【推荐1】As a kid, Joanna Buckley wasn’t interested in science—until she had a chance to try it. That happened when she got a chemistry set as a gift.

“Over the course of a few weeks, I’d completed every experiment. But in the process, I polluted my parent’s dining room carpet and burnt the kitchen worktop with the spirit burner,” she says.

Now science is Buckley’s job. She works in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Sheffield in England. “I realize, first­hand, how important it is to have something or someone to show you why science is so great, ” she says. Now the good news is that citizen science appears.

Citizen science takes the fun of experimenting a step further than Buckley’s at­-home experiments. That’s because these experiments are real, looking for novel answers.

“Compared with a one­off experiment, what’s cool about citizen science is that students get that this has a purpose,” says Amy Prunuske, who teaches microbiology and immunology at a medical college. “Students want to do a good job, because they know scientists are going to use the new data in their own research.”

Jennifer Long’s job is to coordinate (协调) education and outreach. She agrees with Prunuske. “Kids like that it’s real. And they like that it’s important, and that it matters.” Citizen science projects have made big discoveries. One found a previously unknown galaxy cluster (星系团). Another project helped assess how much damage a big earthquake had caused in Japan. And one of the first citizen science projects helped scientists learn where monarch butterflies go every winter.

Some adults worry about teens losing interest in science. They hope that fun, exciting citizen science projects can help them keep engaged, Long says. And she has some evidence that it’s working. “Last year, we did have a couple of students say, ‘I really think I want to be a scientist now’. ”

【推荐3】The deserts of the world are not all covered with sand. Many of them have surfaces of rock or clay or small stones. They are not flat, either. They often have high hills and deep valleys. There is some plants’ life in many parts of the desert. There is little rain in the desert, but it does fall often enough for most plants.

The deserts of the world are not uninhabited (not lived by people). People also live outside oases (绿洲), but these people are not farmers. They have camels, goats, donkeys, sheep, etc. These animals can live on the desert plants and do not need much water.

The people of the desert have to move constantly from place to place, they must always look for grass or desert plants for their animals. They usually live in tents. When there is no more food for their animals, they fold up their tents, pat them on their camels and donkeys, and move to another place. In good years, when there is enough food for their animals, they trade their skins and their goats and camel hairs with the people of oases for wheat and fruit. But in bad years, when there is not enough food for their animals, the people of the desert would attack the oases people. But they are also hospitable, no man in the desert would ever refuse to give a stranger food and water.

【推荐3】Rainforests provide much of the world’s oxygen. People have been trying to protect them for years. But another type of forest, the cloud forest, is just as important to humans.

These forests are at the tops of mountains, generally near the equator (赤道). These wet, wooded mountaintops are mainly in African and Central and South American countries. They are called “cloud forests” because their height allows for the formation of clouds among the trees. The trees in these forests pull water out of the clouds. The water gathers on the leaves and falls into small rivers below, which flow into towns at the bottom of the mountain. The yearly rainfall in these areas is about 180 centimetres. Cloud forests can pull in up to 60 percent of that. The water is important to the plants and the people in the area. It helps them survive.

Cloud forests are also home to countless species of plants that can’t be found anywhere else. One small cloud forest has as many types of plants as there are in all of Europe. In fact, there are so many that scientists haven’t made a complete list of them yet.

These forests are being destroyed at an increasing speed. Trees are being cut down, and roads are being built in their place. Some people have a goal to get government money to protect the forests. But they have had little success so far. Another way is to take the place of the destroyed plants with new ones. That, too, has been difficult because the plants are so special. There’s plenty of work to be done, but saving the cloud forests is still possible with creative solutions.