【推荐3】If you think you’d like to live on Mars, you may have that possibility by 2023. A Dutch company called Mars One will soon advertise for people interested in colonizing (开拓) Mars. If you have all the necessary skills, you could be one of the first colonists. Are you ready for the challenge?

You won’t have to pay for the mission to Mars. Mars One has already received money from some donors and is hoping to get more from TV viewers who will become interested in the show where all applicants have a debate for the rare chances.

The main responsibility of the first colonists is to create an artificial environment on Mars where there is no air to breathe and no land to farm. Scientists know it’s quite possible because something similar has already been done in Antarctica.

Another problem is that space travel to Mars takes nearly a year to get to Mars and the colonists will live the rest of their lives there. When a human lives in an environment without gravity or with low gravity for a long time, the systems in the body weaken. Luckily, spinning (旋转) the spaceship can create artificial gravity, and artificial gravity can ease these problems. It will also be difficult for Mars colonists to be far from home, living in small spaces, and seeing the same people over and over. Colonists with depression could put the mission in danger. Fortunately, a few years ago, a joint Russian and European project called the Mars500 Mission studied people’s reactions in a Mars-like environment. It is viewed as a great success because scientists were able to see how people handle emotional and physical stresses.

Recent studies show that seven percent of people would want to go on such an adventure.

Mars One will soon start accepting its first colonists. Are you interested?

【推荐1】John, who has ADHD (多动症), was removed from the classroom after he refused to stop using a pair of safety scissors to cut his fingernails.

The practice is known as informal removal, defined by the U. S. Department of Education as an action taken by school staff in response to a child’s behavior that excludes the child for part or all of the school day—or even indefinitely. Informal removals can happen through frequent parent pickups, shortened school days or hours spent in”time-out“ rooms.

Too much use of informal removals amounts to a form of off-the-books discipline-in fact a denial of education that escapes responsibility, legal experts say. It has special meanings for kids with disabilities; Informally removing these students circumvents (规避) federal law that protects them from being repeatedly disciplined or removed from school for behaviors related to their disability.

In the law, if they are suspended (停学) for more than 10 days, families are entitled to a meeting with the school to determine whether the behaviors are a result of the child’s disability. If so, then the school must offer adjustments instead of suspension.

The Education Department’s July guidance made it clear that children who are informally removed have the same rights, such as reviews of whether the students’ behavior was a result of their disability, as those who have been officially suspended.

The Associated Press interviewed 20 families in 10 states who described being called repeatedly and at all hours of the school day to pick up their children. They had to leave work to get their child so frequently that they lost their jobs. Many felt they had no choice but to change schools, or even districts. It’s common and the reason for it is that most parents don’t know their rights, and the consequence for the school system is not enough to make them not do it. Families often do not know who they have to complain to. Sometimes they aren’t aware their child should not have been suspended in the first place.

【推荐2】United Airlines is aiming to have electric aircraft flying regional routes by the end of the decade, part of the company’s goal to fully reduce its carbon footprint to net zero by 2050.

Those battery-powered aircraft are being developed by Swedish start-up Heart Aerospace, from which United Airlines placed an order for 100 planes in July 2021. United Airlines has pushed heavily into a variety of lower-emission forms of aviation, not only announcing plans to buy electric air taxis and vertical aircraft, as well as hydrogen-electric engines but also investing in the companies behind the advanced technologies.

“We cannot continue doing and operating our business the way we do; it is important that we change it, and the way we’ re going to change it is through investing in technology,” Mike Leskinen, United Airlines Ventures president, said in an interview as part of CNBC’s ESG Impact virtual conference on Thursday. “Existing technology is going to either cause us to fly less, which is an unacceptable alternative, or continue with a carbon footprint, which we believe is equally unacceptable,” Leskinen said.

Heart Aerospace, which recently redesigned what will be its first electric aircraft which is now called the ES-30, plans to have the planes enter service in 2028, said Anders Forslund, the company’s CEO and founder.

The 30-passenger planes will be driven by electric motors with battery-derived energy, allowing the planes to have a fully electric range of 200 kilometers. The planes will also include a reserve- hybrid engine powered by sustainable aviation fuel, allowing it to have an extended range of up to 400 kilometers with a full flight.

United Airlines could potentially offer those shorter routes not only with greater frequency but at a lower cost. Leskinen said. “As we adopt electric aircraft, I think the cost for a 30-seat aircraft or a 50-seat aircraft, as the industry evolves, is going to be lower than a traditional aircraft,” he said. For small cities, this means they are “going to get either service that they didn’t have before or greater frequency of service,” he added.

【推荐3】Fifty years ago, astronauts traveled to space in rockets designed, built, and maintained by NASA and paid for by government funding. Today, the astronauts are often billionaires enjoying a journey into low orbit on a rocket they paid for from their billion-dollar bank accounts.

The change feels like a giant leap, but it makes sense, says Laura Seward Forczyk, founder of Astralytical a space consulting company. “More and more of modern civilization relies on space,” she says.

Huge numbers of satellites orbit the planet connecting us to everything from cell phones to GPS to Netflix and there is big money in maintaining those systems. “This doesn’t get a lot of headlines typically, but there are profit reasons why private companies want to go into space,” says Forczyk.

And 85 private companies learn more about putting rockets and satellites into space, they’re able to help the likes of NASA on their missions. That’s important because NASA itself has become financially constrained from its 1966 peak, where spending on the space race took up 4.4 percent of the federal budget, that spending is now less than 0.5 percent of the country’s total budget.

“NASA using commercial companies to build a lot of the hardware to do a lot of those services of taking scientific payloads to the surface of the moon,” says Forczyk. The hope is that people will follow — possibly by 2025, but more realistically, says Forczyk, by 2030. If you’re wondering why we’re going back to the moon since mankind has already walked its surface, the answer is that we explored only part of it.

“We know a lot more, but we also know so very little,” says Forczyk. “So we want to go back with people to learn more, but more importantly, we want to go back to live and work there.”

Some even see the moon as an eventual staging area for human exploration of deep space. Mars is seen as the next stepping-off point toward the final frontier — though whether we’ll get there in our lifetimes is another question.