【推荐1】Peter and Minke van Wingerden have created something wild: a herd of cows floating on the sea. The Dutch husband-and-wife team’s experiment on sustainable agriculture, called Floating Farm, can be found in the port of Rotterdam. The modernist structure houses 40 cows, who collectively produce some 200 gallons of milk a day. In addition to helping nourish (滋养) the local community, the waterborne farm is playing a part in the global conversation about how the climate crisis is pushing farmers to reconsider how—and where—they produce food.

Floods, extreme heating, droughts and even rising night temperatures have sent the food system off balance. The race to outsmart the constant attack of extreme weather has made the world of farming unrecognizable from what it was only decades ago. A team of scientists in Mexico is developing wheat types that can adapt themselves to different climates, while Jack’s Solar Garden in Longmont, Colorado, is a testbed for the emerging method of solar farming.

Rotterdam has already established itself as one of the most climate-adaptive places in the world. Everything from office buildings to entire neighborhoods are built on water in the city, which is 90% below sea level. The Wingerdens’ Floating Farm was a new but necessary attempt. Should a weather crisis arise, a waterborne farm isn’t necessarily stuck in place. A former property developer with a background in engineering, Peter found his inspiration for the Floating Farm in a climate disaster in New York City, where Hurricane Sandy prevented the delivery of fresh food to millions.

The Wingerdens’ model is ripe for reproduction—which is exactly what the Floating Farm’s team of 14 are working on now. Plans are under way for a floating vegetable farm to move into the space next to the current Floating Farm. Permit applications are also out for similar structures in Dubai, Singapore and the Dutch cities of Haarlem and Arnhem.

The new projects will apply lessons learned from Floating Farm. “You need to build a house in order to know how to build a house,” Peter says. The biggest obstacles he sees ahead, however, are not financial or physical, but rather political and administrative. “One of the biggest challenges we come across worldwide is regulations. Cities need to have disruptive thinking, cities need to have disruptive departments, and cities need to have areas where you can say: OK, this is the experimental zone.” Because what Peter and his team are pulling off is of a different order than the typical sustainability measures. “We are not innovative,” he says. “We are disruptive.”

【推荐2】Making a transition away from fossil fuels and towards low-carbon energy is the only way to keep our planet safe and habitable for future generations. That transition has thankfully begun, but it has a vast distance to go. And the kinds of changes that are needed cost money. Development of new technology has always required investment.

This applies to the generation of renewable energy, and to the countless lifestyle changes that follow from the shift away from coal, oil and gas. Electric cars and other transport are one example. Packaging to replace plastic is another. Resources are also required to protect societies from the harms caused by the global heating that has already happened, and to help them adjust to altered conditions.

A new report presented at the Cop27 UN climate summit says that about S2tn (£1.75tn) a year will be needed by 2030 if developing countries are to make the necessary changes. One of the authors, Nicholas Stern, pointed to a crucial role for the World Bank as well as western governments in redirecting finance and reducing the cost of capital for investors (banks typically charge higher interest on investments in poor countries, due to predicted risks).

The promise made in 2009 of S100bn worth of climate finance annually from rich countries to poorer ones has been broken. But developing countries have succeeded in getting loss and damage on to the formal Cop agenda (议程) for the first time. So far, five European countries have agreed to contribute to a fund to help weak countries manage global beating’s destructive effects. These commitments are welcome, but insufficient.

Carbon emissions, and the dangerously warming planet they have led to, are the byproduct of the way that the rich world developed. Since industrialisation, we have burned our way to wealth. Thankfully, we now know that there are alternatives to this destructive patter. Renewable energy, along with social change aimed at limiting some forms of consumption, is at the heart of this prospectus (会议章程).

【推荐3】Motorists heading from Paris to the Mediterranean on the highway this summer may be surprised by the rapid growth of bridge-building over France’s main north-south road. The intended beneficiaries are more unexpected: hedgehogs, foxes, wild boar, weasels, deer and other furry or spiky things.

Between 2021 and 2023, 19 new écoponts, or wildlife bridges, will be built over the A6 and other motorways operated by APRR, a private firm, at a total cost of over €80m ($86m). This will bring its network of green bridges in France to 119.

Designed to reduce roadkill and help animals wander more freely, wildlife bridges have become popular from Canada to Australia. In France they have a long history. APRR built its first, near Fontainebleau, in 1960. Early versions were rudimentary. Today’s models, such as the one under construction to connect forests near Chagny, in Burgundy, are grand and advanced: 25 metres wide, complete with a pond for frogs and other amphibians, wooden-fenced sides to protect the passing animals from the glare of headlights, and carefully laid piles of rocks and branches and landscaped vegetation. Pedestrians are banned.

Every year an estimated 29 million mammals are killed on roads in Europe. It is hard to say how many are saved by écoponts. A study by Vinci, another French motorway company, found that between 2011 and 2015 each of its green bridges was used each year on average by 1,086 red deer, 150 wild boar, 104 roe deer, 48 foxes, eight badgers, four weasels, one hedgehog and one wolf. Smaller mammals and reptiles preferred underpasses: they crossed via each of its motorway tunnels.

Private motorway companies are making considerable investments in order to green their reputations and keep their state-awarded operating licence. Governments too have been building eco-bridges. Sweden is also putting up such bridges to help migrating reindeer. Germany has built more than 80 wildlife crossings, which have helped to protect the grey wolf. Green campaigners approve, but add that fewer cars on the roads would be even better.

【推荐1】As palaeontologists can tell, Neanderthals (尼安德特人) died out around 40,000 years ago. But they did not vanish from the Earth entirely. In the past decade it has become clear that Neanderthals mated with the ancestors of modern humans, and that some of those unions produced offspring (generations to follow). The result is that almost half of the Neanderthal genome survives, spread in small quantities among most modern people's DNA. The exception is those with mostly African ancestors, for Neanderthals seem never to have lived in Africa.

Such genes have been associated with everything from hairiness to fatness. Many seem to be related to the immune system, and to affect the risk of developing diseases including lupus, Crohn's disease and diabetes.

A pair of recent papers suggest Covid-19 belongs on that list as well. Two long DNA strings, both inherited from Neanderthals, appear to have resistance or sensibility to severe Covid-19, depending on which is present.

The work was led by Hugo Zeberg and Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, whose researchers pioneered the study of Neanderthal DNA.

Their first paper, published in Nature in September, described one Neanderthal DNA string, known as a “haplotype” (单体型), which is associated with a higher risk of serious illness.

Having one copy of the haplotype, which is found on the third of the 46 chromosomes possessed by humans, doubles the chances of a trip to intensive care. Those unlucky enough to possess two copies, one from each parent, face an even higher risk.

That genetic bad luck is not evenly distributed. It is most common among people of South Asia, with 63 per cent of the population of Bangladesh carrying at least one copy; and among Europeans, where the rate is around 16 per cent. As expected, it is almost absent from Africa. More strikingly, it is also very rare in Eastern Asia.

Exactly what the haplotype does is not clear. One gene within it affects a protein that interacts with the cellular receptors (细胞受体) that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus which causes Covid-19) uses to enter cells and control them.

The haplotype is also thought to be involved in the production of signalling proteins, called cytokines, which help to regulate the immune system. An overly aggressive immune response is one mechanism by which Covid-19 kills.

【推荐2】Many parents confused by how their children shop or socialize, would feel undisturbed by how they are taught — this sector remains digitally behind. Can artificial intelligence boost the digital sector of classroom? ChatGPT-like generative AI is generating excitement for providing personalized tutoring to students. By May, New York had let the bot back into classrooms.

Learners are accepting the technology. Two-fifths of undergraduates surveyed last y car by online tutoring company Chegg reported using an AI chatbot to help them with their studies, with half of those using it daily. Chegg’s chief executive told investors it was losing customers to ChatGPT as a result of the technology’s popularity. Yet there are good reasons to believe that education specialists who harness AI will eventually win over generalists such as Open AI and other tech firms eyeing the education business.

For one, AI chat bots have a bad habit of producing nonsense. “Students want content from trusted providers,” argues Kate Edwards from a textbook publisher. Her company hasn’t allowed ChatGPT and other AIs to use its material, but has instead used the content to train its own models into its learning apps. Besides, teaching isn’t merely about giving students an answer, but about presenting it in a way that helps them learn. Charbots must also be tailored to different age groups to avoid either cheating or infantilizing (使婴儿化) students.

Bringing AI to education won’t be easy. Many teachers are behind the learning curve. Less than a fifth of British educators surveyed by Pearson last year reported receiving training on digital learning tools. Tight budgets at many institutions will make selling new technology an uphill battle. Teachers’ attention may need to shift towards motivating students and instructing them on how to best work with AI tools. If those answers can be provided, it’s not just companies that stand to benefit. An influent in l paper from 1984 found that one-to-one tutoring improved the average academic performance of students. With the learning of students, especially those from poorer households, held back, such a development would certainly deserve top marks.

【推荐3】As global climate change becomes more serious, growing crops will be a major challenge. Massive heat waves and droughts (干旱) are already doing harm to farmers: Over the next three decades, California’s San Joaquin Valley alone could lose up to 535, 000 acres of farming land as a result of the shortage of water supplies.

Jennifer Brophy wants to help solve that problem. She’s an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, and works on methods that she hopes will be used to change crop species so that they can survive severe conditions. At present, Brophy is developing new genetic(基因的) engineering techniques that can help crops survive droughts.

In order to promote plants to respond to extreme climate, Brophy is building what she calls “genetic circuits”. Besides changing the genes within plant cells, this method also changes how and when those genes are activated. If the plant senses a specific sugar, it can express one protein (蛋白质); if it senses another signal, it’ll express a different protein, kicking off an entirely separate chain of events. If both signals are there, the plant may be able to express something else entirely. “Using circuits, you can have plants respond in new ways to all these different inputs,” she says.

“Normally, a plant doesn’t necessarily know what’s coming. It just knows if it’s hot or temperate right now,” says Brophy. This can lead to problems when weather becomes unstable: A plant that usually flowers in spring may flower in winter if there’re a few unseasonably warm days. When temperatures fall quickly again, the flowers die and ruin a year of crops. “It’d be great to be able to communicate with plants to tell them, ‘Hey, you should wait on that flowering, ’” she adds.

Controlling plants’ growth at this level is exciting, but actually putting it into practice is not an easy task. At the moment, Brophy is testing the method in the lab using a small weedy plant called Arabidopsis. She’s still in the process of figuring out how to activate certain genes on command.

【推荐2】When you hear the beginning of your favorite song from the radio, suddenly your neck is covered in goose bumps.

It's such a thing that a group of scientists call “skin excitement”—a feeling of cold caused not by a drop in temperature or sudden scare, but by the sense of beauty. “Skin excitement” can come from a song, a painting, a moving movie scene, or even a beloved memory-pretty much anything that causes the giving out of pleasure-soaked dopamine in your brain. But it does not come for all of us.

Your favorite music uncovers a lot about your personality，and so does how you respond to that music. Studies suppose that as few as 55 percent of people experience “skin excitement” when listening to music. And if you count yourself among this group, the goose bumps on your skin aren't the only giveaway—scientists can read it in your brain, too. In a new study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Harvard researchers performed brain scans on 10 students who said they reliably got cold when listening to music, and 10 students who didn't. They found that the cold-prone brains may really be excited by stronger emotions.

Cold-prone brains are generally more likely to show stronger emotional intelligence than no-cold brains. Cold-prone minds tend to have unusual active imagination, reflect more deeply on their emotions, and appreciate nature and the beauty of music and art to a stronger degree than no-cold brains.

So, what type of music causes the chills? It seems that the type is not so important; participants in the new study reported getting cold from songs of every kind. And any song connected with a strong emotional memory of the listener can produce the most reliable results. For me, that's the song Sailing to Philadelphia by Mark Knopfler, which I listened to as a kid in the car with my dad, on the way to the summer camp.