2012 has also brought in a new age for Chinese TV. The country’s first 3-D TV channel has started broadcasting (播放). Opened on New Year’s Day, the channel will air different programs including documentaries, sports, serials and live events—including the CCTV New Year Gala and the Olympic Games.

The 3-D channel broadcasts from 10:30 a. m. through midnight, Beijing time each day. There are no viewing fees (费用) during the early phase of operation (运行阶段), and viewers can get the full 3-D effect by wearing 3-D glasses.

Six TV stations have worked together to produce the channel, including CCTV, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Shenzhen TV stations. Each station is working on a specific program, while the channel itself is broadcast through CCTV.

【推荐2】Some people are very careful about everything they do. On the other hand, some people are risk-takers they do things without thinking too much about the results. Teenagers are especially likely to take more risks than others. Why is this?

Anna van Duijvenvoorde, a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, uses computer games to find out why some people are more impulsive than others. In one game, players are asked to click on a balloon on a computer screen. Every time they click, the balloon gets bigger. The bigger the balloon is at the end of the test, the larger their reward will be. But if the balloon gets 100 big, it’ll blow off and the player will get nothing.

Van Duijvenvoorde found that when teens played this game, a part of their brain called the striaturn would become more active. “This part of the brain controls our emotional response（情绪反应）to rewards. Another part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, helps us control our decision-making process.”

It turns out that young people have more active striaturns and less active prefrontal cortexes, which affects their ability to make careful decisions. You might have already guessed that teens would pop more balloons during the game than adults—mainly because they are more willing to take risks and don’t take the time to think carefully.

“The teen brain is like a car with a very strong engine,” Van Duijvenvoorde said. “Its brakes just don’t work as well.”

Before the invention of air-conditioning, southern China’s skywells played a key role in keeping people’s homes cool. Could they do it again today?

A skywell, or “tian jing”, is a typical feature (特色) of a traditional home in southern and eastern China, which can date back to Ming and Qing dynasties. A skywell is almost always in the center of a house. It is enclosed by rooms on four sides or three sides plus a wall. It acts as a transitional (过渡的) space between indoor life and the outdoor environment.

Skywells were designed to cool buildings. When wind blows above a skywell house, it can enter the indoor space through the opening. As the cool outdoor air travels down the walls to the lower storeys, it replaces warmer indoor air, enabling the bottom of the skywell to stay cool. Even when there is no natural wind, air circulation (循环) still takes place, because the temperature is different between the top and bottom of the skywell. Moreover, another part of the cooling effect comes from the evaporation (蒸发) of water. People collect rainwater in their skywells, and when the water evaporates, it cools hot air.

Today, although fewer and fewer people live in skywell houses, some designers take a new interest in the traditional Chinese buildings. They are getting creative ideas from skywells to help keep new buildings cooler. One example is the National Heavy Vehicle Engineering Technology Research Centre in Jinan, which was completed in 2022. The 18-storey glass-walled tower block has a huge skywell in the middle, from the fifth to the top floor. The lifts, toilets and meeting rooms are all set around the skywell, which helps improve the lighting and air circulation of the building and cut the overall use of energy.

Although ancient “green wisdom” like skywells has caught more attention of modern Chinese people, there are some challenges for bringing skywells into modern designs. For one thing, traditional skywells highly depend on their natural conditions, like how much sunlight or rainfall in the area, so adding skywells into modern buildings requires designers to fully consider their projects’ situations. Meanwhile, lighting, air conditioning and water supply have become so convenient that we depend on them with little care about the environmental cost. So it won’t be easy to be green by learning from the past without considering our present behaviours.

【推荐2】Let me ask you a question: What is the tallest mountain on Earth? Most school children will say the answer is Mount Qomolangma. In fact, there is something that is 304 meters taller than Mount Qomolangma. However, it is mainly underwater. It begins at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and rises more than 17 kilometers from the ocean floor.

Its name is Mauna Loa. In the Hawaiian language, Mauna Loa means “Long Mountain.Mauna Loa is more than half of the island of Hawaii, the largest of the Hawaii Islands. It is also the largest and most active volcano (火山) on Earth. It has produced liquid rock called lava (岩浆) more than thirty times since records were first kept in 1843. Today, Mauna Loa is quiet. It is not producing lava. However, scientists say it is only a matter of time before this happens once again.

Mauna Loa is not the only volcano on the island of Hawaii. There are four others. Three of them are no longer active. One of them is still active. It is named Kilauea. It has produced lava more than fifty times in the last one hundred years. Sometimes the lava moves slowly. At other times, it rushes out very quickly from the volcano. During these times, it moves almost as quickly as water moving down the side of a mountain. Sometimes Kilauea produces large amounts of lava that seems like rivers of fire.

When the lava from Kilauea reaches the ocean, its great heat produces great amounts of steam that rises into the air. The lava is so hot that it continues to burn underwater for some time. The lava from Kilauea continues to add land to the island as the volcanoes of Hawaii have always done. It is these volcanoes that formed the islands of Hawaii. Scientists say the volcanoes of the island of Hawaii show that the changing situation of Earth is, and will always be, out of humans’ control.