【推荐1】Scientists today are making greater effort to study ocean currents (洋流) . Most do it using satellites and other high-tech equipment. However, ocean expert Curtis Ebbesmeyer does it in a special way—by studying movements of random (随意的) floating garbage. A scientist with many years’ experience, he started this type of research in the early 1990s when he heard about hundreds of athletic shoes washing up on the shores of the northwest coast of the United States. There were so many shoes that people were setting up swap meets to try and match left and right shoes to sell or wear.

Ebbesmeyer found out in his researches that the shoes — about 60,000 in total — fell into the ocean in a shipping accident. He phoned the shoe company and asked if they wanted the shoes back. As expected, the company told him that they didn’t. Ebbesmeyer realized this could be a great experiment. If he learned when and where the shoes went into the water and tracked where they landed, he could learn a lot about the patterns of ocean currents.

The Pacific Northwest is one of the world’s best areas for beachcombing (海滩搜寻) because winds and currents join here, and as a result, there is a group of serious beachcombers in the area. Ebbesmeyer got to know a lot of them and asked for their help in collecting information about where the shoes landed. In a year he collected reliable information on 1, 600 shoes. With this data, he and a colleague were able to test and improve a computer program designed to model ocean currents, and publish the findings of their study.

As the result of his work, Ebbesmeyer has become known as the scientist to call with questions about any unusual objects found floating in the ocean. He has even started an association of beachcombers and ocean experts, with 500 subscribers from West Africa to New Zealand. They have recorded all lost objects ranging from potatoes to golf gloves.

【推荐2】Gever is a computer scientist from California. In 2005, he started a summer program for children called Tinkering School. The idea was that children can learn important skills for life by building things together. Gever and his team help the children to think big and create plans for new things they want to build. Children have made fantastic things since the school started. They have made a rope bridge, tree houses, wooden motorbikes and boats.

At Tinkering School, children get all kinds of materials like wood, metal, plastic, nails and ropes. They get lots of real tools too, such as knives, hammers(锤子) and power drills(电钻). Tinkering School has been around for many years now, but nobody has ever had a serious injury in all those years. This is because there are strict health and safety rules they must follow. The children always learn how to use the tools safely and they must wear the right clothing and protection at all times.

Gever’s ideas have worked very well. A lot of children have gone to his summer schools over the years. In 2011, Gever decided to create a ‘real’ school, called Brightworks, in San Francisco. The school is very small —it only has 20 students aged 6 to 13. Brightworks is based on the same principles(理念) as Tinkering School.

Since it started, Brightworks has been written about a lot. Most of those articles have been very positive(积极的). They have praised the quality of the school. They have found the children are more active than at many other schools. But there have also been critical (批评的) voices. Some people have said that children are not learning enough at Brightworks. They feel that students and teachers are just ‘playing around’ all the time.

The students at Brightworks seem to love their school. We spoke to 12-year-old Tina Cooper. She has been a student at the school since last October. “Since I started here. I’ve never sat in a ‘normal’ class with a teacher,” she told us. “But it’s been a very exciting experience. I’ve worked hard at my new school for eight months now, and there hasn’t been one single moment when I found it boring.”

【推荐3】Zhang Rongqiao, chief（首席的）engineer of China’s first Mars exploration task, has been named on December 16, 2021 by the top scientific magazine Nature as one of the10 people “who mattered in science” of year 2021.

On May 15, 2021, China’s Mars rover（巡视器）landed safely on the planet’s red surface. Watching the great moment, Zhang Rongqiao silently took off his glasses and tears filled his eyes.

The landing marks the ending of a 475-million-kilometre journey full of danger for Zhang and his team. It also marks China has become the second country after the United States to send a rover to Mars. Mars is such a strange environment that the Chinese team faced many unknowns（未知）. Zhang Rongqiao, as the chief engineer, organized a huge research team which has tens of thousands of people and finally succeeded in landing on Mars. Zhang once said the landing gave him a deep understanding of the old Chinese saying—it takes ten years to sharpen（使锋利）a good sword（剑）.

“Look up at the stars and keep your feet on the ground.” is the sentence that Zhang Rongqiao likes very much. He said, “This is exactly what the society needs for each of us, and it is the way for us to live in the society.” He thinks we should base upon（立足）the present and look to the future. “Our knowledge and understanding of the space is still surface,” Zhang said, “We should see that creation never ends.”