2 . Over the years, as I dealt with the pressure of finishing my Ph. D. and starting my post-doctor, I had grown more competitive. I pushed myself to be t ho first to generate thrilling results and to publish in high-impact journals. Those who could have been collaborators (合作者) became rivals I hated.

But the effect of this competitive character was exactly the opposite of what I had hoped for. When I encountered scientific problems, I thought I had to solve them myself instead of asking for help. The pressure became overwhelming. I began to feel alone and lost. I became less and less productive.

I emailed my mentors (导师), explaining that I had put myself second and the job first for too long. They told me that I wasn’t the first academic to feel that way, and that I wouldn’t be the last. They agreed that I should take the time I needed to take care of myself. So, with my mentors’ support and an uncertain future, I left.

Back home, I spent time with family and friends and opened up about my struggles. At first, I was ashamed. But the more I talked about my demons, the more other people told me about their own. I also started to receive emails from my workmates. After a few lines asking how I was, many expressed worries about how they were managing the stress of academic life. Vulnerable (脆弱的) researchers were poking their heads out of their shells. Our relationships deepened. I began to feel less alone.

Three months later, I was prepared to go back to the science that I loved, and I now had a foundation to be more open with my colleagues. I understood that we all struggle sometimes, and that collaboration can be more powerful than competition.

With a bit of time, collaboration has replaced competition. Working with others and seeking help doesn’t weaken my value or contributions; it means we can all win. I no longer feel lonely and unhappy.

3 . A major meeting of computer hackers (黑客) planned for this summer is to include an event that will test the limits of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. The event, in August, will be held as part of the yearly DEF CON hacker meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada. Organizers say the meeting provides a chance for hackers to hear from leading industry officials about the latest developments in computer security. It also includes hacking competitions.

This year, several major AI developers will take part in DEF CON. Among them will be OpenAI, which launched its latest AI model, ChatGPT-4, in March.

Recently released AI tools are built by feeding huge amounts of information into machine learning computer systems. The data trains the AI systems to develop complex skills and produce human-like results.

Experts have warned that such systems may bring major changes to many different jobs and industries. It affects everyone from managers to workers to housewives. They also fear the tools, known as “chatbots”, could greatly increase the amount of misinformation in the news media and on social media.

Chowdhury, an organizer of the hacking event, says the results of the event can provide helpful information to companies looking at ways to safely use the fast-developing AI systems. She notes that the hackers’ work will not end after the gathering. They will spend months afterward creating reports on their findings and identifying specific system vulnerabilities (漏洞).

Jack Clark is the co-founder of AI developer Anthropic. He says he hopes the DEF CON event will lead to deeper commitments from AI developers to measure and test the safety of their systems. For this to happen, though, AI systems will need to be examined by third parties both before and after deployment (部署). “We need to get practice at figuring out how to do this. It hasn’t really been done before,” he says.

4 . If you’re thinking about growing apples, now is the time to test different kinds and talk with local growers. This advice comes from gardening writer Lee Reich. His books include The Pruning (修剪) Book and Weedless Gardening. Reich grows an apple called Hudson’s Golden Gem, and he does so for one reason — the taste. He says the fruit’s wonderful taste makes it truly special.

When you buy apples at the store, your choice is limited to the 12 or more kinds available for sale. Gardeners, however, have more choices. They can plant any of more than 5,000 different kinds of apples.

Gardeners can also harvest their apples just as each kind reaches its moment of perfection. Reich says his Macoun apples taste much better than any Macoun apples found in stores. One reason is that his can be left to ripen until they nearly fall off the tree.

Here are some other flavorful apples to plant. The Ashmead’s Kernel apple was first grown more than 200 years ago in a garden belonging to Dr. Ashmead in Gloucester, England. The apple has a reddish, golden brown color. Inside, it has tasty, sharp flesh. Cox’s Orange Pippin is another old apple from England. It was first grown by Richard Cox in 1825. This apple’s orange and red color makes it unpopular in the American market. But it is loved for its strong taste. Ellison’s Orange is another British apple that came from Lincolnshire in 1911. It is a late summer or early autumn apple, golden yellow with stripes, with juicy flesh.

Before you run out to buy trees to grow the kinds you love to eat, Reich does have a warning: Apples are not easy to grow in many parts of the country. The plants require yearly pruning and insect control. But if you’re willing to learn how to keep the unwanted insects away, a few kinds of trees chosen for their taste will give you years of good eating.

5 . It was a typical weekend for Mitch White and his friends. They were out celebrating a bachelor party, sailing the peaceful waters of the Minnesota River. They never expected that this single party would transform from a relaxed canoe trip into a painful rescue mission. With the sun setting, an unexpected bark changed everything.

Led by Mitch White, the soon-to-be-married man, they searched for the source of the sound along the banks of the river. Suddenly, a weak cry for help came from the mud. They were surprised to find that the head of a 13-year-old St. Bernard named Ed was barely visible in the thick mud. Mitch said, “The dog wasn’t moving on its own, so we should feed it and give it water.” The dog looked like it had used all its strength.

The men took up their oars (桨) and began digging, their festive mood giving way to a focused rescue mission. It took them more than half an hour to free the trapped dog as it was already breathing very feebly after possibly being trapped for 24 hours. When they got the poor fellow out of the mud, he couldn’t walk, so they carried him back to the house. Back home with his owner, George Niskanen, Ed began his slow restoration—a happy ending to a dangerous adventure. George was thankful to the bachelor party heroes.

Now, the people of Carver, Minnesota, have new heroes to cheer for. Indeed, this incredible act of bravery and compassion redefined the meaning of a bachelor party. It became a heroic tale of humanity, friendship, and the instinct (本能) to do what’s right.

7 . Imagine if your clothes could pick up the sounds of everything going on around you. Scientists have created a fibre (纤维) which can pick up sounds and could be used as a hearing aid, to monitor heartbeats or even in spacecraft.

The new fibre works like a microphone. It picks up sounds and turns them into vibrations (震动) and then electrical signals, in a similar way to how ears work. When woven (编织) into a shirt, the researchers say the fibre can even detect a wearer’s heartbeat. The fibre can hear sounds as low as those in a quiet library to louder sounds like heavy road traffic. It can even accurately tell the direction of sudden sounds like handclaps.

The fibre was created by engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and researchers at Rhode Island School of Design. “Wearing a piece of clothing that can hear, you might talk through it to answer phone calls and communicate with others,” said lead author Yet Wan, who created the technology at MIT.

Once they had created the fibre, the team wove it into a more traditional piece of clothing which was much more flexible. When it was woven into the back of a shirt it was able to pick up the sound of people clapping, even picking up the direction the clapping was coming from. When woven into the shirt’s inner lining (内衬) it could pick up the person’s heartbeat, which the researchers think could be used in a pregnant woman’s clothes to monitor a baby’s heartbeat.

As well as wearable hearing aids, and clothes that track your heartbeat, the team says there are possibilities beyond clothing. “It can be integrated with spacecraft skin to listen to space dust, or embedded into (嵌入) buildings to detect cracks or strains,” Yet suggests. “It can even be woven into a smart net to monitor fish in the ocean.”

8 . Minimizing the environmental damage that new roads cause is generally regarded as a good thing. But to do that, it helps to understand just how new roads cause the damage of which they are accused.

Recently, a group of researchers led by Dr. Gonzalez conducted an experiment and proved that immigration is good for the health of animal populations. A road destroys only a small part of the habitat, thus destroying just a few local populations of creatures. So the argument that road-building itself is bad for biodiversity is not self-evidently correct. Those who nevertheless hold this view say that apparently separate local populations of animals are, in fact, parts of much larger populations connected via migration.

According to this theory, when a local population struggles to move about — because of an epidemic, for example — individuals from neighboring communities can fill the gaps.

The implications of the theory are straightforward. Cut local populations off from each other and each is more likely to disappear. And roads are good at doing just that. Testing the theory with experimental roads, however, would be expensive. Dr. Gonzalez’s brainwave was to do the whole thing on a much smaller scale.

The team studied moss-covered rocks. On some rocks the researchers left the moss untouched; on others they made “roadways” across to leave the moss isolated. After waiting six months, they found that in the disturbed habitats nearly all the bug population had declined compared with undisturbed moss, and 40% of the species had become extinct.

The real test came in the second part of the experiment. In this, the researchers removed moss much as before, but they left narrow moss paths to bridge the no-bug’s-land between islands. The islands with bridges did far better than isolated islands — a result that supports the notion that population exchange is necessary to keep an ecosystem healthy.

Whether these results can be translated to large-scale ecosystems remains uncertain. But if they can, they would cause more, not less, concern about the ecological effects of road-building. On the other hand, they also suggest a way out. In Britain, tunnels are often built under roads for animals of regular habits, such as badgers (獾), to be able to travel their traditional routes without having to fight with traffic. Extending that principle, perhaps special bridges might be a cheap way of letting man and nature rub along a bit better.

10 . Cut into the trunk of a pine tree, and you will see a familiar series of concentric (同中心的) rings. But not all trunks tell the same story. A study published in November reveals that the world’s oldest trees had a very different structure.

Some 370 million years ago, cladoxylopsid trees stood at least eight meters tall, covered by branches instead of leaves. Today their rare remains reveal little about their insides; in most cases their inner structures had rotted before the trees fossilize, and storms had filled them with sand. But the recent find of two well-preserved fossils in China has exposed the trees’ inner workings — which are like no other species studied before.

The cladoxylopsid tree was empty inside. Around the edges were thick, vertical strands (缕) containing xylem (木质部), a plant tissue that conducts water and mineral salts from the roots to all other parts. Modern trees add new layers of multiple xylem as they grow, creating a woody trunk with a single set of concentric rings. But in cladoxylopsids, “each strand of xylem had its own growth rings,” says scientist Christopher M. Berry of Cardiff University in Wales.

Over a tree’s lifetime the strands would weave and cross. “It’s just incredibly complex,” Berry says. He likens these networks of flexible tissues and structures to the Eiffel Tower—if tower could grow, extend and split itself apart over time.

Although the cladoxylopsid tree has no living descendants today, it is very important. Brigitte Meyer-Berthaud, a scientist, explains that these trees were among “the major carbon reservoirs of the Paleozoic”, a time period from 542 million to 251 million years ago. Cladoxylopsids made up our planet’s first forests, capturing carbon from the atmosphere and playing a part in adjusting Earth’s climate. Given this fact, maybe we should study these trees for the forests.