2 . Elon Musk has offered a prize of $100m for the best carbon capture proposal. I can save his committee a lot of time. The money should go to Peter Wohlleben, whose book The Hidden Life of Trees was the most encouraging blockbuster (一鸣惊人) of 2015.Wohlleben’s idea is this: do nothing about trees. Stop fiddling (乱作为) with them, thinking that we can deal with climate change better than nature. If we fiddle, our Romes will burn.

The Hidden Life of Trees argued that trees are social. It shows that they can be our saviours. But it’s terribly hard to let ourselves be saved. We think we can be the authors of our salvation (拯救). Of course, there are things we could and should be doing, but in terms of forestry practice, often what’s billed as part of the solution is part of the problem.

Anyone who has planted a tree in their garden knows that it has a far-reaching effect — it makes your garden cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Forests cool by transpiring (蒸发). If there’s no water, there’s no cooling. Drought can kill trees fast, but trees have many ways of dealing with it, and Wohlleben sets them out. As a species, we have survived many climatic changes by changing our behaviour — and that’s how trees survive, too. Trees learn from their past harms and produce younger ones programmed with those lessons. They regulate their growth by changing the rate at which they drip (点滴)-feed them with sugar solution through root networks.

Deciduous (落叶的) forests in particular remove greenhouse gases effectively as long as they live. Cut them down and burn them and you’re releasing carbon dioxide not just from the wood, but also from the forest floor. Deciduous trees are not “harvest-ready” at 200 years: they are teenagers. We must interrogate comforting expressions such as “renewable energy”, and learn the real cost of our toilet paper.

If we don’t learn to do nothing about trees, they will eventually be alone anyway — but without us. Wohlleben brilliantly and readably shows us how urgent and how hard it is to do nothing.

5 . Today, poetry and science are often considered to be mutually exclusive(互相排斥)career paths. But that wasn’t always the case. The mathematician Ada Lovelace and the physicist James Clerk Maxwell were both accomplished poets. The poet John Keats was a licensed surgeon. Combining the two practices fell out of favor in the 1800s. But translating research into lyrics, haiku, and other poetic forms is resurging(再现)among scientists as they look for alternative ways to inspire others with their findings.

“Poetry is a great tool for questioning the world,” says Sam Illingworth, a poet and a geoscientist who works at the University of Western Australia. Through workshops and a new science-poetry journal, called Consilience, Illingworth is helping scientists to translate their latest results into poems that can attract appreciation from those outside of their immediate scientific field.

Stephany Mazon, a scientist from the University of Helsinki in Finland, joined one of Illingworth’s workshops. In the workshop, she was grouped with other scientists and tasked with writing a haiku, a 17-syllable-long poem, which spotlighted water, a fluid that featured in all of the group members’ research projects. “It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly easy to write the poem,” Mazon says. She plans to continue writing. “We do a disservice(伤害)to ourselves to think that scientists can’t be artistic and that art can’t be used to communicate scientific ideas,” Mazon says.

That viewpoint is echoed by Illingworth, who thinks science communication initiatives are too often dominated by public lectures with their hands-off PowerPoint slides. “Actually, when science communication involves writing and sharing poems, it invites a two-way dialogue between experts and nonexperts,” he says. Scientist-poet Manjula Silva, an educator at Imperial College London, agrees. Poetry provides a way to translate complex scientific concepts into a language that everyone can understand, Silva says.

Scientists and poets are both trying to understand the world and communicate that understanding with others. The distinction between scientists and poets is less than people might think. We’re all just people with hopefully really interesting things to say and to share.

It was Mid-Autumn Festival. 79-year-old Bill Porter     1     (grab) a glass of whiskey while enjoying the full moon, and recited an ancient Chinese poem outside his house in the United States. Porter has translated some 2,000 Chinese poems     2     English and published a series of books related to Chinese poetry and philosophy in the past decades.

“To me, the beauty about ancient Chinese poems is     3     the lines of poetry are usually short, with five or seven Chinese     4     (character). You have to read them many times before you can discover their inside meaning. It’s like     5     adventure. “Among Porter’s favorite poets were Su Shi, noted for his optimism in the face of challenges,     6     Tao Yuanming, an Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420) poet famous for his pursuit of free spirit.     7     (see) the Chinese poets as his dear friends, Porter once traveled across China to visit their former residences, birthplaces and graves.

Currently, Porter is translating more poems by Tao Yuanming, and his translation work Poems of the Masters     8     (publish) in China soon. He will continue working hard to introduce the beauty of the     9     (tradition) Chinese culture to Westerners. “The Chinese culture is like a treasure chest,” he said, “I would like     10     (share) the treasure I found with others.”

7 . How would you translate Chairman Mao Zedong’s expression: “Bu Ai Hong Zhuang Ai Wu Zhuang”? “English or American translators might use the words: They love uniforms not gay dresses,” said Xu Yuanchong, a well-known Chinese translator and the first Asian winner of the world’s highest prize for translation, the Aurora Borealis Prize. Xu thought that this translation was correct but not beautiful at all. He cleverly used just two words—“face” and “powder”—to translate it as “To face the powder and not to powder the face”, which became one of Xu’s most representative translations.

Xu thought that the equivalence (相同) of idea, sound and form were the three basic elements found in good translation. However, his method—recreation instead of literal (字面的)—is controversial. Some people said that it was different from the original text. “I think not.” Xu replied firmly. “Western languages are comparable. It’s easy to find the equivalent of English in other languages. But it’s different in Chinese. There are only 50% of equivalents between Chinese and English. If you cannot find an equivalent, then you must find the best words to translate. To find the best word is innovation. It’s recreation,” he explained.

Xu Yuanchong likes to communicate with the younger generation about academic work, hoping that working together to spread Chinese culture will contribute to making the world a better place.

Xu Yuanchong also authored a book, which in Chinese is called “Meng Yu Zhen”, which literally means “dream and reality”. But Xu created a different English name for it. He used “A dream translated into reality”. “This summarizes my entire life. My whole life is about translating my dream into reality,” he explained.

Xu Yuanchong was an expert at translating ancient Chinese poems into English and French but even at the age of 96 had one dream still to fulfill—to translate all of Shakespeare’s works into Chinese.