【推荐2】In a paper published recently in the journal Seabird, a RSPB team documented the training, testing and performance of scent dogs(嗅觉犬) .

Scent dogs have regularly been used for conservation for decades. They are particularly effective at detecting birds that breed (繁殖) in holes and are only active aboveground at night.

Many seabirds show these same characteristics and some, including European storm petrels (海燕), are well-known for their strong scent. However, using scent dogs to detect seabirds has not been common practice in the UK.

The storm petrel is the UK’s smallest seabird. They spend most of their time at sea, only coming to land to breed in summer. They come ashore under the cover of darkness and nest underground in holes. Manx shearwaters (大西洋鹱) are similarly ocean-loving, breeding on land in the UK before going to the South American coast for winter.

These two species are threatened in the UK. However, surveying them is difficult due to their behaviours. The RSPB researchers tried to detect them by using their dogs.

Dog A, called Islay, was trained to locate and indicate storm petrel feathers. Dog B, called Dewi, is used to detect Manx shearwater holes. Dewi had learnt to distinguish between occupied and unoccupied holes and lie down to indicate occupied holes.

The study found that, with sufficient training and reward, Islay could find the precise location of the storm petrel and differentiate between storm petrel and shearwaters cents with 100% reliability. However, care was needed to ensure no combination of scents occurred. Similarly, Dewi had a high success rate in finding shearwater nest holes, although he was less successful at locating deep holes, probably because there was less shearwaters cent at the entrance.

Mark Bolton, RSPB principal conservation scientist and lead author of the paper, says, “The recent use of scent dogs to locate the nest holes of storm petrels on the, Isle of May is further evidence of the potential of scent dogs for seabird monitoring and I hope that this study will encourage more conservation practitioners to use scent dogs in their work.”

【推荐3】About 20 years ago, Daniel Hoffman, a classically trained violinist met a young musician playing in the town square in Marrakech, an ancient city in Morocco. They communicated in the little French they both knew, but their main common language was music. On the back of a motorbike of the fellow violinist, Hoffman weaved through the back streets of the city and then learned his first lessons in Andalusian music, the classical music of North Africa.

That experience gave birth to an idea: What would it be like to try to learn how to play different violin styles around the world in just one week? Oh. yes, and at the end of that week, play a concert. He even got a name for the concept “musical extreme sports”.

It took him almost two decades to launch that dream with a friend, who introduced him to the wonders of Kickstarter, a funding platform for creative projects. Up to now, the dream has taken the form of a new documentary currently airing on American public television stations called “Otherwise, It’s Just Firewood.”

In the documentary, Hoffman travels to County Clare, Ireland, where he takes lessons with James Kelly, a master Irish violin player, for less than a week and then performs together with him in front of an audience, many of whom are star Irish musicians.

The film is what Hoffman hopes will be the first of an eventual series of short documentaries, showing him learning to play the violin in a variety of styles, including the folk music of south India, Sweden, Greece, Romania, and West Virginia.

That would add to his extensive repertoire (全部曲目), which already includes Balkan, Middle Eastern, and Turkish styles. “The big joke is what’s the difference between the fiddle and the violin? It’s the person who plays it,” says Niall Keegan, a traditional flute player. “It’s the music you make on it that makes it Irish or English or French or classical or jazz or whatever else. It’s how we imagine it and how we create through it that make it and give it character.”

“Otherwise, it’s just firewood,” he says, words that became the film’s title.

【推荐2】In the recently opened Our Broken Planet exhibition in London’s Natural History Museum, a small piece of dark material covered with faint holes is on show in a display container. The nodule(小块) could easily be mistaken for coal, but its true nature is much more interesting.

The nodule is a combination of metals and oceanographers have discovered trillions of them on Earth’s ocean floors. Each is rich in some of the most important elements for making the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels that we need to replace the carbon-emitting motors, power plants and factories now damaging our climate.

These nodules could therefore help humanity save itself from the ill effects of global warming, argue mining companies who say their exploitation should be rated an international priority. By mining up chunks(块) from the deep we can slow the burning of our planet’s surface.

“We desperately need substantial amounts of metals contained by these nodules to build electric cars and power plants,” says Hans Smit, chief executive of Florida’s Oceans Minerals, which has announced plans to mine for nodules. “We cannot increase land supplies of these metals without having a significant environmental impact. It’s our only alternative. ”

Other researchers disagree, however. They say mining deep-sea nodules would be disastrous for our already stressed, plastic-ridden, overheated oceans. Delicate, long-living residents of the deep — shells, fish, corals and squids — would be erased by mining. At the same time, mud with poisonous metals would be sent upwards to disturb marine food-chains.

“It is hard to imagine how seabed mines could workably operate without destroying the ocean species,” says UK marine biologist Helen Scales, a view shared by David Attenborough, who has called for a pause on all deep-sea mining plans. “In this case it means the destruction of an ecosystem, an issue worth the best attention from every entity(实体) involved. ”he says.

For better or worse, these mineral nodules are going to play a critical role in determining our future — either by releasing us from our current ecological headaches or by stimulating even more fatal outcomes.