Animals in Odd Places

Tree Goats

These goats will do a lot for their favorite snacks-including climbing to the top of a 9-m-tall tree! Every summer the argan trees in southwest Morocco produce bitter-tasting fruit that the local goats can’t resist. And these peckish goats are doing us humans a favour — when they spit (for sometimes poo!) out the indigestible nut inside the argan fruit, the nuts can be collected to make an oil that’s used in hair products and food!

City Whales

They’re not visiting the Empire State Building — they’re on the lookout for food! Humpback whales are swimming back in the waters off the coast of New York City in the USA. Why? Years of cleanup efforts in the Hudson River — a tidal estuary where fresh and salt water meet — have brought back algae, zooplankton and fish. And the humpbacks, which are the ultimate foodie tourists, weren’t far behind! So far this year there have been an incredible 377 sightings.

Forest Penguins

Fiordland crested penguins prefer the warm waters and misty rainforest of southwest New Zealand to the icy Antarctic! With smaller bodies than many cold-weather penguins (such as emperors), the flightless birds live in balmy 21℃. And their eggs stay toasty in this warmer habitat, too, tucked away in caves, bushes and tree stumps where males sit on the nests.

Ocean Sloths

Pygmy three-toed sloths might be slow climbers, but when they get into the water, they’re powerful paddlers! These special sloths, which only live in the mangroves of a tiny island off the coast of Panama in Central America, plop into the sea when they want to move to a new tree. Their tummies are often filled with gas due to their leafy diet, so they stay afloat easily-and they can move three times faster in the water than they can on the ground. But since we’re talking about sloths, that’s really saying much!

The driver, Zhang Sai, hovered outside an apartment building in Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak. He had been ordered not to take food to customers’ doors in order to minimize the risk of infection. But the woman on the phone was pleading, he recalled. The food was for her mother, who couldn’t go down to meet him. Mr. Zhang relented. He would drop off the order and sprint away. As he placed the bag on the floor, Mr. Zhang said, the door opened. Startled, he rushed away. Without thinking, he jabbed the elevator button with his finger, touching a surface that could transmit the virus. That was how Mr. Zhang, 32, found himself speeding back to his delivery station with one finger held aloft, careful not to touch the rest of his hand.

For many in China, delivery drivers like Mr. Zhang are the only connection to the outside world. Once a common but invisible presence on the streets of nearly every Chinese city, the drivers are now being honored as heroes. What exhausting and dangerous work! Mr. Zhang, who works for Hema, a supermarket chain owned by the tech giant Alibaba, crisscrosses (穿梭) the city armed only with the face masks and hand sanitizer that his company supplies each morning.

The epidemic has brought some unexpected bright spots. Before, Mr. Zhang said, he sometimes ran red lights during rush hour in order to meet his delivery goals for the day. Now, the streets are empty. He has no problem getting around. People are nicer, too. Some customers barely opened the door or avoided eye contact. After the outbreak erupted, everyone said thank you.

A couple John and Mary had a nice family and two lovely children. John had just been asked to go on a business trip to another city and would be gone for several days. It was decided that Mary needed an outing and would go along too. They hired a reliable woman to care for the children and made the trip, returning home a little earlier than they had planned.

As they drove into their home town happily, they noticed smoke, and they went off their usual route to see what it was. They found a home in flames. Mary said, “Oh well it isn’t our fire, let’s go home.” But John drove closer and exclaimed, “That home belongs to Fred Jones who works at the plant. He wouldn’t be off work yet, maybe there is something we could do.” “It has nothing to do with us.” protested Mary. “You have your good clothes on, let’s not get any closer.” But John drove up and stopped and they were both horror stricken to see the whole house in flames. A woman on the lawn was in hysterics screaming, “The children! Get the children!” sobbed the woman, “down the hall and to the left, they are in the basement.”

In spite of Mary’s protests John grabbed the water hose and soaked his clothes, put his wet handkerchief on his head and bolted for the basement full of smoke and scorching hot. He found the door and grabbed two children, holding one under each arm. As he left, he could hear some more whimpering. He delivered the two badly frightened and nearly suffocated children into waiting arms and filled his lungs with fresh air and started back asking how many more children were down there. They told him two more and Mary grabbed his arm and screamed, “John! Don’t go back! It’s suicide! That house will cave in any second!”

But he shook her off and went back. It seemed an eternity before he found the two children. As he stumbled up the endless steps, the thought went through his mind that there was something strangely familiar about the little bodies clinging to him, and at last when they came out into the sunlight and fresh air, he found that he had just rescued his own children.

The baby-sitter had left them at this home while she did some shopping.

To address the plastic pollution troubling the world’s seas and waterways, Cornell University chemists have developed a new polymer (聚合物) that can degrade (降解) plastic when exposed to ultraviolet radiation, according to the research published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

“We have created a new plastic that has the mechanical properties required by commercial fishing gear. If it eventually gets lost in the water environment, this material can degrade on a realistic time scale,” said lead researcher Bryce Lipinski, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Cornell University. “This material could effectively reduce persistent plastic accumulation in the environment.”

Commercial fishing contributes to about half of all floating plastic waste that ends up in the oceans. Fishing nets and ropes are primarily made from three kinds of polymers, none of which easily degrade. “While research of degradable plastics has received much attention in recent years,” Lipinski said, “obtaining a material with a mechanical strength comparable to commercial plastic remains a difficult challenge.”

Coates and his research team have spent the past 15 years developing the new plastic called isotactic polypropylene oxide, or iPPO. While its original discovery was in 1949, the mechanical strength of this material was unknown before this recent work. The high isotacticity and polymer chain length of their material makes it different from previous plastics and provides its mechanical strength.

Lipinski and other scientists want no race of the polymer to be left in the environment. He notes there is precedent (先例) for the biodegradation of small chains of iPPO which could effectively make it disappear and ongoing efforts aim to prove this.