【推荐2】SWG3 is a huge building which hosts major club nights in Glasgow, Scotland. Recently, it has applied a system called Bodyheat. The system creates renewable energy from the body heat on the building’s dance floor.

David Townsend, who designed the system, said, “You and I just stand here right now, and we’re producing about 100 to 150 watts of energy. When you start dancing, let’s say at a medium pace, you might be generating like 250 watts. And then if we’ve got a big DJ, absolutely playing basslines (低音旋律) and making everyone jump up and down, each of us could be producing 500 to 600 watts of heat energy.”

Dancers’ heat is then captured from the dance floor and transferred to a series of 200-meter-deep boreholes which can store heat like a battery. The heat energy then travels back to the heat pumps, is upgraded to a suitable temperature and sent back into SWG3. This will enable people to completely disconnect the venue’s gas boiler, reducing its carbon emissions by about 70 tons of CO2 a year.

The Bodyheat system costs over 600,000 pounds to set up. “If we were to apply the typical air conditioning that is usually used, our costs would probably be about 10% of that so 60,000 pounds,” SWG3 managing director Andrew Fleming-Brown said. “But in the long run, the savings on energy bills will get the spending back in about five years, depending on costs.”

“If we can make it work here in this environment, there’s no reason why we can’t take it to other venues, not just here in Scotland and the UK, but across Europe and further areas,” Fleming-Brown said, adding that introducing the system was a leap of faith and that the venue once promised to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2025.

Bodyheat has been made possible with support from the Scottish government and the money from a series of grants. An official in Glasgow said, “Storing the heat and playing it back is a major way that can positively influence the energy crisis in the UK and improve energy safety. This is a fantastic plan, where people really are making Glasgow greener while having a great time.”

【推荐2】Under a midday summer sun in California’s Sacramento Valley, rice farmer Peter Rystrom walks across a dusty and bare plot of land, dry soil crunching (碎裂) beneath each step. In a typical year, he’d be walking across green rice fields in inches of water. But today the soil is dry and baking in the 35℃ heat. It hasn’t rained for 4 weeks in a row.

“Climate change is expected to worsen the state’s extreme swings in rainfall,” researchers reported in Nature Climate Change in 2018. Low water levels in rivers have forced farmers like Rystrom, whose family has been growing rice on this land for four generations, to reduce their water use.

“If we lose our rice crops, we have to deal with severe food crisis. Climate change is already threatening rice-growing regions around the world. This is not a future problem. This is happening now,” says plant geneticist Pamela Ronald of the University of California, Davis, who identifies genes in rice that help the plant stand up to dryness, disease, flood, etc.

To save and even boost production, rice growers, engineers and researchers have turned to water-saving irrigation (灌溉) routines. Building canal systems and reservoirs (水库) can help farmers dampen their fields. But for some, the solution to rice’s climate-related problems lies in enhancing the plant itself. They hold that establishing rice gene banks that store hundreds of thousands of rice varieties ready to be bred into new, dryness-tolerant varieties is more practical and effective. Solutions may be hidden in the DNA of those older breeds.

Three decades have passed since its initial development, and some researchers are looking beyond the genetic variability preserved in rice gene banks, searching instead for useful genes from other species, including plants and bacteria. But picking genes from one species and putting them into another, or genetic recombination, remains debatable. The most famous example of genetically changed rice is Golden Rice (GR). “Looking ahead, it will be crucial for countries to embrace GR rice. But it will take time,” says Ismail, principal scientist at IRRI,

【推荐3】Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology who called herself a “forest detective”, was raised in mountains in Canada. Few scientists make much impact with their PhD thesis, but, in 1997, she did just that. Her research on the “wood wide web” made the cover of Nature and transformed our understanding of forests. What was then a challenge to traditional ideas is today widely accepted.

A mushroom is the part of a fungus (真菌) that sticks up above the ground. Thin, white threads grow from its stem deep into the soil. These threads are called hyphae (菌丝). Hyphae connect themselves to tree roots. They also stretch from root system to root system, like an underground network. This network may go for miles. Hyphae pick up nutrients and water from soil. The fungus threads that connect to tree roots share their nutrients and water with the trees. In return, they sip a bit of the sugar the trees make. Sharing helps both trees and mushrooms live. It’s also how trees communicate.

When a tree is being eaten by bugs, it makes chemicals to shoo them away, sort of like bug repellent (驱虫剂). The chemicals travel through the tree, down its roots, and into the hyphae network. Other trees connected to the network taste the chemicals. That tells them a nearby tree is under attack, so they start to make their own bug repellent. Trees do more than share warnings through the hyphae. They also help each other. In the fall, paper birch trees drop their leaves and can no longer make sugar. So, a fir tree that stays green all winter uses the network to send extra sugar to the birch until spring comes again. This system of sharing information and nutrients through the hyphae is sometimes called the “wood wide web”, because it works a bit like the Internet.

Local climate sets the stage for the wood wide web, researchers say. In cool temperature and boreal forests, where wood and organic matter decay slowly, network-building EM fungi rule. By contrast, in the warmer tropics where wood and organic matter decay quickly, AM fungi dominate. These fungi form smaller webs and do less intertree swapping, meaning the tropical wood wide web is likely more localized.

Ecologist Thomas Crowther’s results suggest that as the planet warms, about 10% of EM-associated trees could be replaced by AM-associated trees. Microbes in forests dominated by AM fungi deal with carbon-containing organic matter faster, so they could liberate lots of heat-trapping carbon dioxide quickly, potentially accelerating a climate change process that is already happening at a frightening pace.

【推荐2】The Swiss have always had a comfortable relationship with their mountains. But no time in a year seems to show that special connection quite like the beginning of summer. That’s when conservationists(环境保护者) make the difficult journey up those towering heights while bearing large white blankets.

The grand plan? To cover critical sections of the Rhone Glacier - six square miles of ice that is counted as the country’s oldest and most essential glacier v in the UV-resistant (防紫外线的)blankets. While it may seem a gentle gesture, like a mother taking care of a child for the night, the idea isn’t to keep the glacier warm. It’s actually the opposite. The blankets are designed to deflect (使偏斜)the sun’s light, covering the huge glacier up like a freezer bag in the hope of protecting it from the strong heat of the summer sun. And these days, the world’s glaciers need all the help they can get. With the planet getting warmer every year, glaciers have been melting at a rapid rate.

In Switzerland, climate change has increased the Rhone Glacier’s typical summer melt which feeds Europe’s famous Rhône River. As a result, more and more people have taken up protecting the glaciers with blankets. By covering approximately six acres of the glaciers, the blankets, Volken explains, have reduced the ice melt by as much as 70 percent. But it has made the slope (斜坡)we’re on only slightly less slippery. And unless people — the main culprits in climate change — make fundamental changes to address the bigger picture, there won’t be enough blankets in the world to ward off the disastrous consequences of rising sea levels.

And those dreamy white blankets covering the Rhône Glacier? “It will slow things down for a year or two,” Jean-Pierre Guignard, who visited the glacier decades ago when it was much bigger, tells Metro, a British newspaper. “But one day people will have to take away the blankets because the ice underneath will be gone.”

【推荐3】Andrew runs a car repair workshop in a village in London, where swallows have made their nests on the crossbeams beneath its roof. All day long, they fly in and out, bringing back insects for their hungry chicks, seemingly unconscious of the constant noise and the comings and goings of customers. However, this spring the swallows didn’t arrive back at his workshop until 10 April — the latest they have returned in nearly 40 years. Actually, the average return date has been 8 April, but this year I didn’t see one over my garden in Scottish Highlands until the 25th. Numbers are down, too. While the tide appears to have turned up from last weekend onwards, other familiar species, like house martin (毛脚燕), needle-tailed swift, etc have been very few and far between.

There are two reasons for their late arrival. Unlike many other migrating (迁徙) birds, which fatten themselves up before they depart, these species feed as they travel, replenishing (补充) lost energy by catching flying insects. For that reason, they are especially vulnerable to bad weather. And the weather in southern Europe this spring has been very unpredictable.

The second reason is that, here in Britain these years, although the weather has been mainly dry, there have been persistent easterly and northeasterly winds, which may have also slowed down the birds’ progress as they headed north.

How might this end up affecting these global travellers over the long term? Migrating birds usually live for only one or two years, so they need to get down to raising a family as soon as they return. Swallows, which usually start nesting in early April, may only be able to raise a single hatch this year, rather than two as they do in most years.

I have seen swallows all over the world and discovered just how important they are as a sign of spring: not just in Britain but all the way across the northern hemisphere. Yet I am concerned that rapid changes in the world’s climate pose a real threat to their chances of breeding successfully and their long-term future, even a week or two delays.

Fortunately, warm weather and clear skies have finally come to southern Europe, and the migration floodgates have opened. Earlier last week, down on the Somerset coast, I saw a steady passage of swallows, together with a few house martins, all heading steadily northwards. With warm sunshine and enough rain to produce quantities of insects, the swallows might be able to compensate for their lost time.