【推荐2】Experts using a high-tech laser scanner (激光扫描仪) have discovered thousands of ancient Maya buildings hidden under the thick forests of northern Guatemala, officials said Thursday. Some 60, 000 buildings were found over the past two years in a scan of an area in the northern department of El Peten between Mexico and Belize, said Marcello Canuto, one of the projects’ lead researchers.

These findings are a “breakthrough in Maya archeology(考古),” Canuto said.

The new discoveries in this Central American country include city centers with sidewalks, homes, wide steps, farming facilities and so on, said Canuto, an archaeologist at Tulane University in the United States.

Among the finds was a 30-meter high pyramid (金字塔) that had been earlier recognized as a natural hill in Tikal. Also discovered in Tikal: a series of holes and a 14 kilometer-long wall.

The Maya development reached its height in what is present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, and parts of Belize, El Salvador and Honduras between 250 and 950 CE. Researchers now believe that the Maya had a population of 10 million, which is “much higher” than previous judgment, Canuto said.

The project depended on a remote (远程的) sensing method known as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging). Aircraft with a LiDAR scanner produced 3D maps of the surface by using light in the form of laser linked to a GPS system.

The technology helped researchers discover sites much faster than using traditional archeological methods. “Now it is no longer necessary to cut through the jungle to see what’s under it,” said Canuto.

Details of the research will appear in a documentary to air on February 11 on the National Geographic TV channel, said Minister of Culture and Sports Jose Luis Chea.

【推荐1】Before COVID-19, a friend, named Mark, who lived in a southern English village, used to commute to London. He'd leave home at 7:45 a.m. and return at 9:00 p.m., upset and worn out. He rarely saw his children, let alone his neighbours.

Now he works remotely from his garden, takes the kids to school and has used his spare time to volunteer to manage a village tennis club. He has gone from a commuter to a key member of the community. He isn't alone. In the former commuter belts of big cities, remote work is now creating the community. Is this a net gain for humanity, or the disadvantages outweigh the advantages?

Commuting worsened the decline of life. Ever fewer Americans knew their neighbours, worked as a volunteer or went bowling in clubs any more. Every 10 minutes of commuting results in 10 percent fewer social connections. The Office for National Statistics found fewer chats or exchanges of favours with neighbours, a weakening sense of local belonging and falling membership of "political, voluntary, professional or recreational organizations" in 2018 Compared with 2012.

I'd seen this over the decades in the neighbourhood where I finished school and where I still had family. At some point the church on the high street was replaced by a pub. Once people stopped gathering in pubs too, the place became a bad chain restaurant. I returned to the neighbourhood last month. COVID-19 has transformed it into a 15-minute suburb, where all the necessities of life are a walk away. Many residents now work from home. Everyone goes for a morning run, exchanging favours and, afterwards, parents appear in local coffee shops or hot-yoga Studios.

You may make fun of these new urban daily life all you like, but they are what makes up the 21st-century community. After a week there, I was waving to familiar faces on the street. It felt like the suburban idyll in the 1950s recalled by the Beatles in "Penny Lane", with the coffee shops where “all the people that come and go/stop and say hello”.

Some people worry that the neighbourhood revival will kill off city centres. But in the long term, that won't happen in attractive cities. The people living in suburbs are going to London a day or so a week, and they'll go more often when nightlife and cultural areas revive. They love central London. Some would happily move there. They just don't want to commute there every day. David Milder, an expert living downtown, sees Central Business Districts giving way to "Central Social Districts".

【推荐2】Germany’s top court (法院) has ruled that parts of the country’s 2019 climate action law must be changed because they don’t do a good job of protecting young people. Nine young people aged 15 to 24 took the government to court over the law. They said that the government’s failure to plan carefully was putting their future lives in danger.

The judges (法官) of Germany’s highest court said climate change will influence young people far more than adults. That’s because climate change will become more serious over time. As young people become adults, they’ll be left to deal with any problems that today’s adults don’t deal with.

In 2019, Germany passed a new law, promising that the country would be producing no more CO2 than the forest can take in by 2050. The law made a plan of action until 2030. But the law didn’t have any plans for climate actions that would be taken between 2031 and 2050.

The court has asked the German government to fix the law by the end of 2022. The climate law will now need to have a plan for the actions that will be taken after 2030.

The German government has said that it will quickly begin working to make the needed changes. One important part of high court decisions like this is that they act as guides or examples for future decisions. This means that in the future, Germany’s lawmakers will be more likely to think about the climate future of young people as they create their laws.

【推荐2】On November 10, China’s deep-sea manned submersible (潜水艇) Fendouzhe set a new record of 10,909 meters in the Challenger Deep located at the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean.

For deep-sea exploration, the biggest challenge is the water pressure. The Mariana Trench, completely dark and extremely low in temperature, is one of the harshest areas on Earth. At the Challenger Deep, the water pressure is around 11,250 tons per square meter, which is equivalent to 2,000 African elephants stepping on person’s back.

Another threat is the seawater itself, which could corrode electronics and batteries. Underwater communication, navigation (航行) and tracking can also be extremely difficult.

To deal with these issues, Chinese scientists spent years creating a new titanium alloy (钛合金) that is lightweight, but strong enough for the job. The green, fish-shaped vehicle is the first manned submersible that can carry three people to dive and conduct full ocean survey in the world.

But why send humans instead of robots? Yang Ning, deputy director of the Institute of Deep-Sea Science and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that the “human touch” is important for underwater exploration.

“The ocean floor is dark and can be very cloudy due to sediment (沉淀物) and debris (废弃物), and cameras sometimes cannot detect things in these situations as effectively as human eyes,” Yang told China Daily.

In addition, humans may bring surprising discoveries, Yang pointed out. For example, on March 18, the submersible Shenhai Yongshi picked up a signal that was thought to be insignificant at the beginning. But Xie Wei, the marine microbiology expert on-board, suggested looking further into it. It turned out they had actually recorded a whale fall, an extremely rare occurrence, and the first one in the region.

【推荐3】Deforestation (滥伐森林) last year rose to the highest level since 2015 in Brazil’s Cerrado, prompting scientists on Monday to raise alarm over the state of the world’s most species-rich savanna (热带草原), a major carbon sink that helps to hold off climate change.

The Cerrado, which spreads across several states of Brazil and is one of the world’s largest savannas, is often called an “upside-down forest” because of the deep roots its plants sink into the ground to survive seasonal droughts and fires.

Deforestation and other clearances of native plants in the Cerrado rose 8 percent to 8,531 square kilometers in the 12 months through July, Brazil’s official period for measuring deforestation, according to national space research agency INPE. That is more than 10 times the size of New York City’s land area of 783.84 square km.

“It’s extremely worrying,” said Mercedes Bustamante, an ecologist at the University of Brasilia. Bustamante also criticized the government for a lack of transparency in announcing the deforestation data on New Year’s Eve.

The added destruction is particularly concerning. Roughly half of the Cerrado has been destroyed since the 1970s, mostly for farming and ranching (牧场经营). “You’re transforming thousands of square kilometers annually,” said Manuel Ferreira, a geographer at the Federal University of Goias. “Few other places on earth have seen that rapidity of a transformation.”

Ferreira said that new plant and animal species are regularly being discovered in the Cerrado but he added that many are probably being eradicated before they can be studied.

After falling from highs in the early 2000s, deforestation in the Cerrado has been increasing again since right-wing President took office in 2019, calling for more farming and development in sensitive ecosystems. Bustamante and other scientists blame the President for encouraging deforestation with his pro-development rhetoric and for rolling back environmental enforcement.