【推荐1】Grammy Awards don’t only go to the people who produce and perform songs. For just over a decade, they’ve also been given out to those who teach others how to make music. The Music Educator Award, presented by the Recording Academy and Grammy Museum, recognizes those who have made a “significant contribution and demonstrate devotion to music education”.

This year it went to Annie Ray, the performing arts department chair and orchestra director at Annandale High School in Fairfax County, Virginia. She was honored for her efforts to make music accessible to all students, particularly those with disabilities. Ray got to attend the awards ceremony in Los Angeles, take selfies with pop stars and bring home both a $10,000 prize and matching grant for her school’s music program.

Ray created the Crescendo Orchestra (管弦乐队) for students with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as a parent orchestra that teaches nearly 200 caregivers a year to play the same instrument as their child.

She was inspired in large part by the diversity of the Annandale community, which she says represents over 60 countries, including many immigrants. “There’s a. lot of cultures that might typically clash, and they come together in this very beautiful harmony,” Ray explained. “And that’s really uniquely expressed in the orchestra classroom, where we’re just all music-ing together.”

Ray says the Crescendo Orchestra, which was born out of the pandemic, doesn’t necessarily share the social goals of a program like the Special Olympics. The focus is on teaching students how to play an instrument, through one-on-one instruction tailored to their needs. That involves tools like music scarves, egg shakers, rhythm sticks and cardboard instruments. Ray also works with a local charity to give damaged instruments a second life in her classroom.

The orchestra is about much more than just making music, however. Ray says the program gives students a chance to develop their collaboration skills, make mistakes and learn the art of refining something.

【推荐2】The sighting of a new family of gray wolves in Oregon’s Cascade mountains has given wildlife protectors hope that the recovery of the endangered animal in the state is on the way. The state’s fish and wildlife department (部门) said a group of two adults and two babies was recorded by a track camera in August.

The wolves were found in the area of Warm Springs and officials have named it AKW — a new area of known wolf activity. If the group still has all four members surviving at the end of the year, the animals will be known as the Warm Springs group, the state’s third one in the northern Cascades. “Wolves will move to different places, but when we have resident wolves, like we know they’re sticking in that area, that’s when we create an AKWA to make sure the wolf count rise constantly.” the agency’s worker, Michelle Dennehy, told USA Today.

Many years of hunting of gray wolves almost made them die out across the nearby 48 US states by the middle of the last century. In Oregon at the end of 2009 only 14 wolves were known to exist. With protections from the Endangered Animals Act beginning in 1974, numbers have risen slowly since, to 175 in Oregon by the end of last year, living in more than 35 groups.

“I hope this will be an exciting new chapter in the story of wolf recovery in the state. Having more wolves establish families in western Oregon will be important for the long-term survival of these beautiful animals,” Amaroq Weiss, senior wolf protector at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

【推荐1】Fossilized (化石的) footprints found on a beach in southern Spain reveal what may have been a nursery for an extinct species of elephant.

The track-rich coastal site is typically covered by 1 ¹/₂ meters of sand. Storm surges (风暴潮) in the spring of 2020 washed away much of that sand and exposed the preserved footprints of ancient elephants, cattle, deer, pigs, and so on. The sandy-clay sediments (沉淀物) hosting this treasure of tracks were probably laid down about 106,000 years ago, previous studies suggest.

Among the newly uncovered tracks are the first-of-their kind footprints of newborn straight-tusked elephants, an extinct species that probably died out during the last ice age. The teeny tracks — which measure 9.6 centimeters across, about the size of a drink coaster — suggest that the petite, possibly 2-month-old elephants stood about 66 centimeters tall at their shoulders and weighed around 70 kilograms, slightly heavier than a Newfoundland dog. Based on previous finds elsewhere of actual bones, adult straight-tusked elephants may have weighed 5.5 metric tons for females and 13 tons for males.

The mix of elephant tracks at the site suggests that family groups including newborns, youngsters and adult females frequented the area and possibly used it as a nursery, the researchers say. Other fossils found at the site, including those preserving traces of ancient roots, indicate that the area was rich in vegetation and lakes and ponds.

The team’s findings “are a thrilling study,” says Anthony Martin, a trace fossil expert at Emory University in Atlanta, Series of footprints show how the ancient elephants were moving, offer insight into their social structure and even provide a sight of their reproductive ecology, he says, If newborns were part of the family group and “if they were acting anything like modern elephants, the mother had to be nearby,” Martin says.

What’s more, the presence of preserved Neandertal footprints at the site suggests that the ancient people hunted young elephants or other creatures, Martin says. The Neandertals “probably were not foolish enough to take on a full-sized elephant.”

【推荐2】New findings clearly show the Anglo Saxons were a melting pot of people from both migrant and local cultural groups and not one group from Western Europe.

Prolessor Keith Dobney at the University of Sydney said the team 's results state that "the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of early Medieval Britain were clearly similar to modern Britain—full of people of different ancestries sharing a common language and culture.”

Published in PLOS ONE, the cooperative study by Professor Dobney at University of Sydney and Dr Kimberly Plomp and Professor Mark Collard at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. looked at the three-dimensional shape of the base of the skull (头盖骨).

“Previous studies have shown that the base of the human skull holds a shape signature that can be used to track relationships among human populations in a similar way to ancient DNA,” Dr Plomp said. "Based on this, we collected 3D data from suitably dated skeletal collections from Britain and Denmark, and then analysed the data to judge the ancestry of the Anglo-Saxon individuals in the sample.”

The researchers found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of early Anglo Saxon individuals were of continental European ancestry, while between a quarter and one-third were of local ancestry. When they looked at skeletons dated to the Middle Anglo- Saxon period (several hundred after the original migrants arrived), they found that 50 to 70 percent of the individuals were of local ancestry, while 30 to 50 percent were of continental European ancestry, which probably indicates a change in the rate of migration and local adoption of culture over time. "These findings tell us that being Anglo- Saxon was more likely a matter of language and culture, not genetics," Professor Collard said.

The ongoing and unresolved argument is whether a lot of European invaders largely replaced the existing Romano- British inhabitants, or did smaller numbers of migrants settle and interact with the locals, who then rapidly adopted the new language and culture of the anglo-Saxons?" Our new data suggests that early Anglo Saxon society was a mix of both newcomers and locals and, instead of whole population replacement, a process of acculturation resulted in Anglo- Saxon language and culture being adopted largely by the local population.

【推荐3】Antarctica has not always been a land of ice and snow. Earth’s southernmost continent once was home to rivers and forests full of life. Researchers are using satellites to look deep under the ice in Antarctica, finding a large ancient landscape buried under the continent’s ice sheet. The landscape is located in East Antarctica’s Wilkes Land area bordering the Indian Ocean, covering an area about the size of Belgium. The researchers said the landscape is estimated to have been buried beneath the ice shelf for between 14 million to 34 million years, when Antarctica entered its deep freeze.

“The landscape is like a snapshot of the past,” said Stewart Jamieson, a professor of glaciology at Durham University in England and co-leader of the study published in the journal Nature Communications, “It is difficult to know what this lost world might have looked like before the ice came along, but it was certainly warmer back then. Ancient palm tree pollen has been discovered from Antarctica, not far from our study site.”

Some earlier studies have uncovered ancient landscapes beneath Antarctica’s ice including mountains. But the landscape discovered in the new study was the first of its kind. It is estimated that such an environment would likely have been populated by wildlife. But the area’s fossil record is too incomplete to know which animals may have lived there. The ice above the ancient landscape measures about 2.2 kilometers to 3 kilometers thick.

The researchers said one way to learn more would be to drill through the ice and take a piece of the earth below. This could uncover evidence showing ancient life, as was done with samples taken in Greenland dating back two million years ago.

Right before 34 million years ago, Antarctica’s landscape and wildlife was likely similar to today’s cold temperate rainforests. That includes places like Tasmania, New Zealand and South America’s Patagonia area. When the climate cooled even more, an ice sheet grew which covered the whole continent.