, does not appear in the film, and Hawking introduces their 1995-2007 marriage with a few pictures and a brief description.

    An introduction to this book is as superfluous as a candle in front of a powerful searchlight. But a convention of publishing seems to require that the candle should be there, and I am proud to be the one to hold it. About ten years ago I picked up from the pile of new books on my desk a copy of Sons and Lovers by a man of whom I had never heard, and I started to race through it with the immoral speed of the professional reviewer. But after a page or two I found myself reading, really reading. Here was—here is—a masterpiece in which every sentence counts, a book packed with significant thought and beautiful, arresting phrases, the work of a remarkable genius whose gifts are more richly various than those of any other young English novelist.

    To appreciate the rich variety of Mr. Lawrence we must read his later novels and his volumes of poetry. But Sons and Lovers reveals the range of his power. Here are combined and blended(混合的) sort of “realism” and almost lyric(抒情的) imagery and rhythm. The speech of the people is that of daily life and the things that happen to them are normal adventures and accidents; they fall in love, marry, work, fail, succeed, and die. But of their deeper emotions and of the relations of these little human beings to the earth and to the stars, Mr. Lawrence makes something near to poetry and prose(散文) without violating its proper “other harmony.”

    Take the marvellous paragraph on next to the last page of Sons and Lovers (Mr. Lawrence depends so little on plot in the ordinary sense of the word that it is perfectly fair to read the end of his book first):

    Where was he? One tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun, stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in the darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted(气馁). So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.

    Such glorious writing lifts the book far above a novel which is merely a story. I beg the reader to attend to every line of it and not to miss a single one of the many sentences that await and surprise you. Some are enthusiastic and impressive, like the paragraph above; others are keen, “realistic” observations of things and people. In one of his books Mr. Lawrence makes a character say, or think, that life is “mixed.” That indicates his philosophy and his method. He blends the accurately literal and trivial(琐碎的) with the extremely poetic.

    To find a similar blending of tiny daily detail and wide imaginative vision, we must go back to two older novelists, Hardy and Meredith. I do not mean that Mr. Lawrence derives(源于) immediately from them or, indeed, that he is clearly the disciple(弟子) of any master. I do feel simply that he is of the elder stature(名望) of Hardy and Meredith, and I know of no other young novelist who is quite worthy of their company. When I first tried to express this comparison, this connection, I was contradicted by a fellow-critic, who pointed out that Meredith and Hardy are entirely unlike each other and that therefore Mr. Lawrence cannot resemble both. To be sure, nothing is more hateful than forced comparisons, nothing more boring than to discover parallels between one work of art and another. An artist's mastery consists in his difference from other masters. But to refer a young man of genius to an older one, at the same time pronouncing his independence and originality, is a fair, if not very superior, method of praising him.

    City trees grow faster and die younger than trees in rural forestry, a new study finds. Over their lifetimes, then, urban trees will likely absorb less CO₂ from the air thah forest trees.

    As we all know, the earth would be freezing or burning hot without CO₂. However, CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, meaning it traps energy from the sun as/heat. That makes temperatures near the ground rise. Human activities, especially the widespread burning-of fossil(化石)fuels, have been sending extra greenhouse gases into the air. This has led to a rise in average temperatures across the globe.

    Studies had shown forests readily absorb CO₂, but there hadn't been much data on whether city trees grow, die and absorb CO₂ at the same rate as forest trees do. So some researchers decided to find out.

    To figure out how quickly trees were growing, researchers tracked their diameters (the width of their trunks) between 2005 and 2014. A tree's diameter increases as it grows, just as a person's waist size increases as they gain weight. About half the weight of a tree is carbon, research has shown. Most of the rest is water. Over the nine years' tracking, the researchers found city trees absorbed four times as much carbon from the air as forest trees. However, they were twice as likely to die. So over the lifetime of each type of tree, forest trees actually absorbed more CO₂.

    City trees grew faster because they had less competition for light from their neighbors. In a forest, trees tend to grow close together, shading their neighbors. Street trees also benefit from higher levels of nitrogen (氮)in rainwater. Nitrogen helps plants grow. Waste gases from gas-burning cars also contain nitrogen, thus enriching city air with nitrogen. Later, rainwater may wash much of it to the ground. Some street trees may also have better access to water than trees in the country because the underground water pipes can leak.