【推荐2】When the parcel arrives, the remote-controlled car inside is broken. That could easily result in an unhappy child — but not this time.

The package has come from a British start-up that hopes to equip the nation’s youngsters with an endangered skill: the ability to fix gadgets when they fail. The aim is to encourage 10 to 14-year-olds to try fixing electronic devices and learn how they work, by sending them faulty toys that they have to take apart and repair themselves. The company, Team Repair, has been founded by five engineering graduates from Imperial College London. Having begun as a university project, its ultimate goal is to steer children into careers in science and to nurture (培养) a new generation of engineers and inventors.

“Every month, we’ll send children an electronic gadget with a carefully planned fault,” said Patrick McGuckian, 22, the chief operating officer. “The idea is that they learn key repair skills, and that they also learn the science and technology behind how the components inside it work.”

It is estimated that two million tonnes of electrical and electronic items are thrown away in the UK each year. “Meanwhile, the UK has a Stem [science, technology, engineering and maths] skills shortage costing£1.5 billion a year,” McGuckian said. “We wanted to help solve those two problems.”   

The service — currently in a testing phase — will cost £28 a month, with each kit designed to keep a child occupied for several hours. Once a gadget has been mended, you post it back so it can be broken again for somebody else to fix. There is also an app to provide instructions on how to perform the repair, and also mini science lessons. “As a society we’ve been tuned to replace rather than repair,” McGuckian said. “We want to encourage a different mindset in the next generation — and on top of that, we want them to be creative, to be engineers, to be inventors that solve the biggest problems.”

【推荐3】China BW Steel Group

China BW Steel Group was founded by the joint (联合的) reorganization of former Bste Group Co. Ltd and WSteel (Group) Corporation on December 1, 2016. On September 19, 2019 China BW implemented the joint reorganization of Msteel Group, making it the largest are most modern combined steel company in China.

Since the beginning of its construction, China BW has always positioned itself as first-class producer by keeping pace with the continuous development of the world economy. Now China BW Steel Group has become a miracle in the history of Chinese iron and steel industry. With the spirit of sincerity and creativity, it helps the modernization of China. To get few achievements, it has occupied half of the market share of cold rolled automotive sheets China, resulting in the upgrade of China's automobile industry. China BW's high-grade pipeline steel is used in the West-East Natural Gras Transmission project. China BW is the first domestic maker in China to produce the 690 U-type pipe steel for nuclear power of operators, which safeguards the operation of China's nuclear facilities. China BW's high temperature resistant material has been used in the Shenzhou spaceships and the high strength oil droll pipe is used in China's 8000-meter underground exploration.

China BW promotes the development and upgrade of the industry by innovation. It is promoting large scale industrial manufacturing (制造业) by means of automation and IT technologies, and creating a new cross-region production, control system that makes steel manufacturing more efficient.

China BW is also seeking new business models to support the health development of the main business of iron and steel. It never stops developing new technologies, processes, and products.

With “spirit of strictness and demanding, road of study and innovation, working for first-class target” as the faith and cooperation as the core value. China BW has formed its culture. The spirit of strictness and demanding is the source to make first-class products, and study and innovation helps the company to keep growing and upgrading.

Looking into the future, China BW is trying to be a leader in steel technology, a driver of the green industry chain, and a corporate model with mutual development of employees and the company. China BW will be the most competitive company in the world, and shall also be an honest, friendly, creative and well-respected company.

【推荐2】When I was an incoming(即将入学的）student in University of Oxford，I participated FYSOP. Ever since then, whenever it comes up in conversation, I am met with the following question: “What is FYSOP?”     1    

FYSOP stands for First Year Student Outreach Project, which focuses around a week service to the city of Oxford and its various neighborhoods.     2     They volunteer for the Oxford community at local sites helping out schools, parks or non-profit organizations.

Students are divided into groups and led by student leaders. These leaders ensure that each place is prepared and that the students get there safely.    3    In this way the incoming students are able to reflect on what it means to give back and to be a part of the community. These conversations are important for incoming students because of the change they experience starting out in college.

    4     Students obtain valuable volunteer experiences and meet new people. Also, FYSOP participants get to move in a week earlier than most other students. This means that you get to skip out on the hurried move in schedule and might even get a slightly cheaper flight than if you were moving in with the other 140,000 college students.

    5     Through my personal experience, I met some of my best friends, got a better understanding of the layout(布局) of Oxford，and really enjoyed volunteering at various non-profits. If you are not, maybe consider staffing FYSOP in the future.

【推荐2】The State of California is depending on its forests to help cut down planet-warming CO₂. But that climate-change strategy may be risky, as new research from the University of California, Irvine(UCI)reports that trees in California’s mountains and open spaces are dying from wildfires and other pressures — and fewer new trees are filling the blank.

“The forests are not keeping up with these large fires,” said study co-author James Randerson, the Ralph J. and Carol M. Cicerone Professor of Earth system science at UCI. Acrossthe whole state, tree cover area has dropped 6.7% since 1985. “These are big changes in lessthan forty years,” he said. It’s the first time that researchers have been able to measure tree population fall in California, and find out the reasons(wildfires and woodcutting).

For the study, the UCI-led team used satellite data from the USGS and NASA’s Landsat mission to study plant changes between 1985 and 2021. They found that one of the most obvious falls in tree cover was in southern California, where 14% of the tree population in local mountain had disappeared, maybe everlastingly.

“The ability. of forests to recover(恢复)from fire appears to be dwindling in the south,” said Jonathan Wang, a researcher in Randerson’s research group, who led the study coming out in AGU Advances. “At the same time, the state’s coverage of bushes and grasses is rising, which could mean more everlasting ecosystem shifts(生态系统转化).”

“The speed and scale of fall in tree cover is different across the state. Tree cover in the Sierra Nevada, for example, stayed relatively unchanged until around 2010, then began dropping suddenly. Fortunately, in the north, there’s plenty of recovery after fire,” said Wang, perhaps because of the area’s higher rainfall and cooler temperatures. “This threat(威胁) to California’s climate solutions isn’t going away anytime soon,” Wang said. “We might be entering a new age of bigger fire and vulnerable(易受损的) forests.”

【推荐3】Scientists in China have developed a small, flexible device that can change heat from human skin into electrical power. In their research, the team showed that the device could power an LED light when worn around a wrist. The findings suggest that body temperature could someday power wearable electronics.

The new device is a thermoelectric generator (TEG) that uses temperature difference between the warmer body and the cooler environment to generate power. Researchers have designed a self—powered electronic system. They connect an LED to a TEG. Then, they wrap the TEG around the wrist of someone. With a temperature difference, the generator harvests heat given off from the skin and successfully lights up the LED.

Unlike traditional generators, thermoelectric generators don't use the energy of movement to produce power. They can be widely used in various fields to supply energy. In addition, thermoelectric generators don't rely on rare metals, which can lower the costs of production.

Zhang Oian.one of the leading scientists, and her colleague have been working on designing thermoelectric generators for years. With wearable devices becoming increasingly popular in recent years. the team wanted to explore whether these generators could replace traditional batteries in devices like fitness trackers and smart watches.

There's an increasing demand for greener energy, and TEGs fit right in, for they can turn wasted heat into power in many conditions — as long as there's a temperature difference. “Our production will have good performance if it's introduced to the market,” says Zhang Qian. Looking forward, the team plans to further improve the design so the device can absorb heat more efficiently.