【推荐1】Because of the politics and history of Africa, wild animals there, which are interested in finding food and water not in politics, are in trouble. In the past, there were no borders between African countries, and the animals could travel freely according to the season or the weather. However, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the continent was divided up into colonies and then into nations. Fences were put up along the borders, so the animals could no longer move about freely.

Some countries decided to protect their animals by creating national parks. Kruger National Park, created in South Africa in 1926, was one of the first. By the end of the twentieth century, it had become an important tourist attraction and a home for many kinds of animals. Among these, there were about 9,000 elephants, too many for the space in the park. It was not possible to let any elephants leave the park, however. They would be killed by hunters, or they might damage property or hurt people. South African park officials began to look for other solutions to the elephant problem.

As early as 1990, the governments of South Africa and Mozambique had begun talking about forming a new park together. In 1997, Zimbabwe agreed to add some of its land to the park. A new park would combine the Kruger National Park with parks in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. There would be no national border fences within the park, so that elephants and other animals from the crowded Kruger Park could move to areas of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. This new “transfrontier” park would cover 13,150 square miles (35,000 square kilometers). The idea of a transfrontier park interested several international agencies, which gave money and technical assistance to Mozambique to help build its part of the park.

In April 2001, the new park was opened, with new borders and a new name: The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. A border gate was opened between Kruger National Park and Mozambique, and seven elephants were allowed through. They were the first of 1,000 elephants that would be transferred to the world’s greatest animal park.

【推荐2】If you’ve ever had a dog, you know just how deep a connection you can develop with “man’s best friend”. But a dog has a much shorter life span — about 12 to 15 years long — than humans, which means every dog owner has to go through the heartbreaking moment when their loving pet passes away.

Why not make a clone of that dog then? This is the solution offered by a South Korean company, Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. The company has successfully cloned at least 400 dogs, mostly for US customers, ever since it pioneered the technique in 2005. Now, Sooam Biotech is planning to introduce their business to UK dog owners, offering them dogs that look just like their lost ones.

Meanwhile, another dog is selected to supply an egg. Researchers then replace the DNA in the egg with that from the skin cell and implant the egg into the womb (子宫) of a female dog. The egg grows into a puppy over the following two months. To clone a dog, researchers first need to take a skin cell from a living dog or one that has just died.

The whole process takes less than a day, but it comes at a shockingly high price — around £63,000 (614,000 yuan). But if you can’t afford it now, you can also save the cells in a laboratory and access them at a later date. Just like identical twins of humans, they share the exact same DNA but there will still be small differences between them. “The spots on a Dalmatian clone will be different, for example,” Insung Hwang, head of Sooam Biotech, told The Guardian. However, as magical as cloning might sound, there is no guarantee that the cloned dog will be a perfect replica of the original one.

Dog owners will also have to accept the fact that personality is not “clone-able”. Apart from genes, personality is also determined by upbringing and environment, which are both “random elements [that] cloning technologies simply cannot overcome”, Professor Tom Kirkwood at Newcastle University, UK, told The Telegraph.

Perhaps bringing our dogs back with cloning is not the best way to remember them after all.

Kirkwood, a dog owner himself, pointed out: “An important aspect of our relationship with them is coming to terms with the pain of letting go.”

【推荐3】Gardening can be a fun and rewarding activity for people of all ages, but it can be especially beneficial for children.

Gardening enhances children’s senses and motor skills. In addition to being able to touch the soil, use various tools and seeds, children can also spot the differences between different plants, and hear sounds of different insects.    1    . Gardening activities like digging, planting, watering, and weeding can stimulate movements of the body, particularly arms and hands, and help children learn about the natural world.

    2    . Children’s curiosity about plants starts with the first seed they sow. They learn about natural process by observing the growth and fruit ripen. They also come to appreciate the vital role of insects and worms for plants and recognize that everything in nature is connected.

Plant care fosters (培养) patience and responsibility.    3    , and children learn what it means to be responsible for something to help ensure its health. Gardening also teaches children about caring for the environment, fostering a love and respect for nature.

Gardening promotes nutrition and healthy choices for kids. Planting and cultivating (培育) plants, picking vegetables and fruit, and involving kids in cooking with what they grew will certainly result in a wish to try and consume the food they prepared. They will gladly try vegetables and fruit they planted and cultivated themselves.     4    

Gardening gives your family bonding time. Bonding with your family is so important, but it can be hard to realize with the digital age.     5    ,which contributes to parent-child relationship.

【推荐1】Contrary to “popular opinion”, the scientific pursuit for knowledge is not a predictable process. To make new discoveries, researchers need the freedom to be creative, fail, and learn by chance. This aspect is similar to art. This is why Wageningen scientists look to artists for inspiration and exchange ideas about how to increase creative freedom.

“Science and art are two different ways to make something understandable. They both provide a perspective on reality,” says Biochemistry Professor Dolf Weijers. “From the outside, the research process looks very formal and the artistic process looks somewhat messy. But the scientific process can also unfold in an unpredictable way.”

“Scientists can learn a lot from artists,” says Weijers. “Association and creativity are central to art. Those aspects require more attention in science as the creative process is the key of science.”

“As a scientist, you use different methods, but it is equally about how you visualize(可视化) your understanding of reality and the connections that there are. This is sometimes just as visual as art,” says Weijers. One example is a recent special project in which Weijers and his colleague Joris Sprakel, professor of Physical Chemistry and Soft Matter, measured the forces that act on plant cells. A molecular(分子的)sensor was used to visualize the different forces. They showed the results in colorful images, each representing a different force.

What science and art also have in common is that they are topics of discussion in society. There are people who say that they do not value art and people who mistrust science. Weijers says, “It often creates the wrong impression because only the results of scientific studies are presented, and people do not have any insight into the process leading to discovery. As a scientist, you are doubted if you say that something is different a few years later. Then you are viewed as unreliable. But what is often poorly understood is that there are no final results in science. What we scientists can achieve in the coming period is to provide more chances for people to focus on the process. Personally, I think that the connection with art can help to lead the focus on the process than the result.”

【推荐2】Arguably, the biggest science development of the year to date has been the images of the very depths of the universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Those images beg a comparison between the external and internal universes that science is bent on observing and understanding.

Decades ago, astrophysicist Carl Sagan famously said, “The universe is also within is. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. ” He was commenting then on the reality that our internal universe was as complex and as fantastic as the outer space.

There are many similarities between the progress we’ve made in understanding the universe and in piecing together life’s inner workings. Like the technological developments that took us from Galileo’s telescope to the Hubble to the JWST, life science tools have also improved rapidly. From early light microscopes to modern super-resolution ones, these developments have afforded researchers a deep look into biology’s infinitesimal (无限小的) landscape. Learning that living things were composed of cells was, not a terribly long time ago, a revolutionary observation. Since then, scientists have been able to dive ever deeper into the components of life.

Going beyond merely observing the complicated makeup of organisms, life scientists can now discover the workings of molecules (分子). And that is where scanning the universe differs from peering into biology. Understanding the universe, especially from a functional standpoint, is not necessarily an immediate urgency. Understanding biology on that level is. Simply observing the amazing internal structure of cells is not enough. Biologists must also characterize how all those parts interact and change in different environments and when faced with various challenges. Being able to image a virus or bacterium is nice at the level of basic science. But knowing how viruses gain entry into cells and spread, infect, and disable can literally save lives. Through time, biology has risen to this mechanistic challenge. Not only can life science tools produce images of cell components, even more importantly, they can help predict the effects of drugs on receptors, of immune cells on foreign invaders (入侵者), and of genetic perturbations (基因干扰) on development and aging.

This is not to belittle the work of scientists researching into universe. They should rightly be praised for delivering views of impossibly distant, impossibly massive phenomena. My aim is to celebrate these accomplishments while at the same time recognizing that science’s inward search for detail and insight is equally impressive and, in my view, more urgent. The output of both the outward and inward explorations should stimulate wonder in everyone. After all, it’s all star-stuff.