【推荐1】Every day as the sun rises, Ma Hongyi, a 66-year-old farmer, can be seen patrolling (巡逻) Yuncheng Salt Lake with his dog in Yuncheng city, North China’s Shanxi province.

Ma still remembers the day when he first saw two big pink birds wandering through the water. “I had never seen such pretty birds. They were even taller than me, with long wings,” Ma recalls. He was later informed that those birds were flamingos, a rare sight in China, which were listed on the International Union for Protection of Nature’s red list of endangered species in 2013. From that day on, Ma started his second career as a volunteer to prevent human beings from doing harm to the wildlife. “The birds are attracted by the good environment,” Ma says. “I will do my best to protect the lake so that birds can come here every year.”

Yuncheng Salt Lake covers an area of 132 square kilometers and used to serve as a salt production base. As the country began attaching greater importance to environmental protection, an ecological (生态的) protection and development center was set up in 2012 to carry out regular ecological protection and restoration of the lake. “The greatest value of the Salt Lake lies in its ecology, which should be properly protected,” says Chu Xianghao, head of the city. The lake area hosts 292 types of wild animals, along with 782 plant varieties, some of which are newly recorded species in the country.

After patrolling the lake as a volunteer for over four years, Ma was employed by the local government to help with wildlife protection in 2019. “The lake’s ecology is getting better,” Ma says, adding that he looks forward to the arrival of the flamingos every year. “Some of them are my old friends,” he says.

【推荐3】Seen any unseasonably early daffodils showing their faces yet? UK spring flowers are opening nearly a month earlier than they did before the mid-1980s, due to climate changes.

That is the conclusion of a study of nearly 420,000 observations of the flowering date of 406 plants from UK citizen science project galled Nature’s Calendar. It has records dating back to 1753 from gardeners and naturalists, as well as lie bodies such as the UK’s royal Meteorological Society.

Urth Bruise at the University of Cambridge and his team found that plants were opening their flowers 26 days earlier on average in the years after 1986 than they did before. They picked that year as it was the midpoint in the data set — where they had about the same number of observations before and after — because there were many more recent record than earlier ones.

The analysis included records of all plants, whatever time of year they flower, but most of them bloom in spring. “It is likely that the influence of climate change will be greater for spring-flowering plants, where the usual onset of warmer temperatures that would cause flowering to start earlier,” says a spokesperson for the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society.

There was a bigger advance in the dates of the first blooms for smaller plants, with those less than 20 centimeters high flowering an average of 32 days earlier in the years after 1986 than they had historically.

In any year, flowering opening times were closely correlated with the average temperature of the months from January to April. “If it’s warmer, it’s an earlier onset. If it’s cooler, it’s a later one,” says Bruise. The average maximum temperature across those four months rose by 1.1 °C, comparing the period from 1950 to 1986 with the years after 1986. The shift could hurt insects, birds and other wildlife that has evolved to coexist with the flowering of certain plants,” says Bruise.

【推荐2】As is commonly known, Antarctica is an icy continent with extreme environment. However, a new study provides evidence that the area had a rainforest in the past.

The researchers collected a piece of Earth sediment from under the seafloor off the coast of Antarctica. In the sediment, they discovered forest material that was estimated to be about 90 million years old. At that period, dinosaurs were the ruler animals of the land.

Johann Klages, a German geologist, was the lead writer of a study on the findings, published in the journal Nature. He said the sediment was collected from a depth of about 30 meters below the ocean floor. Klages said an examination showed that the material didn’t form in the ocean.

The researchers estimate that the area — about 900 kilometers from the South Pole — had average yearly temperatures of about 12°C to 13°C. The soil included fine dirt particles and hard clay, as well as substances linked to at least 65 different kinds of plants, the study found. Although no animal remains were found, Klages said there were likely dinosaurs, flying reptiles and many insects in the environment.

The research represents new evidence of the major climate changes Earth experienced in the past — and is currently undergoing today. The soil in the sediment dates back to the planet’s warmest period of the past 140 million years, with sea level about 170 meters higher than today. The researchers said that the rainforest environment in Antarctica was especially surprising because each year, the area experiences a four-month polar night when there is no sunlight to fuel plant life. Klages said no ice sheets were present during the time, but seasonal snowfall was likely.

【推荐3】Coffee chains create a lot of waste, from disposable take-away cups to the used grounds that are sent to landfills(垃圾填埋场). Starbucks has started to try recyclable alternatives to the disposable cups. But the used coffee is often unnoticed.

The world drinks around 2 billion cups of coffee a day, producing 6 million tons of used grounds every year. When they go to landfills, the grounds give off greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

UK Bio-bean has found a way to turn that waste into a valuable resource. At Bio-bean, used coffee grounds are processed to remove paper cups or plastic bags, and then passed through a dryer and a further screening (筛选) process. They are finally processed into the Coffee Log.

“Coffee is highly calorific and lends itself to being a really fantastic fuel”, says May, director of Bio-bean. “They burn about 20% hotter and 20%o longer than wood logs do.”

While these fuels release greenhouse gases when burned, if they replace other carbon-based fuels. Bio-bean estimates that the recycling process reduces emissions (排放) to by 80% compared with sending the grounds to landfills.

Founded in 2013, Bio-bean grew rapidly, starting coffee collection services across the UK and building the world's first coffee recycling factory only two years later. In 2016 they produced their first product, Coffee Log, and are now ready to launch their first natural flavoring ingredient into the tool and drink industry.

“We’re really managed to succeed with our innovation (创新) because we’ve managed to get to scale. What started as a good idea is today the UK’s largest recycler of coffee grounds. We are tuning 7,000 tons of those grounds per year into the fuel”, says George May. “Despite being delayed by the worldwide COVID-19 epidemic, we plan to expand our operation into northwestern Europe within the next five years.”