Three minutes of looking at red light once a week may help our eyesight, new research suggests. The findings show that red light might be a cheap and easy treatment for declines (衰退) in color vision (视力) as we get older.

Last year, researchers from University College London did a study on red light therapy (疗法). 24 healthy volunteers, aged between 28 and 72, were asked to look at red light for three minutes every day for two weeks. Tests later found that the eyesight of people over the age of 40 improved.

To test the possible weak points of their therapy, they did a new study this year. Instead of using the light every day, they used it once a week. The new study included 20 volunteers, aged between 34 and 70, all with healthy vision. Some received red light therapy in the morning, and others received it in the afternoon. They were then tested on their color vision up to a week later.

On the whole, those who got the treatment in the morning showed a 17% improvement in their color vision, even a week later. Those who got the treatment in the afternoon did not have any improvement.

“We’ve found that one single treatment in the morning can greatly improve declining vision.” said lead author Glen Jeffrey.

The findings do support their earlier work, and they might make the treatment more practicable, since a once-weekly treatment is easier to stick to than a daily one. But the team’s promising results are still drawn on small numbers of healthy volunteers Larger studies would be needed to show the help of red light therapy.

“In the near future, a once-a-week three-minute treatment could be done while making a coffee or listening to a song, and such a simple thing could change eye care and vision around the world,” Jeffrey said.

Given its low cost (as little as $15) per machine, and simplicity, the team is excited about the future of their therapy.

In October, Mediterranean fruit flies were discovered in an area of Los Angeles. California is a big farming state, and this was serious news for farmers. The Mediterranean fruit fly, often known as the “Medfly”, is one of the most serious threats faced by farmers worldwide. Once the Medfly makes its way into an area, it can be very hard to get rid of.

The fies lay their eggs in over 300 kinds of fruits and vegetables. When the eggs hatch, they turn into worm-like larvae (幼虫) that can ruin these products. The problem is that it can be hard to know that the flies are there until it’ s too late. That’ s because the fruits and vegetables still look normal even after the eggs are laid inside. So the damaged fruits and vegetables can be sent to other places, allowing the Medflies to spread.

Mediterranean fruit fies were first found in California in 1975, but they really became a problem in the 1980s. Luckily, Califormia has developed a program to control the Medflies. The program involves using planes to drop millions of Medflies over the area. That may sound like a bad idea, but it’ s actually a tricky way to make sure that Medfly numbers go down.

The trick? The airplanes only drop male flies, and all of them have been treated so that they are sterile. This means that even though they can mate with female fruit flies, the eggs produced will never grow or hatch.

In the early growing stages, these sterile flies are grown in labs in Hawaii and Guatemala. The insects are colored with a special substance to make sure they won’t be confused with wild Medflies.

These immature insects are then sent to Califormia in huge numbers -around 200 million a week. They’ re raised until they’ re adults, and then they’ re treated to be sterile. Finall , the flies are released from airplanes, sing a special method designed to spread them out over a wide area. The government says that the number of infestations (times when flies are found) has been cut by over 90%.

Turtles have a habit of eating plastic objects floating in the sea, which may kill them. Many believe that it is because floating plastic bags look similar to jellyfish, which many types of turtles love to eat. However, lots of plastic objects that turtles eat do not look like jellyfish at all. Joseph Pfaller of the University of Florida doubts that the smell of sea micro-organisms (微生物) which live on floating plastic objects attract turtles to eat.

The kind of idea first appeared in 2016. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, noticed that certain chemicals, especially dimethyl sulphide (二甲基硫), which can be found on plastics where micro-organisms live, are those which many seabirds sniff (嗅) to find food. These birds are more likely to eat plastics.

Since turtles usually appear above the sea surface and sniff the air when going to their feeding areas, Dr. Pfaller believed that they are following these same chemicals like those seabirds and mistakenly think that floating plastic objects are edible.

To test that idea, he and his team did an experiment using loggerhead turtles. They exposed 15 turtles to four smells: the smell of clean water; the smell of turtle-feeding food; the smell of a clean plastic bottle; and the smell of a bottle that had been kept in the ocean for five weeks to allow micro-organisms to grow on it. When sniffing both the smell of turtle-feeding food and that of five-week-old bottles, turtles kept their noses out of the water more than three times as long, and took twice as many breaths as they did when sniffing the smell of fresh bottle-plastic or clean water.

Though they have not yet tested whether dimethyl sulphide on the five -week-old bottles cause turtles to cat plastic objects, Dr. Pfaller and his team think it is highly possible.