Absolutely Unputdownable Books You Have to Read

If you’re seeking a pleasant read, try this short story by Daniel Keyes. He’ll show you how a person feels going from a simple cleaner at a bakery, whose IQ is less than 60, to a genius and the most intelligent person on the planet. In a situation like this, is it possible to overcome your fears and cope with loneliness? Keyes offers his answer to this question.

A giant generation ship is sailing without guidance through the depths of the universe. Its passengers have long forgotten the outside world and believed in a pre-technological culture marked by superstition (迷信). This novel has brought Heinlein wide recognition, and will grasp you tight and won’t let you go for months (or even years) afterward. Are we, the digital generation, different from the passengers of that imaginary spaceship?

Adapted from the author’s own experience, this story is about the main things in life: choices we make, the power of love and devotion. The story of a thirteen-year-old boy who one day has to gather all his strength and courage and take a step towards adulthood proves once again that dreams do come true. After all, no matter how many pounds we have, we’re all trying not to lose hope.

If you don’t enjoy thrillers or sci-fi and stories about dragon-riding detectives, if you’re longing for something emotional, slow and gentle, this beautiful little book by Francoise Sagan is just what you need. Strongly recommended by psychological doctors, it’s a pleasant exception among traditional romance novels: you’ll find all of the advantages of high-quality literature here. And yes, it’s a real page-turner.

Society looks down on people who collect the wastes of others, but what they don’t realize is that they could get more money in one day than what they get in one week working at their daily job from selling other people’s unwanted goods.

I am no “make-money-quick guru” but I have made a couple thousand dollars from selling what others throw out to the garbage. As the saying goes: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

You don’t have to start a business. You could simply sell second-hand things people give away and profit from it. In my high school days, I had my first experience selling an old pre-loved Logitech keyboard to a buyer on Gumtree.com.au for $50. I remember how exciting it was for me to make money from something I no longer needed. I technically made a $50 profit in less than an hour.

How to make $1,000 with $0 in a day?

Go on platforms such as Facebook market or Gumtree and find things people are giving away for free in your local area, then sell them. I found an abundance of household items like cupboards, shelves, mirror cabinet, and chairs that sell very well. Don’t worry what people think of you, remember that you could get a few hundred for those.

Reinvest your money and buy something with a higher value that someone might be happy to get rid of, and sell that for a profit of $600, etc. Your action is not just about making money, but also seeing it as using the earth’s resources efficiently and not wasting them in the trash.

If there is one thing I learned from this practice, it is that: there is always someone out there who considers one man’s trash as treasure, no matter what the item is.

The average temperature on Earth is now 1℃ hotter than it was in the late 1800s, and that temperature will keep rising toward the serious 1.5℃ standard over the next five years, according to a new report.

The authors of the new report predict that the average annual temperature on Earth will temporarily hit 1.5℃ of warming at some point in the next five years. “That possibility has doubled since last year. We’re seeing increasing changes in our climate,” says Randall Cerveny, a climate scientist at Arizona State University.

Topping 1.5℃ of warming in a single year wouldn’t break the Paris Agreement. But with every passing year of rising greenhouse gas emissions (排放), it becomes more likely that humans will cause catastrophic warming. The report calculates there’s a 90% chance that one of the next five years will be the warmest year on record. “It is yet another wakeup call that the world needs to speed up commitments to slash greenhouse gas emissions,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

If the U.S. follows through on new promises to cut down on its greenhouse gas emissions, it would help limit global warming to some extent, although other countries including China would also need to reduce their emissions in the next 10 years.

In April, the U.S. promised to cut the emissions in half by 2030 compared with 2005 levels. Most of those cuts would need to come from electricity generation and transportation. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is seeing more pressure to invest in clean energy. On Wednesday, a Dutch court ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its carbon emissions more quickly, although the company says it expects to appeal (上诉) the decision. And a small activist hedge fund (对冲基金会) successfully placed at least two new candidates on Exxon Mobil’s board of directors, with the goal of pushing the company to take climate change more seriously.

When it comes to speeding up, some electric vehicles rely not only on a battery to deliver the necessary wattage, but also on a second source of power called a supercapacitor (超级电容器).

The battery serves as a marathon runner, providing a steady giving-off over a long distance. The supercapacitor is a racer who runs a short distance at top speed, releasing a large amount of energy rapidly. Besides, supercapacitors can be recharged more quickly, too. They can, though, store only a part of the amount of energy which a battery stores, so they soon run out.

Because of this, engineers have been trying for a while to combine the best bits of a supercapacitor with the most useful features of a battery, to make a storage device with both speed and endurance. They are now having some success.

Indeed, NAWA Technologies, France, claims its supercapacitor-like battery could run more than twice the distance of an electric car, allowing it to run for 1,000 km on a single charge. This new device could also, NAWA says, be recharged to 80% of its capacity in as little as five minutes.

Capacitors and batteries work in different ways, so combining them is difficult. A capacitor stores energy physically, in the form of static electricity (静电). This is easily and rapidly released, so capacitors have good power density (the rate at which they move energy, per unit of weight). An acceptable modern supercapacitor has a power density of several kilowatts per kilogram.

Batteries store their energy chemically, in the form of reactive substances in their two electric poles. The electric current is the reason for the battery’s existence. Chemical reactions take time, so batteries have low power density.

A lithium-ion battery (锂电池) of the sort used in electric cars might gather only a tenth of a kilowatt per kilogram. But chemicals can hold a lot of energy, so batteries have high energy density (the amount of energy they can contain, again per unit weight). A Li-ion battery can store 200-300 watt-hours per kilogram (wh/kg). However, supercapacitors generally manage less than 10 wh/kg.