【推荐1】Minh Anh Ho is sitting beside a microscope. Many people are busy with other tasks. One is interviewing the mayor for a TV news station. Another is running the electric company. As a researcher for a company that repurposes plastic, Minh Anh Ho is studying a sheet of cling wrap (保鲜膜). “It’s a really important job,” she says. “Plastic takes a really long time to disappear, so it would be good to come up with something else to do with it and not just throw it away.”

The learning center where Minh Anh Ho and her class are spending their day is designed to introduce kids to working life. Students run an imaginary town, with each kid doing a different job in a different business. Each year, about 83% of all sixth graders in Finland go through the program. It teaches them not just about business and working, but also, as Minh Anh Ho’s “job” makes clear, about the circular (循环) economy.

Most societies have linear (线性) economies, which operate on a “take, make, waste” model. Natural resources are taken from the Earth and made into products, which are usually thrown away if left over. In 2016, Finland became the first country to use a “road map” to a circular economy. This model focuses on the transformation of existing products. Businesses rely on recycled or repurposed materials and use less raw (未经加工的) material to make their products. That reduces the amount of waste going into landfills.

Education has always been a central part of Finland’s plan. Kindergarten director Liisa Woitsch is sitting on the floor with students and a broken wooden chair. “Do we just throw it away now,” she asks, “or can you think of anything else that can be done with it?” A little boy pounds on the chair. He says it can be used as a drum.

Anssi Almgren helped design the program. “Children have so many great ideas,” he says. “We want to enable them to think about solutions. But changing a society by educating its youth takes time.”

【推荐3】We are in the middle of another technology revolution. The digital economy will contribute 48% of GDP in China in 2035, up from 23% in 2020.

With the implementation(实施) of 5G and consumer AI, smart cities are no longer just a concept. Indeed, in a surprising silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, smart city apps have shown they can help China contain the spread of the virus, helping to recover the economy. Other successful examples include applications for better traffic management, flood control and crime reduction.

The number of smart street lights required in China is estimated at 13million assuming a 30% penetration rate(安装率) of all street lights in 2025. When the network of smart street lights increases further, it will also likely expand to cover more functions. In addition to basic lighting, it could include monitoring cameras, auto-police calling when the data shows abnormalities, weather information collection, WI-Fi hotspots converting telecommunication signals, e-vehicle chargers, and so on.

In order to deal with the difficulty of parking, Shenzhen has combined 5G and AI to enhance the efficiency of car park usage. For example, drivers can seamlessly book a parking space at a hospital at the same time as scheduling a doctor’s appointment. Drivers also know whether all of the parking spaces are occupied at the time of the doctor’s appointment and can choose other transportation. Besides, Robots and sensors installed in the auto-valet parking lots work together to find a space and park the car for drivers, which provide much convenience for drivers.

With more technology applications，there is bound to be disruption(扰乱) to existing activities and the labour they require. If smart cities help driverless cars to take off, the thousands of drivers of taxis or delivery drivers that find low skilled employment in China’s cities could be displaced and struggle to find alternative employment. New jobs will certainly arise from the implementation of smart city technology, but will likely require different skills and knowledge to those being displaced. The government will need to assist those whose employment is disrupted to find alternatives.

【推荐1】In the threatening trouble of climate change, growing commercial crops on solar farms is a potentially efficient use of agricultural land that can both increase commercial food production and improve solar panel performance and longevity(寿命), according to a new Cornell research.

“We now have, for the first time, a physics-based tool to estimate the costs and benefits of co-locating solar panels and commercial agriculture in terms of increased power conversion efficiency and solar-panel longevity, ” said lead author Henry Williams, a doctoral student in Cornell Engineering.

“There is potential for agrivoltaic (农业光伏) systems-where agriculture and solar panels coexist-to provide increased passive cooling through taller panel heights, more reflective ground cover and higher evapotranspiration (蒸散) rates compared to traditional solar farms,” said Max Zhang, professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, “We can generate renewable electricity and conserve farmland through agrivoltaic systems.” In New York, for example, about 40% of solar farm capacity has been developed on agricultural lands, while about 84% of land suitable for solar development is agricultural, according to a previous research study from Zhang’s group.

The engineers showed that solar panels mounted over vegetation reveal surface temperature drops compared to those built over bare ground. Solar panels were mounted 4 meters above a cotton crop and the solar panels showed temperature reductions by up to 10 degrees Celsius, compared with those mounted a half-meter above bare soil.

“As you decrease the solar panel operating temperature, you can increase efficiency and improve the longevity of your solar panels, ” said Williams, “We’re showing double benefits. On one hand, you have food production for farmers, and on the other hand, we’ve shown improved longevity and improved conversion efficiency for solar developers.”

“Up to this point, most of the benefits from agrivoltaic systems have been around areas with abundant sunshine, ” said Zhang, “This research is taking a step toward evaluating the application of agrivoltaics in climates representative of the Northeastern U. S. in relaxing the land-use competition it faces.”