When you hear the word “recycling”, what comes to your mind? The color green or global warming?

    What if I were to tell you there is a dark side of recycling? A type of recycling that does more than good. The dark side of recycling has nothing to do with the environment but rather has a lot to do with the recycling of ideas.

Environmental unrest is not the only trouble we must face. Idea pollution is quickly becoming widespread across the online world.

    Think about it. When was the last time you read an original blog post? I'm guessing it has been quite a while. Why do you think top bloggers of today win so much respect? Do you think they recycle their ideas? With each recycled idea the online world becomes much more polluted. Used content contributes to the ever increasing mass of digital smog.

    The first step to reduce pollution is simple: stop recycling. When you stop recycling, you will then be forced to take up the task of creating from your own ideas. When you recycle an excellent idea, it soon becomes good. When you recycle a good idea, it soon becomes just OK. The chain continues until the key part of what used to make the idea good is saturated, leaving you nothing but a pile of mess.

    In order not to pollute, your ideas must go beyond “just recycled”. Your ideas must stand out from the pollution of the web. For your voice and talent to be heard and seen, you must go far beyond the standard copy of your neighbours' ideas.

    For the next week, make a promise not to recycle. Let your ideas flourish and flow. Believe in your ability to create, because the death of recycling starts with YOU.

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    Alibaba started taking the lead in China, simply enough, by connecting big Chinese, manufacturers(制造商)with big buyers across the world. Its business-to-business site, Alibaba.com allowed business to buy almost everything. Alibaba's advantage wasn't hard to identify: size.

    Alibaba is just big, even by Chinese standards. Its marketplaces attract 231 million active buyers, 8 million sellers, 11.3 billion orders a year—and Alibaba is just the middleman. It encourages people to use its markets—not charging small sellers a percentage of the sale.

    If you want a quick look into the influence of Alibaba on daily Chinese life, take my experience. I moved to Beijing almost a year ago and quickly got tired of visiting small stores across the crowded, polluted city of 20 million people in search of new electronics, bathroom furnishings. “You're looking for what exactly? Why not try it? ” my Chinese teacher asked me one day. With that, my wonderful new relationship with Alibaba began.

    Alibaba's original business-to-business model now is secondary to consumer buying. Chinese retail（零售）buying makes up 80% of Alibaba's profit, and leading that group is Taobao, with 800 million items for sale and the most unbelievable selection of things you'll ever find. TMall.com is Alibaba's other big site, where you can find brand name goods from Nike and Unilever near the lowest prices.

What I have a hard time explaining to friends and family back in the U. S. is how China has gone beyond traditional shopping—big-box retailers(零售商)especially—in favor of online purchases on Taobao and a few other sites. In smaller towns than Beijing, where big retailers have not yet traveled, shopping online is shopping, and shopping is Taobao.

    I have a list of some of my recent purchases on Taobao for a sense of how extensive(广泛的) the marketplace is. Almost everything arrived a day or two after ordering with free shipping. I'm not even a big buyer, because I need friends to help me search the Chinese-language site. When I was searching my purchase history on my Chinese teacher's iPad, which helps me buy goods, I looked through with great difficulty about 10 of her purchases for every one of mine.

    It was a cold winter day. A woman drove up to the Rainbow Bridge tollbooth (收费站). “I'm paying for myself, and for the six cars behind me,” she said with a smile, handing over seven tickets. One after another, the next six drivers arriving at the tollbooth were informed, “Some lady up ahead already paid your fare.”

    It turned out that the woman, Natalie Smith, had read something on a friend's refrigerator: “Practice random(随意的，随机的) kindness and aimless acts of beauty.” The phrase impressed her so much that she copied it down.

    Judy Foreman spotted the same phrase on a warehouse wall far away from home. When it stayed on her mind for days, she gave up and drove all the way back to copy it down. “I thought it was beautiful,” she said, explaining why she'd taken to writing it at the bottom of all her letters, “like a message from above.” Her husband, Frank, liked the phrase so much that he put it up on the classroom wall for his students, one of whom was the daughter of Alice Johnson, a local news reporter. Alice put it in the newspaper, admitting that though she liked it, she didn't know where it came from or what it really meant.

    Two days later, Alice got a call from Anne Herbert, a woman living in Marin. It was in a restaurant that Anne wrote the phrase down on a piece of paper, after turning it around in her mind for days.

    “Here's the idea,” Anne says. “Anything you think there should be more of, do it randomly.” Her fantasies (imagination) include painting the classrooms of poor schools, leaving hot meals on kitchen tables in the poor part of town, and giving money secretly to a proud old lady. Anne says, “Kindness can build on itself as much as violence can.”

    The acts of random kindness spread. If you were one of those drivers who found your fare paid, who knows what you might have been inspired to do for someone else later. Like all great events, kindness begins slowly, with every single act. Let it be yours!

    Let's face it. No one drinks diet sodas for the taste. People drink diet sodas in the hope that it will help them lose weight or at least keep them from gaining it. Yet it seems to have exactly the opposite effect, according to a new study.

    Researchers from the University of Texas said those who drank two or more diet sodas a day had waist size increases that were six times greater than those who didn't drink diet sodas. "What we saw was that the more diet sodas a person drank, the more weight they were likely to gain," said Sharon Fowler.

    The study was based on data from 474 participants in a large, ongoing research project, where the participants were followed for nearly 10 years.

    While the findings are surprising, they also offer some explanations.

    Nutrition expert, Melanie Rogers, who works with overweight patients in New York, has found that when patients are switched from regular to diet sodas, they don't lose weight at all. "We weren't seeing weight loss necessarily, and that was confusing to us," said Rogers.

    So why would diet soda cause weight gain? No one knows for sure yet, but it could be that people think they can eat more if they drink diet sodas, and so over-compensate(补偿) for the missing calories.

    A related study found some sweeteners (甜味剂) raised blood sugar levels in some mice. "Data from this and other potential studies suggest that the promotion of diet sodas and artificial sweeteners may be risky," said Helen P. Hazuda, professor at the University of Texas's school of medicine. "They may be free of calories, but not of consequences."

    It's 11 p.m., and I'm still sitting here writing this article for the school magazine! I've had two weeks to write it, and my teacher, Julia, wants it tomorrow. She's always complaining (抱怨) that I leave things till the last minute. Maybe she's right.

    A month ago I made a decision to be more efficient (有效率的) this year. Well, I've clearly failed. I've also been trying to get fitter for four weeks now. I've started going to the health club. I've even been going to bed earlier. But I'm not feeling any fitter, just a little unhappier. I miss my bad habits. Why is leading a better life so hard?

    I've just read an article on a website, and I've discovered that it isn't my fault (过错)! In fact, it isn't anyone's fault. It's our brain's. It's programmed to make it difficult to break bad habits. There's nothing we can do. Scientists have done experiments that show we use one part of our brain when we think about ourselves and another when we think about other people. However, when we think about ourselves in the future, we use the same part of the brain that we usually use to think about other people. In other words, the brain sees the “future you” as a different person than your “present you.” That's why we don't always find it easy to make good decisions for ourselves in the future.

    But that's not all. Scientists have also discovered that it takes around ten weeks to form a good habit. That's the amount (数量) of time the brain needs to accept new behavioral patterns (形式). The good news is that once you make it to ten weeks, everything becomes a lot easier. The bad news is that ten weeks is a really long time, so it's easy to give up what you want to do before then.

    So even when we want to change our ways and become better people, our brains won't let us. Or is this just an excuse? Look — I've finished my article on time! Anything is possible!