For years, I was in the rat race, my sense of wonder lost. Gardening was my antidote (解毒药). It gave me time to stop, listen and absorb all the little details that nature has to offer—nurturing the earth, plants and myself to fight against the aggression and tiredness of everyday working life.

I quit my job and had a vision for my company. I wanted others to find the comfort that my garden gave me. Now, I watch my clients experience their own transformations. A corner that was once an unwelcoming place of weeds is a child's play area; a lonely person has an inspiring, evolving view.

Gardening requires us to be present in the moment, while also imagining the future. You may see a beautiful flower and surprise for a minute at the magic of nature. Some flowers last for a day, others for a season. Some come back year after year. Seasons pass and you become connected to the changes in life in a deeper, more spiritual way. This builds acceptance.

Where there once may have been beauty, there might now be an empty space and a deep sense of sadness... But gardening brings hope—we can create something beautiful again and that space will no longer be bare.

Hope is one of many emotions stirred by gardening. Whether you're growing vegetables to eat, planting tiny seeds or tending flowers, there is always a great sense of satisfaction at the end of a session. How you choose to garden is deeply personal to you—it's about creating something fruitful, alone or with others.

The key is to have a vision, ideas and bright hopes for the future.

While global warming and ocean acidification driven by pollution cause a real threat to sea creatures, climate change is not the primary driver threatening to cause the extinction (灭绝) of large ocean animals. It is humans that are threatening large sea creatures primarily by hunting and fishing them.

Researchers findings reflect a phenomenon experienced by ancient land ecosystems (生态系统). These losses in the ocean are paralleling what humans did to land animals some 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, when we wiped out around half of the big-bodied mammals on Earth, like mammoths, mastodons. saber-tooth cats and the like.

The increasing threat to large groups of sea animals is a recent phenomenon. The researchers made this discovery by comparing characteristics of nearly 2,500 extinct sea vertebrates and mollusks alongside others currently in danger of extinction. They found that smaller sea animals were a little more likely than large ones to be killed off during five previous mass extinction events—the most recent of which was associated with a small planet’s strike some 65 million years ago.

What was surprising to the researchers was that they did not see a similar kind of pattern in any of the previous mass extinction events that they studied.

The study shows that a sixth mass extinction, which may already be underway, could kill off larger-bodied animals while leaving smaller ones behind. That could have a terrible long-term impact.

Such removal of the largest animals from the modern oceans, which never happened in the history of animal life, may disturb the order of ecosystems for millions of years even at levels of taxonomic loss far below those of previous mass extinctions.

This news should serve as a wake-up call for humans to fundamentally change the way they manage the oceans. That is to say, it is a warning of what will happen if we don’t get our act together.

Limiting industrialization of the oceans may be necessary to give threatened animals time and space to recover. Most whaling has been banned since the 1980s. We have brought gray whales back from the edge of extinction and blue whales are coming back too.

The researchers point out that cutting back on carbon emissions (排放) will also be   necessary to slow extinctions.

Two 18-year-old girls, Jrasnatt and Marisa, learned about a major challenge faced by the cricket (蟋蟀) farmers. Bigger crickets often attack the smaller ones. When attacked, a cricket will cut off its own legs to escape. But after abandoning a leg, this animal will often die or becomes less valuable to buyers.

Jrasnatt and Marisa were determined to solve the problem. After some research, they learned that colored light can influence the behaviors of some animals, including insects. To find out, the teen researchers transferred groups of 30 newly hatched crickets into each of 24 boxes. The crickets in six boxes were exposed only to red light. Another six boxes were lit with green. Six more boxes were lit with blue. These three groups of insects spent daytime hours throughout their lives — about two months — in a world bathed in just one color of light. The last six boxes of crickets lived in natural light.

“We see they’re growing every day and take notes on what’s happening,” says Marisa. “We’re like the parents of the crickets.” Throughout, the teens kept track of the crickets. The share of crickets with missing legs was about 9 in every 10 among those living in red, blue or natural light. But fewer than 7 in every 10 crickets who grew up in a world of green lost legs. Also, the survival rate for crickets in the green box was four or five times higher than that in the other boxes.

Crickets’ eyes are adapted to only see in green and blue light. So, in red light, the world would always look dark. Without being able to see, they are more likely to hit each other. That results in crickets losing legs. Besides, crickets are more attracted to blue light than green light, which pulls them closer together and leads to more fights. In the green light box, the crickets were most likely to mind their own business and avoid struggle.

Creating a green-light world for crickets is a solution that could be brought to the farms. Jrasnatt and Marisa are already in talks with the farmers. Those farmers plan to try out green lighting to see if it will boost their profits.