【推荐1】There is nothing like a coast redwood. It is the planet’s tallest tree, up to heights of more than 320 feet into the sky. With trunks(树干)that grow to more than 27 feet wide, they can live for over 2,000 years. Some of them living today were alive during the time of the Roman Empire.

Coast redwoods have survived through thousands of years of natural floods, droughts, tsunamis and fires. They can thrive and recover from damage as long as they can count on rainwater and coastal fog banks that roll in every morning. And it is those critical water sources that are disappearing as temperatures continue to rise. The damp conditions the trees like are rarer than they used to be. Coast redwoods now occupy less than 10 percent of their original range.

Their loss will have some consequences, particularly in the vast amount of carbon they store. Redwoods can store 2,600 metric tons of carbon per hectare, more than double the absorption rate of the Pacific Northwest’s conifer trees(针叶树), according to a new research published in Forest Ecology and Management.

David Milarch, an arborist from Michigan, says he feels sorrowful about the disappearing redwoods. He spends his days tracking down the healthiest coast redwood specimens(样本)he can find, cloning them in his own lab, and then planting them in carefully chosen places where they can thrive. Milarch’s goal is both to strengthen the coast redwood gene pool with clones of the strongest individuals, and to store loads of carbon. It’s a complicated mission with a simple philosophy: save the big trees, and they’ll save us.

Milarch explains that we need a practical and measurable solution to fighting against climate change. He believes the redwoods are the answer. However, scientist Mark Maslin cautions against viewing tree planting as a magic bullet, since even fast-growing trees take a long time to grow and be mature enough to reach their maximum carbon-trapping time which climate change cannot afford. As a global society, the most important thing we should do now is to reduce our overall carbon emissions if we want to have any impact on the planet’s climate crisis.

【推荐3】Plastic is nearly everywhere — in shoes, clothes, refrigerators and construction materials. But this highly useful material can have a major defect. Made from oil and slow to break down, conventional plastic is not environmentally friendly. Today, researchers discuss inventing what they say should be a safer, biodegradable (可生物降解的) alternative made from fish waste— heads, bones and skin— that would otherwise likely be thrown out.

If developed successfully, fish-oil-based plastic could help meet the considerable need for more sustainable plastic, says Francesca Kerton, the project’s investigator. Previously, others have developed new plastic using plant-based oils. However, this too comes with a disadvantage: the crops that produce these oils require land that could otherwise be used to grow food.

Leftover fish struck Kerton as a promising alternative. Salmon (鲑鱼) farming is a major industry for coastal Newfoundland, where her university is located. After the fish are processed, leftover parts are often thrown away. Kerton and her colleagues developed a process for turning this fish oil into a plastic-like material. But does the plastic smell fishy? “When we start the process with the fish oil a slight kind of fish smell, but as we go through the steps, that smell disappears,” Kerton says.

In other experiments, they have begun examining how quickly the new material would likely break down once its useful life is over. Kerton put pieces of it in water, and to speed up the degradation for some pieces, she added a chemical capable of breaking down fats like those in the fish oil. Under a microscope, she later saw microbial (微生物的）growth on all of the samples, even those that had been in plain water, an encouraging sign that the new material might biodegrade quickly, Kerton says.

Kerton now intends to study the material’s physical properties to see how it might in real-world applications, such as in packaging or fibers for clothing.

【推荐1】From a large elephant to a small mouse, animals live happily together in Disney's new movie Zootopia. Judy Hopps, the main character, becomes the first rabbit police officer in the city. While solving a mystery, she meets the smart fox, Nick, who helps her with her case, and some other animals like the lion mayor and a mouse called Flash. Here is something more about the movie.

There are 64 kinds of animals in the movie. All of them look like real ones except Judy, the first rabbit police officer. Its appearance is a bit different from real rabbits. Real rabbits actually have split lips, but the film makers decided to make Judy's lip all together to look nice.

Film makers learned that not all fur of animals is the same. In the movie, some of polar bears' fur is clear. It appears white because the light reflects off it. Part of a fox's fur is dark at the root, getting lighter till its red top. They did so to make sure that the animals in Zootopia were believable.

Moreover, a film maker, Nathan Warner with his partners also took a trip to Africa for researching animals. There they had a close watching of different animals. According to their discovery, these artists added leaves to animals' coats like the big sheep. They also made animals' tears run from the inside corners of eyes down to the outside of the mouths.

【推荐3】It sounds like a math problem. How do you make one of the world’s most famous ancient sites bigger? You can’t build more of it.

So with ever more tourists pouring into the site, the team behind the Archaeological（考古的）Park of Pompeii have found a plan B—dividing visitors around ancient sites that are farther, with all-in-one tickets and buses laid on between the sites.

The ancient city of Pompeii will be a scattered archaeological park, including the archaeological areas of Pompeii itself, as well as famous old houses in nearby villages or towns. The sites have already become part of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, but until now, they have been selling their own tickets. They are also far away from each other—the park’s sites cross around 8 miles—with little public transport to some of them.

The inaccessibility（难达到）to the old houses means that visitor numbers are low. While nearly four million people visited Pompeii itself in 2019, only 55,000 made it to see House A, which is thought to have been owned by the emperor Nero and his second wife. Only 52,000 went as far as the two houses at Stabiae, House Arianna and House San Marco. But visitor numbers to Pompeii rose from under 2.7 million in 2014 to over 3.9 million by 2019. In July 2023, a record 21, 141 people visited the park in a single day.

A bus service around the sites—the Pompeii Artebus—was started in 2021. Tickets for the connected sites will be acceptable for three days, with free buses connecting all the sites.