【推荐1】What is Earth Day? It’s a day to celebrate, praise and notice Mother Earth.     1     A reminder that without Mother Earth, none of us would be alive.

For Earth Day, and every day for that matter, go outside.     2     Soak up the sunlight. Taste the air on your tongue, feel the wind kiss your cheeks, and let your bare feet meet the dirt, grass, and sand.

Go for a walk. Look, listen and smell the world around you.     3     Notice the breathtaking display of flowers and bushes, grasses and trees —everywhere. Breathe in their scents. Notice the chirps, buzz and clicks of birds, insects, and squirrels. What are they saying? Notice the colors —every shade of every color, everywhere. Hello natural world! I see you! Say out loud. And then try to understand the biodiversity of life. Try to imagine all that Mother Nature is, all that Mother Nature has and all that Mother Nature does for us. Really try to understand--reach and bend and stretch until your heart and mind are gaping. Then celebrate her.

Kiss the trees. Dance in a meadow. Sing with the birds. Play in the dirt. Join the animals and the birds and the angels, the silent song of the flowers and trees in praise of her.    4     Pick up rubbish; plant a garden; feed the birds; remove a fence; let a weed grow.

    5     Wish Mother Earth a happy Earth Day and make a promise that when people ask when Earth Day is, you will answer, “Every day!”

【推荐2】Sixteen miles off the windswept coast of northern Scotland, the future of renewable energy is taking shape. Turning rhythmically in the breeze, the five enormous turbines of the Hywind Scotland wind farm look like any other off-shore wind project, except one major difference — they’re floating.

While conventional offshore turbines sit atop mental and concrete towers fixed into the seabed, Hywind’s turbines rest on floating steel structures that rise and fall with waves. Carefully balanced, they remain upright despite the waving conditions. This simple sounding, yet extremely complex design is changing the way green developers view offshore wind.

It could prove to be an important development as the world attempts to meet the net zero carbon emission targets that countries committed to in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The energy department as a whole currently accounts for around three quarters of all the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity.

To cut those emissions, green electricity will need to be at the main source of global energy, according to the International Energy Agency. It says that by 2024, half of the world’s energy needs will have to be met by electricity produced in a net zero way.

With growing numbers of electric vehicles, combined with increased demand for electricity to replace fossil fuels in domestic and industrial uses, electricity networks will also need to become far more flexible with more ways to generate and store energy. It means that by 2045, our energy network could look thoroughly different to the way it does today. Projects like Hywind’s floating wind farm offer a present-day glimpse of what the future could look like.

While floating turbines overcome some of the issues that make offshore wind farms in deep waters impossible, there are still challenges to be overcome. There are some concerns about what impact large wind turbines might have on the marine environment. The price of floating wind projects is also still high — costing almost twice as much per megawatt hour of electricity produced compared to bottom-fixed offshore wind. But those costs are expected to drop as the technology becomes increasingly advanced, as has been seen with other wind energy projects, helping pave the way towards net zero emissions, and a future powered by carbon-free fuel.

【推荐1】While some say school safety depends on guns, cameras or alarms in classrooms, Mark Gomer and Kristi Schiller think specially trained dogs should play an important role in preventing violence in schools.

Gomer’s for-profit company has sent a gun-and-drug detecting dog to patrol (巡查) the halls of an Ohio high school, while Schiller is launching a nonprofit program in Houston to give schools the trained dogs for free.

Gomer’s first full-time safety dog is a three-year-old Dutch shepherd named Atticus, who is reported to duty this school year at Oak Hills High School in Green Township in southwest Ohio. The dog was trained at the school before the summer break, said Gomer, co-owner of American Success Dog Training in Bridgetown, Ohio. Atticus has won over students, parents, teachers and district Superintendent Todd Yohey, who initially worried what people would think of him spending $10,000 on a dog. Gomer has talked to a lot of parents and faculty, and they are saying it was money well-spent, he said.

For her part Schiller is looking to provide safety dogs to schools free of charge. She hopes her new initiative, program “K9S4KIDS”, does for schools what her program “K9S4COPS” did for police departments. She has placed more than 60 dogs with agencies in three years. “These dogs are extremely social, yet highly qualified warriors that are accustomed to going straight to the source of a threat or shooter and disengaging the suspect armed with the weapon,” said Schiller.

As the programs get up and running, questions remain about possible health problems and distractions the dogs can cause.

A school safety expert said those are concerns parents and schools will have to work out. Ken Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm, discussed the issue in general because he was not familiar with either program.

He said the dogs would have to be extremely social to deal with students’ initial excitement “Kids are going to like those dogs,” Trump said, “There are concerns to work around, but with the right dogs and right handler and the right policies and procedures, they should be very beneficial. The dog might be a distraction in the beginning, but they will become part of what students expect to see when they go to school.” “There is so much these dogs can do,” said Ted Dahlin, a deputy who serves on the K9S4COPS board of directors. “If I were going to pick a school to make trouble, it would be one that I knew didn’t have a dog.”