In Northwestern Italy, rice farms are employing bats. Bats are the foremost known predators of insects that are active at night, including several pests that can be found in rice fields. "The idea is that what is needed to achieve sustainable food production is what we already have, but has been ignored for a decade," says Laura Garzoli, 2017 winner of BCFN Young Earth Solutions.

“It has been predicted that, globally, 50 percent of pest species have become pests because chemicals killed their natural predators. There is no sustainability in the long term if there are no conservation efforts,” says Garzoli.

Since 2017, Garzoli, along with colleagues from the National Research Council has fixed 60 artificial bat roosts in three rice fields in Northwestern Italy. Now, they are collecting bats’ waste to analyze their diets at these sites and to gain insight into the insects living in these areas.

“In Italy, there are 34 bat species, each feeding on a variety of insects —each bat species has its preferred insect snack,”—says Garzoli. Bats can eat up to one-third of their body weight each night, which means they can consume thousands of insects per night. They are also flying hunters — they can prey on new non-native pest species.

Garzoli is committed to developing an awareness of the importance of bats in the ecosystem. "Their usefulness has been acknowledged in several countries — not only do they contribute to protecting crops, but they are important pollinators. Bats still get bad press in the news, in particular concerning the spreading of virus diseases, says Garzoli to Food Tank. She explains, "Many bat species are nowadays facing the risk of extinction.”

Garzoli is also drafting a best practice guide for farmers outlining habitat management techniques for sustainable production.

Are healthy people happier than seriously ill ones? Not necessarily. In a study described in The Journal of experimental Psychology, a group of people with end-stage kidney（肾）failure were provided with electronic devices that required them to record their moods at various times throughout the day. For comparison, a group of healthy volunteers used the same devices. When researchers had studied the results, they found that the levels of happiness were about the same for the two groups.

The researchers, led by Dr. Jason Riis of Princeton when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, also found that the healthy people greatly overestimated how unhappy the sick ones would be. And the sick people overestimated how happy healthy ones would be.

For the study, 49 kidney disease patients who were undergoing dialysis（透析）sections three times a week were given personal digital assistants, as 49 healthy volunteers were matched to the patients by age, race, education and sex. When the devices beeped, the subjects were asked to rate their mood on a 5-point scale, with 2 defined as “very pleasant” and minus 2 defined as “very unpleasant”. On average, the kidney patients rated their mood as 0.70, while the healthy subjects rated it as 0.83. The participants were also asked to describe other emotions they might be feeling, including joy and anxiety, and to describe their levels of physical comfort. And sometimes they were asked, “How do you feel about your life as a whole?”

A better understanding of how well people are able to adapt to poor health, the researchers said, could help doctors and patients make wiser choices about their medical care. Earlier studies have also found that seriously ill patients described themselves as being happy. But these patients were not given a chance to answer questions about their mood privately and repeatedly over a period of time, Dr. Riis said, and so it was unclear how accurate their responses were.

“I like pigs,” Winston Churchill supposedly once said. “Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” Whether Churchill’s contemporary George Orwell also liked pigs is less clear. But he, too, surely saw something in them that was lacking in many domestic (驯养的) animals, for it was they who ended up running the show in his novel, Animal Farm. Pigs, then, are intelligent social creatures.

And, like all animals, they sometimes fight. Some pigs tend to be attackers; others tend to be victims. Who is what depends largely on weight. Among pigs, pounds mean power. The attacker might bite, kick or push the victim. Most conflicts end in seconds, but some last a minute or two.

In most animal species fights would be like that. However, many of the conflicts among pigs Dr Norscia, a biologist, observed had interested parties beyond the fighters. He therefore wanted to understand the role of these bystanders in solving conflicts — and what this says about pigs’ cognitive (认知的) abilities.

Since there was usually not enough time for a bystander pig to become involved in the heat of a conflict, though this did occur, Dr Norscia looked at what happened in the three minutes immediately following a fight. Sometimes, he found, the fighters were reconciled with each other on their own. The more distantly related the fighters were, the more frequently this happened. Dr Norscia guessed that relations between close relatives are more secure to start with, so rebuilding friendly relations rapidly is less necessary for them.

On other occasions, however, a third pig stepped in. Sometimes this bystander interacted with the attacker, which reduced the number of attacks coming after. Sometimes, the bystander interacted with the victim. This appeared to calm the victim down, for it reduced anxiety-related behavior.

Social intelligence need not, though, be entirely selfless. Pigs are more likely to step in after a conflict if they are closely related to either the attacker or the victim. This is probably an example of kin selection (亲属选择), which favors the development of behavior.