【推荐2】Downey's mother spent one year studying abroad through an international exchange program with a French school. She often talked about how exciting and interesting the experience was. So, even before finishing high school, Downey had decided to follow suit one day.

Downey began studying architecture at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 2004. Near the end of her second year, she started to feel unhappy with her school and decided it was time to study abroad.

U. S. colleges and universities commonly have joint programs with foreign schools that permit student exchanges. These programs usually last half a school year or sometimes a whole school year. The classes students take abroad usually give them credits toward their degree. In a four­year degree program, the third year is the most common time for American college students to study abroad. Many students think they need a change before what is usually their final and most difficult year of study.

Downey said her school did not want her to go at first. The architecture program at Lehigh was very intense, and her professors were worried she might miss learning important material. However, she was eventually able to get special permission to study internationally for a whole year. During the fall term in 2006, she attended a Danish international school in Copenhagen, Denmark, explaining she did so because Danish architects are well known for their housing design.

Young adult as she was, she had to deal with travel documents and many other issues (问题) on her own. Overcoming the language barrier is the biggest challenge of studying abroad. However, she had a lot of emotional (情感的) and financial support from her family. She learned life lessons and made friendships and memories that have lasted to this day. She said, “The more you're out of your comfort zone, the more rewarding the experience is in the end.”

【推荐1】SnotBot is on a mission. The toaster-sized drone (无人机) flies over the open ocean, directly above an unusual whale. On a boat nearby, Andy Rogan smiles with joy. Rogan has been studying whales in his entire career but had never seen this species.

Back in 2011, Lian Pin Koh and Serge Wich, conservation experts, wondered if there might be an easier way to get data of animals in the wild. Wildlife researchers often walk through forests. They may look closely at whales from boats or stay in helicopters to view animals from above. Such trips are usually dangerous. Plus, their noise may scare animals. And helicopters can’t fly very far over the ocean because there’s nowhere to land or refuel.

“We thought, ‘What if you fly over them with a flying camera?’’’ says Wich. So they put together a drone from a remote-control model airplane and camera equipment. And it did the trick. On a test flight, the drone caught an image of an orangutan (猩猩) at the top of a very tall tree. The pair realized this was just the beginning of a whole new way of doing conservation work.

Now Wich and his colleagues are building AI that automatically locates and recognizes animals. They call their project Conservation AI. When someone uploads an image or video, the model analyzes the data. Then the model recognizes anything it can. In the future, an AI model could keep watch, instead of forest guards. It could send warnings when seeing doubtful activities.

The team tested this idea in a study in East Africa. Volunteers in Tanzania pretended to be poachers (偷猎者). The researchers made drones fly over the actors at different times of the day. Overall, people looking at the drone images did a better job than the AI model at finding pretend poachers. The model picked out many things that weren’t people at all. But the model found poachers that most people missed. With a little more work, Wich thinks that systems like this will make it easier for conservationists to better protect endangered animals.

【推荐2】A sheet of transparent new material at a University of Maryland lab looks like it might be plastic. But it's actually wood — and it could eventually be used to make energy efficient windows or even see-through buildings.

Compared to glass, wood has lower thermal conductivity(导热系数),and it's lighter, stronger, and more environmentally friendly. The idea is to employ the material in buildings. With a window made from transparent wood instead of glass, for example, a building would take less energy to heat and cool. Because of the structure of the wood, the windows could also reduce glare from the sun while allowing in natural light.

Researchers have experimented with transparent wood in the past, but the new method is more sustainable. Other methods usually soak the wood into a chemical compound to remove lignin(木质素),part of the wood that gives it structure. But this can weaken the wood, and it produces waste that is hard to recycle. The researchers adjusted the process so it doesn't fully remove the lignin. By brushing hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂)over the wood and leaving it under a UV light, they removed only the parts of the lignin that give it color. The result is transparent wood that can be coated in epoxy(环氧树脂).

It's just one o£ a number of ways scientists and engineers are rethinking how we can use this renewable resource in construction. Skyscrapers made entirely out of wood are gaining popularity in cities around the world. And scientists recently discovered a technique to grow wood in a lab, opening up the possibility of using wood without having to chop down a forest.

The transparent wood is 50% stronger than previous transparent wood and could even be used to build load-bearing walls in a building. It could also potentially be used in other ways, such as layers used in solar cells. A new spin-off company called Invent Wood is working to commercialize the technology.

【推荐3】One of the important, but seldom-discussed, problems in healthcare reform is how to take care of our aging population as people continue to live longer. According to a new study from the Mac Arthur Research Network on an Aging Society, by 2050 Americans may live 3.1 to 7.9 years longer than the government expects. That would mean women would live 89 to 93 years and men 83 to nearly 86 years. The researchers base their conclusion on “rapid advances in biomedical(生物医药) technology that delay the start and progression of major deadly diseases or that slow the aging process.”

While this is good news, especially for the young, the life expectancy, which is in excess of(超过) the government’s estimates, would raise costs sharply for Medicare and Social Security. If the study’s predictions are accurate, the total cost for those two programs through 2050 could be between $3.2 trillion and $8.3 trillion higher than the US Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration currently expect.

And that’s only the beginning. With anticipated scientific breakthroughs in coming decades, people could eventually live to 150 years of age, says Dr. Steven Joyal, an official of the Life Extension Foundation (LEF), a nonprofit organization that promotes research on how we can live longer and healthier. The MacArthur paper, in fact, says that some experts believe the average life expectancy could hit 100 by 2060.

What’s more, Joyal says, overcoming disease and slowing down the aging process will lead to a sharp decline in disability, allowing people of advanced age to function as well as they did when they were much younger. “In other words, a 90-year-old person could have the same mental and physical capacity(能力) as somebody 40 or 50 years old.”

【推荐2】In our everyday lives and in our personal and professional pursuits, one of the best personal growth keys you and I should pursue is a healthy amount of self-awareness. Put simply, without self-awareness, we are tricking ourselves into living out life through the imagination of reality instead of reality. On the contrary, when we’re not tricking ourselves, we are putting ourselves in a position to grow and succeed.

Fundamentally, the more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting to change, growing healthily. So, how do you become self-aware? One of the most effective ways is to invite honest feedback into your life. I grew up in a generation in which everyone got a prize just for showing up. And while I am an enormous supporter of encouragement, false feedback only masks blind spots in a person’s character. Worse yet, a sustained “everyone gets a prize” culture supports mediocrity. Of course, on one likes hard conversations, but I’d like to advocate developing the maturity of character to get real self-awareness, and keep us sharp and effective as we meet the challenges of everyday life.

Yet amid all this, there’s one more key ingredient for self-awareness, and that’s applied self-knowledge. Imagine texting while driving. Being a slave to the ping of the latest message, you take your focus off the road in order to glance at your phone. A few seconds later, your eyes back on the road, you’re dangerously driving into the opposite way. Our self-awareness can tell us, “I mustn’t text while driving.”When we can understand the motivations behind our thoughts and actions, followed by our action plan to conduct our accompanying behavior, we’ll be better experiencing lasting growth. Self-awareness is not undervaluing ourselves; nor is it self-consciousness. Instead, self-awareness will keep us focused on what matters most and keep us away from those things that will distract us from our purpose, allowing us to be aware of our blind spots.

We can read all the self-help guides and personal growth strategies that money can buy, but if we don’t know ourselves well enough to put any of it into effective, specific practice, we’ll never arrive at the greatest place of success possible in this short life. And that is simply, yet powerfully, becoming the version of who we were meant to be.