【推荐2】Chaudhary quietly weaves together lengths of ropes, binding them with grass collected from the riverbank. She skillfully shapes the materials into a jewelry box. Meanwhile, she’s instructing a group of women to work out the materials. The ropes used were once the lifeline for climbers tackling Nepal’s mountains and were then discarded (扔掉). They are now finding new life, transformed by skilled hands into items to sell.

Acharya, working with the cleaning campaign, owns a waste processing business in Kathmandu, also an advocate for sustainable waste management. “Aluminum and other metal waste go through the recycling process, but we found no way to recycle ropes and gas cans,” she says. It struck her that the non-recyclable waste could be reused, but it wasn’t until she met Maya Rai that a solution emerged. Rai, leading Nepal Knotcraft Centre, helped connect Acharya with Chaudhary’s team of craftswomen in hopes of turning the mountain waste into economic opportunity. “While this seems insignificant compared to waste in the mountains, it’s a start. We aim to connect local expertise, mountain waste and local economy,” says Acharya, proudly displaying a mat made from ropes left on Mt. Qomolangma by climbers. Her goal is to ensure that no waste collected from mountains ends up in a landfill again.

Finished crafts are sold at outlets and exhibitions. The craftswomen are paid according to how many items they make and sell. With flexible hours, the project gives women an opportunity to earn money even as they maintain household responsibilities.

Eventually, Acharya hopes to expand the program to involve more women and process more waste. But progress has been slow. “We still have not found a sustainable business plan to make crafts in large quantities, ”she says. Now, she is searching for cooperators to make a model that serves not only the mountain but the communities. “After all, we are trying to craft a sustainable future.”

Each rope turned into a decorative item is a way to help local women earn a living and keep mountains clean.

【推荐3】As temperatures soar, electric bills often go through the roof. That’s because people tend to turn on their air conditioners during the long, hot summer months.

It’s been predicted that by 2050 about 75 percent of the world’s homes could have air conditioners. If that’s true, the energy required to cool buildings will double. For that reason, researchers continue to look for solutions to keep air-conditioner usage to a minimum. Some innovations are being used already or are in the process of being developed. Certain building materials can feel cooler because of their ability to absorb heat and release it slowly. Other buildings use water cooling systems to cool them. However, these aren’t the only methods. Science has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

Researchers at Purdue University have developed the world’s whitest paint. This paint can keep a building’s exterior surface cooler than the surrounding temperature. On hot days, walls absorb heat and often become 10 to 20 degrees Celsius hotter than the air around them. But walls painted with Purdue’s white paint reflect 98.1 percent of the heat and send it back into space. This creates a cooling effect.

Purdue professor Xiulin Ruan believes that the super-white paint could have a more powerful cooling effect than many home air conditioners. Researchers hope to have the paint on the market in five to 10 years.

Yi Zheng of Northeastern University has created a “cooling paper”. This material reflects the sun’s rays while pulling heat out of a building’s interior, and the paper can be recycled. He and his team discovered that the paper helps bring down a room’s temperature by about 6 degrees Celsius. Zheng hopes that the cooling paper will someday be used on roofs and within building materials.

Now and in the future, perhaps some of these energy-efficient methods will make it easier to beat the heat.

【推荐1】It is predicted that in 2023, a quarter of all new cars purchased in China will be an all-electric vehicle or a plug-in hybrid. By some estimates, more than 300 Chinese companies are making E.V.s, ranging from discount off rings below $5,000 to high-end models that rival American and German automakers. There are roughly five million charging units in the country, with more coming.

While other E.V. markets are still heavily dependent on allowances and financial stimulation, China has entered a new phase: Consumers are weigh in e the features and prices of electric vehicles against gas-powered cars without much consideration of state support, it took China more than a decade of allowances, long-term investments and infrastructure (基础设施) spending to lay the foundation for its electric vehicle market to start standing on its own. Of the world ‘stop-10best-selling E.V. brands, half are Chinese. And it’s not just the car sales that are booming in China. The Chinese battery manufacturers are the biggest players in the industry.

Mr. Li, a 27-year-old employee at a construction firm who recently decided to trade in his gas-powered car for an E.V., said financial stimulation did not weigh on his decision to go electric. In Chengdu, the big city in southwestern China where Mr. Li lives and works, traditional cars are restricted from being on the road on certain days of the week to help reduce traffic jams and pollution. Electric vehicles, however, are free to come and go. For electric cars, parking is free for the first two hours at public parking lots.

【推荐2】Between July and December 2021, more than 11 million young oysters (牡蛎) were put into the Hudson River. They are part of a plan to create a healthier ecosystem in the river by increasing the oyster population.

The waters used to be full of oysters, which were collected for food and shells too much. Weather got warmer and New York City also dumped waste water and harmful chemicals into the river. By 1927, most of the oysters had died. Now, oysters may help to restore the waters and bring back marine life. How do oysters do it?

Oysters help clean water. They are filter feeders, taking in water through their gills (鳃) and filter out the food they eat, such as plankton (浮游生物) and algae (海藻). A single adult oyster can filter up to 189 litres of water in a day. They also filter other harmful things out of the water, one of which is nitrogen, a chemical often found in fertilizers (肥料). Sometimes nitrogen gets washed into rivers and oceans when it rains. Too much nitrogen in the water causes large amounts of algae to grow. The algae use up the oxygen in the water, harming other marine life. Oysters filter nitrogen out of the water and use it to grow their shells.

Oysters also build reefs, benefiting the whole ecosystem. Oysters attach themselves to hard surfaces underwater like rocks. Then more oysters attach themselves on top of those, and more on top of those. As the oysters grow, their shells combine together to form a reef. Oyster reefs provide homes for plants and animals, thus creating more biodiversity. Reefs also serve to protect the shoreline. Large reefs weaken the shock of waves coming in from the ocean, and help lessen flood disaster and prevent gradual destruction of the coast.

It will take decades before the new reefs grow as big as the reefs destroyed long ago, but signs show up that the ecosystem is getting healthier.

【推荐3】Dyslexia (阅读障碍) is a common reading disorder. It refers to a language-processing problem in which the brain tends to confuse the order of numbers, letters and other images. Past research showed that crowded text was especially difficult for people with dyslexia to read. So researchers at Anglia Ruskin University wanted to see how much help an increase in the spacing between letters would provide.

Steven Stagg and his team found 59 students between 11 and 15 years old. The kids came from schools in three cities in England. 32 had dyslexia; 27 did not. While the researchers recorded them, each student read two passages out loud. One passage was printed in its original format. In the other, the spacing between the letters was increased by 2.5 points. That extra space equals about 0. 88 millimeters. The recording allowed the scientists to measure someone’s reading speed and count any errors, such as skipped

People with dyslexia often employ aids to help them read, such as colored overlays (透明膜). So the researchers offered those colored plastic sheets to the students here. Readers place the plastic on top of the text and then read through it.

Those colored overlays didn’t help either group of kids. But the extra spacing did. Kids with dyslexia read the wider-spaced text 13 percent faster than the text with original spacing. These kids also made fewer mistakes. Students without dyslexia read faster, too, although only by 5 percent. Stagg studies how the mind processed language. He wasn’t surprised that the colored overlays weren’t helpful. Stagg has dyslexia and says colored overlays never helped him much, either. What was unexpected to the scientist was that wider-spaced letters helped even kids without dyslexia.

This is very good news. It means teachers and publishers can print material with extra spacing between letters knowing it will help everyone. Readers with dyslexia won’t feel singled out by having to use special reading materials. It’s a simple fix, too. Certain text-writing and document— processing software, such as Microsoft Word, can easily add extra spacing between letters. Web designers can add space to the text on their pages, too,