In addition to the official basketball world, various other types of basketball are practiced around the world.

Wheelchair Basketball

    Wheelchair basketball was invented in 1946 by former American basketball players, who, after wartime injury, wanted once again to experience the excitement of a highly athletic sport within a team environment. It is now played in more than 80 countries by over 25,000 men, women and children with a physical disability which prevents them from playing competitive basketball on their feet.

http://www.iwbf.org

Beach Basketball

    Beach basketball is an exciting, non-stop action game played in the sand. The game was born more than forty years ago on the physical education fields of Gulf Shores School. This kind of basketball, invented by Philip Bryant, has grown from an extremely effective skill improvement game to a very popular, widespread competitive sport.

http://www.beachbasketball.com

Street Basketball

    Street Basketball or streetball is mainly played as a leisure game, but streetball players can also compete against each other. There are no specific streetball rules and the game is played outdoors; the players make up their own rules to play. Streetball is very popular among younger players and allows players to publicly show their own individual skills.

http://www.streetball.com

Deaf Basketball

    Basketball for the deaf (unable to hear in one or both ears) men and women has been played since the early 1920s. The game today has exactly the same rules as FIBA (International Basketball Federation).

http://www.dibf.org

Bankshot Basketball

    Bankshot is a new game of skill and challenge that is often described as “mini golf, but with a basketball.” Bankshot is the only sports system that allows the able-bodied and athletes with a disability to play together at the same time. This game is about no running, jumping, or body contact(接触)and relies on the shooting skill.

http://www.bankshot.com

    People have understood that kindness is good for the person who receives help. For example, when we give food to a hungry person, he is blessed. However, scientists have recently begun to study the effect kindness has on the person giving it. What they have found is that doing good is good for the doer. Acts of kindness can improve health, help a person reach goals and even add years to a person's life.

    The first study to show the connection between doing good and living a long life was a study on aging. Beginning in 1956, scientists studied a group of married mothers for 30 years. They thought the women with the most children would die first. But the number of children a woman had did not matter. Wealth did not matter. Education did not matter. What did matter was whether they volunteered. Women that volunteered had fewer diseases during their life.

    Many other studies have found the same positive effects. Helping other people improves long-term health. The gains are the same for men, women, old people and the young. Those who volunteered had fewer serious diseases than those who did not volunteer. This included diseases such as heart attack, cancer and stroke.

    Scientists are researching many possible causes. One possible cause is an increase in antibodies （抗体）, which help fight against disease. One study showed the body produces more antibodies after an act of kindness. This increase in antibodies can last nearly an hour after one act of kindness is finished.

    Another one is an increase in a chemical that fights the effects of stress from life. Scientists have found a link between being kind to people and an increase in the chemical oxytocin. Oxytocin is a chemical produced in the brain. It reduces many of the harmful chemicals the body produces under stress.

    A large scale study has found a link between eating a diet based on organic food and having a reduced risk of cancer. If the new results are confirmed, promoting organic food consumption could be a promising preventative strategy against the disease, a team of researchers from several French institutions said.

    Among the environmental risks for cancer, there are growing concerns about exposure to different types of pesticides（杀虫剂） from farming. The impact of such chemicals on the human body is still not well understood but there are some indications that harmful effects can occur even at low concentrations.

    Meanwhile, pushed by environmental and health concerns, the organic food market continues to grow rapidly. Organic food is produced without the use of synthetic（合成的） fertilizers, pesticides, genetically modified organisms, and the use of veterinary（兽医的） medications.

    "Organic foods are less likely to contain pesticide remains than conventional foods, and studies have shown that an organic diet reduces exposure to certain pesticide," Julia Baudry, lead author of the study from the Centre of Research in Epidemiology and Statistics in France, told Newsweek.

    "In the general population, the primary route of exposure is diet, especially intake of conventionally grown fruits and vegetables. However, few studies have examined the association of organic food consumption with cancer risk."

    For the study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, a team of researchers examined data on the organic food consumption frequency and dietary intake of 68,946 French adults collected by an ongoing survey which began in 2009. They then followed up on these people at various points in the future.

    Participants reported how often （never, occasionally or most of the time） they consumed 16 types of organic foods including fruits, vegetables, soy﹣based products, dairy products, meat and fish, eggs, grains and legumes, bread and cereals, flour, vegetable oils and condiments, ready﹣to﹣eat meals, coffee, tea, and herbal tea, wine, biscuits, chocolate, sugar and so on.

    Some of the world's most famous musicians recently gathered in Paris and New Orleans to celebrate the first annual International Jazz Day. UNESCO(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) recently set April 30 as a day to raise awareness of jazz music, its significance, and its potential as a unifying(联合) voice across cultures.

    Despite the celebrations, though, in the U. S. the jazz audience continues to shrink and grow older, and the music has failed to connect with younger generations.

    It's Jason Moran's job to help change that. As the Kennedy Center's artistic adviser for jazz, Moran hopes to widen the audience for jazz, make the music more accessible, and preserve its history and culture.

    "Jazz seems like it's not really a part of the American appetite, "Moran tells National Public Radio's reporter Neal Conan. "What I'm hoping to accomplish is that my generation and younger start to reconsider and understand that jazz is not black and white anymore. It's actually color, and it's actually digital. "

    Moran says one of the problems with jazz today is that the entertainment aspect of the music has been lost. "The music can't be presented today the way it was in 1908 or 1958. It has to continue to move, because the way the world works is not the same, "says Moran.

    Last year, Moran worked on a project that arranged Fats Waller's music for a dance party, "just to kind of put it back in the mind that Waller is dance music as much as it is concert music," says Moran. "For me, it's the recontextualization. In music, where does the emotion(情感) lie? Are we, as humans, gaining any insight(感悟) on how to talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context," says Moran, "so I want to continue those dialogues. Those are the things I want to foster. "

Landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom has designed a new green roof on the Rangsit Campus of Thammasat University, about 25 miles north of central Bangkok, Thailand. Her imaginative work challenges the common thinking that urbanization has a negative impact on the planet, whether flooding, excess（过度的） energy use, disrupted biodiversity or the heat island effect.

The 236,806-square-foot structure, which opened in December 2019, includes a flood water management system and Asia's largest rooftop organic farm. It combines modern landscape architecture with traditional agricultural knowledge, creating a green and friendly environment.

The green roof, containing an H-shaped landscape, looks like a futuristic hill with a brick building beneath it. The hill features a complex pattern of zigzagging terraces（之字形梯田） of planted beds, leading all the way down to the bottom. When rainwater hits the roof, it flows down the zigzags while being absorbed by the soil in the beds. The excess water is directed into four storage ponds—with a capacity of up to 3 million gallons. The process slows down the flow speed of rainwater runoff compared to a normal concrete rooftop. This keeps the area from flooding during heavy rains.

The roof's terraces are filled with organically grown crops, including a drought tolerant variety of rice, many local vegetables and herbs. The farm can supply the canteens on campus with a large amount of rice, herbs and vegetables a year. The food waste is composted （把……制成堆肥） to make the soil of the farm richer, and water from the storage ponds is used to water plants, creating an entirely localized and circular system.

 The farm serves as an outdoor classroom and a source of local jobs, too. Farmers offer workshops on sustainable agriculture and nutrition as part of the university's sustainability course. "Students and community members are invited to participate in seasonal seeding, harvesting, and soon," says Voraakhom. "The urban farm is training a new generation of organic farmers with real-world skills. It also promotes a sense of community."

Whales are celebrated for being the largest and most intelligent creatures in the ocean. Now, biologists have discovered that they also capture（捕获） tons of carbon from the atmosphere, a service with an economic value of US $1 trillion for all the great whales, according to a new study published by the International Monetary Fund. The study points out that protecting whales, normally viewed as a human good, also has a monetary motivation.

"The carbon capture potential of whales is truly incredible," said the report. "Our conservative estimates put the value of the average great whale at more than US $2 million, and easily over US $1 trillion for the current stock of great whales." Whales absorb carbon in their bodies during their long lives, some of which stretch to 200 years. When they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking the carbon with them. According to the study, each great whale traps around 33 tons of carbon dioxide on average. A tree during the same period only contributes to 3percent of the carbon absorption of the whale.

Whale populations are today a smidgen of what they once were. It is estimated that there are slightly more than 1.3 million whales in the ocean, a quarter of their pre-whaling number of 4 t o5 million. Some species in particular, like the blue whale, are only 3 percent of what they used to be. "We can create financial methods to promote the restoration of the world's whale populations," said the report's authors. "Rewards could help those who pay significant costs as a result of whale protection."

With the Paris Agreement coming into force next year and the effects of climate change ever more widespread, we must prevent the harm to whales. Researchers analyzed that unless new methods are put forward, it would take over 30 years to double the number of current whales, and several generations to return them to their pre-whaling numbers. "Society and our own survival can't afford to wait this long," they said.