California has become the first U.S. state to approve plans to require newly-built homes to include solar equipment.

    The state's Energy Commission voted 5-0 to approve the new rules, which are to take effect in 2020. The rules will deal with most newly-built residential (住宅的) buildings up to three stories high.

    The move is California's latest step aimed at reaching renewable energy targets and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

    California has set a goal of filling half of its electricity needs with renewable energy by 2030. Officials said they had reached 30 percent by the end of 2017. The state's Governor, Jerry Brown, plans to hold an international climate meeting in September.

    ①The Energy Commission said the cost of adding solar equipment to a single-family home would be about $9,500. But, the group added that homeowners would save at least $19,000 in energy costs over 30 years.

    Robert Raymer is the technical director for the California Building Industry Association. He says the action is a step forward for the wider use of solar power in the U.S. "You can bet every other of the 49 states will be watching closely to see what happens," he told the Associated Press.

    ②Solar companies praised the new requirements, which officials have said will likely raise demand for solar equipment in California by 10-15 percent.

    The Solar Energy Industries Association called it a "historic decision for the state and the U.S." It estimated the action would produce "huge economic and environmental benefits," including bringing tens of billions of dollars into California.

    ③Some legislative and community leaders argued that Californians cannot afford to pay any more for housing in what is already an extremely high-priced market.

    "That's just going to drive the cost up and make California, once again, not affordable to live in," said California Assemblyman Brian Dahle.

    ④Severin Borenstein is an energy economist at the University of California, in Berkeley. He sent an email to the head of California's Energy Commission to urge the state to reconsider its decision.

    He expressed his belief that it is a mistake for California to approve such a policy instead of centering on efforts to develop large solar farms to produce renewable energy. He said these farms would cost much less to operate.

    "Every energy economist I know is shaking their head at this," he told the Wall Street Journal. "In many ways, this is setting the wrong example," he added.

Work and the Young: Generation Jobless

    “YOUNG people ought not to be idle (闲置的) . It is very bad for them," said MargaretThatcher in 1984. She was right: there are few worse things that society can do to its young than to leave them ignored.

    Yet more young people are idle than ever. The International Labour Organization reports that 75m (m=million) young people globally are looking for a job. World Bank surveys suggest that 262m young people are economically inactive. The number of young people without a job is nearly as large as the population of America (311m).

Two factors play a big part. First, the long slowdown in the West has reduced demand for labour, and it is easier to put off hiring young people than it is to fire older workers. Second, inemerging economies population growth is the fastest in countries with disordered labour markets, such as India and Egypt.

    One possible way to settle this problem is to stimulate growth. That is easier said than done in a world suffering from debt, and is anyway a possible answer. The countries where the problem is worst (such as Spain and Egypt) suffered from high youth unemployment even when their economies were growing. Throughout the recession ( 经济不景气)，companies have continued to complain that they cannot find young people with the right skills. This underlines the importance of two other solutions: reforming labour markets and improving education.

    Youth unemployment is often at its worst in countries with inflexible labour markets. High taxes on hiring, strict rules about firing, high minimum wages: all these help force young people to the street corner. South Africa has some of the highest unemployment, in part because it has powerful trade unions and inflexible rules about hiring and firing. Many countries with high youth unemployment rate have high minimum wages and heavy taxes on labour. India has around 200 laws on work and pay.

    Across the OECD (经合组织) , people who left school at the earliest opportunity are twice as likely to be unemployed as university graduates. But it is unwise to conclude that governments should simply continue increasing the number of people who graduate from university. In both Britain and the United States many people with arts degrees are finding it impossible to get appropriate jobs. In North Africa university graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed as non-graduates.

    What matters is not just number of years of education people get, but its content. This means expanding the study of science and technology and closing the gap between the world of education and the world of work-for example by upgrading vocational education and by building closer relations between companies and schools. Germany, which has the second lowest level of youth unemployment in the rich world, owns long-history system of vocational schooling and apprenticeships (学徒制).

    The problem of youth unemployment has been getting worse for several years. But there are at last some reasons for hope. Governments are trying to address the mismatch between education and the labour market. Companies are beginning to take more responsibility for the young. The world has a real chance of introducing an education-and-training revolution worthy of the solution to the problem.

    Nelson Mandela is respected and admired around the world. And to South Africans he is a superstar. He is a hero who shocked the world by fighting for peace between races, despite the 27 years he spent in the prison of the South Africa's white, racist regime (种族主义政权).

    Mandela who won the nation's first all-race elections after the fall of apartheid (种族隔离) in 1994, retired in 1999. But he remains as popular as ever. His popularity has inspired an entire national industry. His portrait (肖像) has appeared at many places, including on some goods. His face has appeared on a South African coin, and some business leaders hope to build a statue in his likeness—the Statue of Freedom. It would stand taller than New York's Statue of Liberty.

    “His popularity is similar to that of John F. Kennedy with US or Winston Churchill in Britain, but few politicians in his times have achieved his level of admiration,” said Tom Lodge, head of the political science department of the University of the Witwatersrand, “What a skilled performer Mandela has been throughout his political career! He's a very, very clever man.”

    However, he is far from perfect. Most articles for his birthday, which appeared in every major South African newspaper on the day, briefly mentioned that Mandela did have his shortcomings.

    Then they returned to their flowing praises. “Through the ages, the human race has had its icons (偶像)—men and women who rose above ordinary people to inspire their generations,” The Mail and Guardian Weekly said. “In our generation, the gods presented us Nelson Mandela.”

When we meet someone for the first time, we usually get a vague sense of what kind of person they are by the way they shake hands, talk, or walk. In the age of social networking, however, first impressions are sometimes made even before we actually meet someone in person—that is, by looking at their profile photo.

    According to a recent study, these social images say a lot about our personality. In the study, presented in a paper at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, a group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in the US used software to analyze the profile pictures of 66,000 users of US social platform Twitter and 3,200 of their tweets. At the same time, about 434 participants were asked to complete a survey about their personality type. The researchers wanted to find out if there was a connection between personality traits—like openness, extroversion, and neuroticism(神经质)—and a person's profile picture.

    According to the results, open people are more likely to pose in an unusual way and use objects such as glasses or a guitar in their profile photo because they enjoy new and exciting experiences. Meanwhile, neurotic people often hold back their negative emotions. They try to avoid showing their face；Instead, they use an image of something like a pet, a car or a building.

    Apart from the objects in profile pictures, the colors used in them also give us some hints about the photo's owner. For example, extraverts were found to have the most colorful profile images, as they want to emphasize their personality and show themselves off, the researchers wrote.

    Although social media photos "usually represent an extension of one's self, they also allow a user to shape his or her own personality and idealized view," according to the researchers. So, when choosing a profile photo, maybe we should ask ourselves first what kind of image we'd like to convey. After all, first impressions always last.

    A study examining the children of people evacuated(撤离) during the WWII showed the daughters of female evacuees were up to four times more likely to suffer from serious mental health conditions compared to those whose parents stayed at home.

    In the largest enquiry ever of its kind, researchers examined the health records of 3000 children of Finnish people evacuated to Sweden during the 1941-1945 conflict with Soviet Russia. The evacuees, many of whom were at a pre-school age, were placed with foster families in Sweden and were forced to learn Swedish, later returning to Finland. The study found that the female children of these girls had an increased risk of being hospitalized for conditions such as depression. However, this was not the case with children of boys evacuated during the war.

    The study could not determine why. One possibility is that the stress of the evacuees' experience affected their psychological development in ways that influenced their parenting style. Another possibility is that the evacuees' experience resulted in epigenetic changes—changed in the way genes are expressed. For example, the researchers mentioned an earlier finding that Holocaust survivors have higher levels of methyl groups bound to the FKBP5 gene and have passed his change on to their children. This higher level of methyl groups appears to change the production of cortisol, a hormone(荷尔蒙) that controls the stress response.

    "The Finnish evacuation was intended to protect children from the harm associated with the country's wars with the Soviet Union", said study co-author Dr Torsten Santavirta, from Uppsala University.

    "Our observation of the long-term psychiatric(精神病的) risk that reached into the next generation is concerning and stresses the need to weigh benefits as well as potential risks when designing policies for child protection".