As days are getting shorter and colder, people can often find themselves feeling sad or lacking the motivation to do anything. One possible reason for those feelings is seasonal affective disorder (SAD), which is common during the cold months. 【小题1】 If your dog loses interest in its favourite games or walks, they may be experiencing it. Here’s how to give your dog’s mood a boost.

Analyzing your dog’s behaviour will help you get a better understanding of whether they may be feeling sad. 【小题2】 Knowing what to expect throughout the day and feeling comfortable in their surroundings is very important for a dog.

Even when you’re inside, make sure to spend time playing or training your dog. Try to come up with new games that require you to interact with your dog. This is a great way to get your pet excited and boost their mood, and yours, too.

As with humans, the lack of sunlight during the winter can cause lower mood levels, so it is very important for your dog to get as much sunlight exposure as possible. 【小题4】 You can also try other strategies such as moving their bed closer to a window, or even use more artificial lighting.

The winter months are colder and darker, and it might be inviting to skip an exercise or a walk outside, but much like humans, this can have a significant effect on your dog’s mood. 【小题5】

Eating insects is one of those ideas that never quite seem to catch on. The United Nations spread the idea a decade ago, but, in the West at least, insects remain mostly absent from supermarket shelves. Faced with an unsatisfied public, scientists have been exploring other options. One is to feed the insects instead to farm animals, which are not so picky.

Of course, the insects need to eat, too. To date, they have mostly reared (饲养) on leftover chicken feed. But the supply of that is limited, and if insect-reared meat is to take off, new sources will be needed. Niels Eriksen, a biochemist at Aalborg University, suggests feeding them on the waste products of the beer industry.

The world knocks back around 185bn litres of beer every year. Each litre produces between three and ten litres of wastewater full of thrown-away grains. The mix is rich in protein but lacking in carbohydrates (碳水化合物), especially compared with chicken feed.

Most insects grown for feed depend, in the wild, on the carbohydrates found in bad fruit. Whether insects would actually consider beer waste a square meal was, therefore, unclear.

The researchers used the baby insects of the black soldier fly. The young insects were divided into three groups, which were offered beer waste, chicken feed or a mixture of both. The researchers monitored both their weight gain and the amount of CO, they produced. They found the baby insects happily consumed both beer waste and chicken feed, and grew equally well on either food source. Dr Eriksen found few differences in how nutritious the insects would be to farm animals.

The experiment may have implications beyond the beer business, too. Bone meal from farms, and waste from other food industries are all likewise plentiful and protein-rich.

All now look to be reasonable targets for nutrient recycling by insects. Whether consumers will be willing to eat insect-reared beef, though, remains to be seen.

Clark’s Nutcrackers generally live in high mountain whitebark pine (白皮松) forests. They seem to prefer forests that open or, at least, with frequent openings. The bird has a gray body with black wings and tail. If you were to draw a cartoon combining a crow with a woodpecker( KNA), you would have the Clark’s Nutcracker. It is a member of the family Corvidae, which includes crows. It was first discovered during the Lewis and Clark Expedition — the first American expedition to cross what is now the western part of the US. Clark described it as “some form of woodpecker”.

The nutcracker consumes the seeds of the whitebark pine. In late summer and fall, the tracker will begin to store its seeds. The bird buries the seeds in the soil. A single Clark’s Nutcracker may store upwards of 30, 000 seeds each year, and there may be as many as 1, 000 separate storage sites. In the winter, they will get the seeds back for food.

This creature, however, does not just rely on its food stores. Much of its diet consists of pine seeds and the remainder is composed of nuts, berries, insects, eggs, and in the winter dead animals flesh. They search for food in the trees and on the ground. They catch insects out of midair in flight. Occasionally, the bird becomes a woodpecker using its specialized mouth to pound dead wood for insects.

The nutcracker possesses the behavior suitable to spread the seeds constantly.

The bird stores them deep enough in the soil to greatly reduce the problem of rodents (啮齿动物) finding the seeds. It will certainly fail to get back a certain percentage of its food. The unused seeds will then start to grow and become new trees so not only does the Clark’s Nutcracker take advantage of the whitebark pine, the tree uses the bird too.