The different parts of a health care system have different focuses. A hospital's stroke （中风） unit monitors blood flow in the brain. The cardiac unit is interested in that same flow, but through and from the heart. Each collection of equipment and data is effective in its own field. Thus, like the story of blind men feeling an elephant, modern health care offers many separate pictures of a patient, but rarely a useful united one.

On top of all this, the instruments that doctors use to monitor health are often expensive, as is the training required to use them. That combined cost is too high for the medical system to scan regularly, for early signs of illness, so patients are at risk of heart disease or a stroke.

An unusual research project called AlzEye, run by Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, in cooperation with University College, London (UCL) , may change this. It is attempting to use the eye as a window through which signals about the health of other organs could be discovered. The doctors in charge of it, Siegfried Wagner and Pearse Keane, are studying Moorfields' database of eye scans, which offers a detailed picture of the health of the retina (视网膜).

The project will go a step further：With the information about other aspects of patients' health collected from other hospitals around England, doctors will be able to look for more accurate signs of disease through eye scans.

The Moorfields data set has lots of linked cases to work with--far more than any similar project. For instance, the UK Biobank, one of the world's leading collections of medical data about individual people, contains 631 cases of a "major cardiac adverse event". The Moorfields data contain about 12, 000 such. The Biobank has data on about 1, 500 stroke patients. Moorfields has 11, 900. For the disease on which the Moorfields project will focus to start with dementia, the data set holds 15, 100 cases. The only comparable study has 86.

Wagner and Keane are searching for patterns in the eye that show the emergence of disease elsewhere in the body. If such patterns could be recognized reliably, the potential impact would be huge.

I'm at the salon (美发厅) and my hairdresser Kristi Lauren is talking rubbish. To be precise, she's telling me exactly how much waste her salon recycles: last year it was 125 tonnes. Everything from hair to shampoo (洗发水) bottles is recycled in innovative ways. Her waste is collected by Waste Free Systems, a social enterprise.

Lauren explains the problem, "Our colour tubes are boxed, and they can have a paper ingredient (成分) list as well as the plastic cover and the metal tube. All our product bottles. Then there's all that cut hair, and the unused colour that would normally be washed down the sink."

Waste Free Systems charges a fee for collecting the waste, and money raised by selling recycled materials goes to charities: Lauren, who runs an eight-chair salon, says, "It's a small price to pay. It ends up being just about $2 per client － we call it a green tax."

Paul Frasca is the co-founder of Sustainable Salons, a similar service which now works with almost 1,000 hairdressing salons and beauty salons across Australia and New Zealand. Frasca says many salons are now using their green programs actively as a marketing strategy. "The environmentally aware consumer is now the most important customer on the market. So it doesn't just make environmental sense." 

Both programs are researching new ways to redirect waste. Waste Free Systems is using hair to provide nutrients for plants, while Sustainable Salons makes hair products for cleaning up oil leakage. Sustainable Salons has partnered with Dresden Vision to turn plastic shampoo bottles into frames (框架) for eyeglasses. Waste Free Systems has experimented with turning plastic bottles into 3D printing material.

The UK is home to 26 world-ranked universities of the top 200 globally. At the heart of each university is the library, a space for students to access resources, absorb knowledge and gather thoughts. Here are some of our must-visit libraries across the UK. 

The British Library, London

Located in London, the British Library is home to over 170 million items. The collections offer a glimpse into literary heritage over the ages, from books to maps to manuscripts. Visitors can browse treasures including Leonardo da Vinci's notebook. Students with a reading pass are known to spend hours at a time in the reading rooms.

Bodleian Old Library, Oxford

Dating back to 1488, the Bodleian Old Library has three notable reading rooms. It is celebrated for its late Gothic architecture. You may recognize the elaborately carved ceiling from scenes in Harry Potter. Students at the university automatically get access to the library. 

John Rylands Library, Manchester

Opened in 1900, this library is part of the University of Manchester, one of the top five universities in the UK. This library offers limitless research potential for students. Whether you want to make use of the rich collections available, or simply explore the site, this library should be on everyone's must-see list.

The Mitchell Library, Glasgow

The Mitchell Library is one of Glasgow's most famous landmarks. On the top of the copper dome（圆屋顶） is a bronze statue of the Roman goddess, Minerva. Visitors can climb the dome for the city's most distinctive rooftop views.