【推荐2】Using more wood for construction has been praised as a lower-emission alternative to carbon-intensive steel and concrete but it may not be as carbon friendly as thought.

“It would be very convenient if wood were a better solution,” says Tim Searchinger atPrinceton University. Wood is, in theory, a renewable resource and any wood used in buildings acts as long-term carbon storage. Research has found that using wood for construction instead of concrete and steel can reduce emissions.

But Searchinger says many of these studies are based on the false assumption that harvesting wood is carbon neutral (中和的). “Only a small percentage of the wood gets into a timber (木材) product, and a fraction (小部分) of that gets into a timber product that can replace concrete and steel in a building,” he says. Efficiencies vary in different countries, but much of a harvested tree is left to rot and used for short-lived products like paper or burned for energy, all of which generate emissions.

In a report for the World Resources Institute, Searchinger and his colleagues have modeled how using more wood for construction would affect emissions between 2010 and 2050, accounting for the emissions from harvesting the wood. They considered various types of forests and fractions of wood going towards construction. They also factored in the emissions savings from replacing concrete and steel. In general, they found a large increase in global demand for wood would probably lead to rising emissions for decades.

The researchers report in a related paper that increasing forest harvests between 2010 and 2050 would add emissions equal to about 10 percent of total yearly emissions. William Moomaw at Tufts University in Massachusetts says the works show that harvesting timber, even when done sustainably, isn’t a carbon neutral activity.

Ali Amiri at Aalto University in Finland says the report’s conclusions about emissions from rising demand are probably correct, but the story is different for wood we have already harvested. Boosting the efficiency of current harvests and using more wood for longer-lived purposes than paper would cut emissions, he says. “We cannot just say we should stop using wood.”

【推荐3】India and China are leading the global greening effort, a latest NASA study said, observing that the world is a greener place than it was 20 years ago.

Data from NASA’s satellites show that human activities in China and India play an important part in this greening of the planet, thanks to tree planting and agriculture. The effect comes mostly from tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture (集约农业) in both countries. “China and India account for one-third of the greening,” said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University.

China alone accounts for 25 percent of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6 percent of global vegetated (有植被的) area. The greening in China is from forests and farmland, but in India, it is mostly from farmland with minor contribution from forests. China’s great contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part from its programs to protect and expand forests.

“When the greening of the earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization (施肥) from the added carbon dioxide (CO²) in the atmosphere. Now with the satellite data, we see that humans are also contributing,” said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “Once people realize there is a problem, they tend to fix it. In the 1970s and 80s in India and China, the situation about vegetation loss was not good. In the 1990s, people realized it, and today things have improved. That’s what we see in the satellite data,” added Nemani.

The land area used to grow crops is comparable in China and India, and has not changed much since the early 2000s. Yet both countries have greatly increased both their annual total green leaf area and their food production. This was achieved through multiple cropping practices, by which a field is replanted to produce another harvest several times a year. Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more has increased by about 35% — 40% since 2000 to feed their large populations.

【推荐1】Seventy-year-old Tububatu and his wife live in a village on the edge of Badain Jaran, China’s third-largest desert. Since their retirement, they’ve been spending every day fighting the advancement of the desert with the help of plant-life. Others had tried fighting the desert and failed, but they just wanted to know if they could make a difference.

Relying only on their pensions, the retired couple have been slowly and steadily growing their little desert forest. They started out by planting just 50 trees, but kept doubling their efforts to the point where they now plant thousands of trees a year. Even though they mostly plant drought-resistant species, they still water them at least once a day to make sure they grow better. Their small desert forest now covers over 266 hectares and numbers tens of thousands of trees.

The couple stay behind in their village, nearly 100 kilometers away from the nearest town, despite their children’s efforts to get them to move with them to a more comfortable home. They’ve been ridiculed by members of their own community who believed their efforts to fight the desert were sure to fail, but they haven’t let that prevent them making their efforts. They may very well fail, but at least they’ve given it their all.

Over the last 19 years, the couple have planted over 266 hectares of desert and have no plan of stopping anytime soon. China Daily reports that Tububatu and his wife have so far planted over 70, 000 trees and spent more than 1 million yuan of their savings in the process. The bad conditions have caused a lot of damage to their health, they look older than their age, and they both have been battling serious health conditions, but they refuse to abandon their battle against the desert.

【推荐2】It's natural to think about what goes into producing the food in your daily lunch bag. But have you ever stopped to consider the production techniques behind the bag itself? At the center of it is a woman named Margaret Knight.

From her earliest years, Knight was a restless creator. In the article titled " The Evolution of the Grocery Bag", its writer mentions a few of her childhood projects. She was “famous for her kites", and "her sleds were the envy of the town’s boys.”

To support her mother, she took a job at a cotton factory when she was 12. That same year she invented a shuttle system which helped to prevent injury. At the time, she had no concept of patenting(得到……的专利权) her idea. What strengthened her place in history was her working experience at the Columbia Paper Bag Company. Here, instead of folding every paper bag by hand, Knight wondered if she might be able to make them cleanly and rapidly via an automated machine. The result was a working model of her elegant paper-folding machine. But this time: she wanted to go to the extra step and secure a patent on her creation, a brave move for a woman in the 19th century, when an extremely small percentage of patents were held by women.

Not only did Knight file for a patent, she bravely defended her owner ship of the bag machine idea. A man named Charles Annan said the creation was his own, arguing no woman could be able to design such a machine. Knight fought a legal battle against him and handed Anna a courtroom(法庭)defeat by presenting her detailed hand-drawn blueprints. Finally，Knight received her rightful patent in 1871.

After making the machine, she continued to invent many other things like a paper feeding machine and a skirt protector. Knight, at the age of seventy, worked twenty hours a day on 89th invention.

【推荐3】When the COVID-19 hit and supermarket shelves were empty, Chris Hall and Stefanny Lowey decided they no longer wanted to rely on others for food. The couple, who live on Pender Island in British Columbia, Canada, decided to start a year-long challenge where they wouldn’t buy a single thing to eat. Instead, they would grow, raise or catch everything—right down to sugar, salt and flour. Now, five months in, they say the challenge has changed their lives.

Chris, 38, said, “It has always been something that we have wanted to do. We have had a garden and grown vegetables for a long time already. When the COVID-19 hit, it gave us that extra push that we needed to do it. We were both out of work when we started, and with the reality check of grocery stores running out of items, it gave us even more motivation to see if we could look after ourselves.”

The pair spent the months before building a house for chickens, ducks and turkey as well as studying as much as possible to figure out where they would get all the things they needed. Chris adds, “We had to learn so many new things like how to grow mushrooms, process our Stevia plants, and harvest salt from the ocean. We spent a lot of time reading and studying online to figure out all the things we were going to need to do.”

Now after two months, they both feel it’s been going well but Chris admits the first few weeks were difficult. “The first three weeks were very challenging as our bodies adjusted to cutting out coffee, wine and sugar all on the same day,” he says. “After three weeks, our energy levels balanced out and our wishes reduced and now we feel great.” Now February has ended. As they come through winter, they feel positive about continuing with this way of living, with their challenge officially ending in November.

Most parents tell their children, “You can be anything you want when you grow up.” I feel the same and I say this often. But I also want you to understand that realizing your dreams comes from hard work, some good luck and good timing. Here are some words of wisdom for you as you make your way in the world, from an entrepreneur (企业家) and from your mama.

In high school, I wanted to be a politician. I left my hometown and went off to college in Washington, DC. There, I discovered that I loved to support women. It taught me that I’m creative, a strong leader and great at marketing. As a result, I moved on to be the head of a national healthcare nonprofit. Becoming a mother while in that job opened my mind to launching a breast pump bag (储奶袋) business. Now I run a highly successful company that I started up on my own. I'm not a politician!

Failure can be heartbreaking. But I will tell you that every failure I’ve had along the way has absolutely made me better. Failing the big math exam in high school and going to summer school was embarrassing. I eventually passed, and I’ve never failed an exam again. I learned from that experience to ask for help. Now, I ask for help in business all the time. I’m proud to be a role model to you as a mom and an entrepreneur. I hope I inspire you to believe that you can be anything you want. It will be my pleasure to watch your lives unfold before my eyes.

Love,

Your mom

【推荐3】People need light for daily activities, but in some places in the world, access to reliable power is a problem, and natural disasters can make the matter worse.

Andrea Sreshta and Anna Stork understand how important light is to people in need. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Andrea and Anna, then graduate students in architecture and design at Columbia University, wanted to do something to help.

So as a school assignment, they designed a lighting product that was lightweight, portable   and   wireless,   something   that   might   help   improve   the   safety   and   living conditions of Haitians. The result was the LuminAID light. An inflatable( 可充气的 )plastic, waterproof rectangle light that can be recharged with solar power. What was only a school project for them soon became something much more when friends and contacts began sending the lights to those in need.

In their final year of architecture school, Andrea and Anna filed a patent for the lamp, and shortly after graduating, they went to India to conduct field tests on their prototype( 雏形). Anna says visiting villages without stable access to electricity was really meaningful to them. “It helped us understand the houses and the conditions that these people were living in. And what was so interesting is one of the villages that we’ve visited. The house was made out of really thick cement( 水泥), so even in the daytime, it was completely dark inside the house. So we saw real need for portable lighting, “Anna says.

In 2011, Andrea and Anna launched their business LuminAID. They say that after hearing from people who use the lights, they now realize how important their product is.

【推荐1】It looked to all the world like something that might have graced the cover of a 1950s comic book. On September 28th, on a warm Texas evening, Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX, a rocketry firm, introduced his company's newest machine, Starship Mkl. It stands 50 metres tall and is made from shiny plates of stainless steel. Despite its name, it is not in fact an interstellar （恒星之间的） spacecraft. But it is a prototype （雏形）of an interplanetary one. Mr Musk hopes, one day, to use its successors to ferry passengers to the Moon or to Mars — or perhaps even, according to one piece of SpaceX concept art, all the way to Saturn （土星）.

In the 17 years since its founding, SpaceX’s cheap, reusable machines have revolutionised the rocket business. The firm's ukra-low prices have seen it seized a dominant share of the commercial satellite-launching market. Along with Boeing, an American aerospace giant, SpaceX is responsible for ferrying supplies to the International Space Station, It may soon fly astronauts there as well. But all of this commercial success is merely a necessary first step in Mr Musk’ bigger plan, which is to make humanity into a "niultiplanetary species" by establishing colonies in the universe.

That is where the Starship comes in. The prototype on display in Texas is only one half of an enormous rocket stack designed with planetary colonisation in mind. When paired with a Falcon Super Heavy booster （助推火箭），which is also being developed, the result should be able of lifting around 150 tonnes into orbit. That would make it the most powerful rocket ever built, superior to the Saturn V, which sent astronauts to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s. And unlike the Saturn V, whose three stages were abandoned to the sea or to space as their fuel was used up, the Starship and its booster will be reusable which should keep costs down.

It is a bold plan. Mr Musk's shorter-term plans are bold too. Besides designing a new spaceship and booster, SpaceX engineers are busy working on a new. more efficient engine to power them. Called Raptor, it is designed to bum super-cold methane rather than the kerosene that fuels the company's current Merlin engines. The Starship will sport six Raptor engines. But each Super Heavy booster will need somewhere between 24 and 37. The result will be a repairman's nightmare.

Mr Musk has said, perhaps optimistically, that a Starship prototype might be ready for a test flight all the way to orbit (although without its booster stage) within six months. That would be of a piece with its crazy development schedule. The traditional rocket-building industry is used to generous government contracts that are about job creation as much as rocket creation. However, SpaceX has adopted a different approach, closer to the rapid-fire development practices of the software industry.

The Starship prototype, for instance, was put together in a matter of months. It was built out in the open, rather than in a carefully controlled factory environment. The firm has two teams competing against each other to produce the best design,

【推荐2】New England is the six northeastern states of the United States：Maine，New Hampshire，Vermont，Massachusetts，Rhode Island，and Connecticut. The six states were among the first colonies (殖民地) in America. The colonies were ruled by England，and this is how the area became known as New England. After the Revolutionary (革命的) War the colonies became states.

Many things are similar in the six New England states. For example，there are many stone walls, fishing villages and forests in these states. The houses and buildings are similar，too. People cut down trees from the forests to make space for their farms and villages.

They then used wood from the trees and stones from the field to build houses，schools, and churches. Even today, most of the houses in New England are made of wood.

There are big cities in New England，but there are also small cities and farms，especially in the northern part.There is much industry and business and New England is one of the most populous (人口稠密的) parts of the United States.It has many busy seaports on its long coast.There are always many tourists who enjoy the beautiful lakes，beaches，and mountains and who visit the historical places.

【推荐3】Residents(居民) in the poorest areas in the U.S. face a life expectancy(平均寿命) up to decade shorter than those in the wealthiest areas, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Researchers from East Tennessee State University wanted to better understand how socioeconomic status was associated with health outcomes. To find out, they divided the country’s 3,141 areas into 50 new “states” (with 2 percent of the areas in each) based on household income rather than on geography.

The researchers broke down the data by county（郡，县） since they found state-level data may hide some “effect of socioeconomic differences on both the best-off and worst-off counties.” They then examined health data from the wealthiest and poorest “states” (top and bottom 2 percent) to see how residents differed on factors like smoking, clinical care and excessive(过多的) drinking. Researchers found that there was nearly a 10-year gap in the life expectancy of men with an average of 79.3 years in the wealthy counties compared to 69.8 years in the poorest. For women, the difference was slightly less：83 years in the wealthiest counties and 76 years in the poorest.

The study authors were cautious that while they found a connection between socioeconomic status and health outcomes, they did not analyze cause and effect. But they suggest that the data shows how policy makers should not just focus on state-wide initiatives (主动性) but more targeted efforts to help those most at risk. “With limited resources, methods of knowing the poorest areas exactly can be quite significant in the equal distribution (分配)of resources and programs to those communities that are in the greatest need,’’ the study authors wrote.