【推荐1】VOLUNTEERS WANTED

Beach Patrol volunteers meet twice a month for a 1-hour clean-up, removing litter from Frankston’s beaches for collection by Frankston City Council. Please contact our partner organisation Impact Volunteering for more information and to discuss this opportunity further either over the phone or in person. Phone 03 9770 6492.

We are looking for enthusiastic and community-minded people to assist us in our new reading club for primary students, in particular those with reading challenges. As a book lover, you will understand how reading can make a difference. For more information, please call 314 576 3993.

Come and support one or all four days of the National Boccia (硬地滚球) Battle Championships, held at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Boondall. Join all the fun and excitement of this sport, learn a new skill, make new friends while helping the event run smoothly. Please call Susan Solakovic HR, 07 3253 3333.

Prepare sorted goods for display and sale including pricing where appropriate; willing to take all store duties. This opportunity comes to you via Volunteering Central Coast. Please ring 02 4329 7122 to make a booking for a telephone or face-to-face interview.

【推荐2】Sophia Scott meant to spend the summer as an intern (实习生) shadowing doctors at the UCLA Concussion Clinic, as she had the year before. With COVID-19, the senior from Marymount High School had to put her plans on hold.

“Once everything fell through, I wanted to make sure I used my time as well as I could,” she explained.

Instead of using the summer focusing on herself, the 17-year-old from Los Angeles set about trying to help others. Recognizing that distance learning has been tricky for many, Scott decided to use her God-given academic skills to do something for others.

In a matter of weeks, she set up and launched Quaranteens, a free tutoring service that gathered together other like-minded teens to help out those students needing an academic boost in various subjects. She hoped that she and her group could really help the students get improved.

Impressively, Scott didn’t sit around waiting for students in difficulty to reach out for help. She set up a website and actively offered her services to charities focused on education, appreciating that there were many pupils struggling with the distance learning experience.

“A lot of the students I’ve worked with felt their school year was essentially cut off last March, which absolutely would have a negative impact on the year ahead. So a lot of the work we did was trying to help them catch up,” the new tutor shared.

This situation has been experienced around the world by many students, so the fact that this caring teen sought to remedy (挽救) the situation single-handedly makes her actions more inspiring.

Now with lots of children back in school, Scott hasn't finished her tutoring service. Instead, the experience has encouraged her and her team, which now totals an impressive 16 tutors, to continue offering their help.

“What is most satisfying to me is knowing that something small I'm doing now, like helping a kid become better at reading, could have such a wide range of impact on their education in the future.”

【推荐3】Ryan Hreljac is a boy living in Canada. Without his help, hundreds of wells that now provide fresh water for people in Africa, Central America and India might never have been built. Ryan is what you might call a water ambassador(大使). He traveled the world to tell people how they can help solve a big problem: the lack of safe drinking water in many developing countries.

Ryan’s efforts didn’t begin in a far-off place, but right at home in Kemptville, Ontario.

When he was 6 years old, Ryan learned from his teacher that children in Africa often must walk miles each day to find water. Some even die from drinking bad water, his teacher said.

So Ryan decided to act. He did chores for his parents and neighbors. He spoke to schools, churches, and clubs about his goal. The word spread. After several months of hard work, Ryan had raised $ 2, 000, enough to dig one well.

An organization called Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief (CPAR) chose a site for the well in the village of Agweo, in Uganda. Two years later, CPAR arranged for Ryan to visit Uganda for the opening ceremony of the well. Ryan met a new friend named Jimmy. Then they formed a close friendship. He often traveled with Ryan to explain how water changed his life.

After the first well, “the ripple(涟漪) effect took over,” Ryan says, “and one goal led to another. ” With adult help, he founded Ryan’s Well Foundation to educate people about the importance of water. Now the foundation has raised more than $ 1. 5 million and built 255 wells that serve more than 427, 000 people in 12 countries. Ryan has received many awards but he isn’t bragging(炫耀). “The most impressive people I’ve met are the other kids who want to help too,” he says. “I’m just a typical kid. I had a small dream, and I stayed with it. Everybody can do something.”

【推荐1】Hundreds of little robots are walking around colleges and cities in the United States, China and elsewhere. The robots, about 50 centimeters tall, are bringing food like pizza to hungry students.

“We saw needs for robot usage just go through the ceiling,” said Alastair Westgarth. He is the head of Starship Technologies, whose robots recently made their 2 millionth delivery(递送). “I think the need is always there, but it was brought forward by the pandemic effect(疫情影响).”

The robots use cameras, sensors and GPS to move around and even cross streets on their own at the speed of 8 kilometers per hour. Operators keep watch on several robots at a time but they say they hardly need to stop or move them around a barrier(障碍). When a robot arrives, people enter a code(密码)from their phones to open the robot and get their food.

There are some disadvantages for now. The robots have to be recharged(再充电)regularly. They are slow and cannot travel far. They will not leave food at the door. And big cities like New York and Beijing are not welcome them.

Ji Hye Kim is chef of Miss Kim Restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She used robot delivery when her dining room was closed last year. Kim prefers robots to delivery companies which charge more and sometimes cancel orders if they do not have enough drivers. Delivery companies also group several orders per trip, she said, so food sometimes arrives cold. Robots take just one order at a time.

Denis Maloney is vice president at Domino’s Pizza. His company is testing robots from Nuro, a California-based company. The robots are about 1.8 meters tall and can travel at a top speed of 40 kilometers on streets, not sidewalks. Maloney said delivery from Nuro costs more than using human drivers for now. But as the technology scales up and gets more refined, the costs will go down.

【推荐3】No matter how exciting space exploration sounds, there’s a vital point about it that needs to be considered: food supplies. Right now, astronauts typically rely on dry food in airtight bags and cans, since there are strict weight limits on items taken into space. Foods that we take for granted, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, are out of the question for space explorers.

For those who’ve attempted to grow food during space missions, they’ve faced many difficulties, including the absence of gravity, and a lack of soil, air and humidity (湿度). However, as Shane Topham, an engineer with Space Dynamics Laboratory at Utah State University in the US, told NASA, “Growing food to supplement and minimize the food that must be carried to space will be increasingly important on long-duration missions.”

Great efforts have been made to explore the concept of space farming. Recently, a team led by Federico Maggi at the University of Sydney in Australia figured out how plants can absorb nutrients from human urine (尿), as reported by New Scientist on March 27.

After over 20 years of experiments, the results suggested that human urine could supply three to four out of the six nutrients that plants need. The researchers also found out that urine-fertilized plants produce no harmful by-products, such as carbon dioxide or ammonia (氨).

According to New Scientist, human urine is 95 percent water, with the other 5 percent composed of nutrients which are harmful to the human body but not to plants. The advantage of this urine-fueled life support system is obvious: By recycling liquid waste and producing food, an efficient cycle will be created.

And most importantly, said New Scientist, the duration of space missions will be greatly extended to “20 years of flight”, meaning we may be soon sending astronauts on missions to Mars, or even beyond.