1 . About a year ago, my department invited me to submit a 5-minute video clip about my research laboratory to be screened at a secondary-school summer camp. With many ________ under my belt (已获得的) after five years as a main investigator, I was quite ________ about getting this ________.

Three seconds into ________ myself on my phone in my office, I realized that I had been too ________. I had to press ‘Pause’ ________ I couldn’t help looking around the room. And while watching myself on camera, I couldn’t obtain the excitement I brought to the classroom—all my ________ trained teaching method didn’t work well for a video clip. Admitting that my acting career had ________ a wall, I decided to ________ to a directing role and asked my graduate students to help me to film and present the video.

The 5-minute clip ________ taking 2 hours to finish, but it was so well received by the audience that it ________ me to create an account on Bilibili, one of the leading video-sharing websites in China. I got my lab to ________ making short films in Chinese on the main topics of our ________, which include digital fabrication (数字制造) in architecture and adaptive structures that can respond to stimuli (刺激物). In the nine or so months since I created that ________, our lab videos have attracted more than 20,000 subscribers and received nearly 3 million ________, mainly in China.

2 . There was a point in time when the solar industry was considered dead money. It was too expensive, too inefficient, and too inconsistent to be a viable (切实可行的) alternative energy source for really anything, let alone your home or office.

But those days are long gone.

Solar energy costs have dropped more than 70% over the past 10 years, and are now cheaper than fossil fuels in most parts of the United States. Better yet, the drivers of these cost declines — economies of scale (规模经济) and technological improvements — are durable (耐久的) , and therefore, solar is only going to get even cheaper. Indeed, these forces are so powerful in the solar industry that they have their own law — Swanson’s Law — which states that the price of solar modules (模块) decreases by about 20% for every doubling in global solar capacity.

Meanwhile, solar panels have become very efficient at transforming light from the sun into usable energy. Back in 1992, researchers at the University of South Florida made a thin-film solar cell with 15.9% efficiency — and that was considered a breakthrough at the time.

These days, though, your average silicon solar cells’ efficiency rate is around 20%. That’s standard. And some research efforts have even managed to achieve near 50% efficiency in certain lab tests.

At the same time, these solar systems have become dramatically more consistent. One of the biggest hurdles for solar in the early 2000s was its intermittency — the sun doesn’t shine every day, so what do you do when its cloudy?

Well, that’s why the clean energy industry has developed energy storage solutions, which are basically just big batteries that homeowners and office building managers can install on-site and link to their solar panels to store excess (过度的) solar power on super sunny days, and use that power on cloudy days.

Cheapest. Most efficient. Most consistent. That’s a powerful combination. No wonder solar industry has accounted for 58% of all new energy capacity additions so far in 2021 and is only going to get stronger and more active over the next 10 years — to a point where, by 2030, I wouldn’t be surprised to see solar industry accounting for 90%+ of all new energy capacity additions.

3 . Here are some highly recommended books for readers to choose.

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?       by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn       $23.92

Lizzie Damilola Blackburn’s first published novel is incredibly relatable for anybody whose family members frequently question their relationship status. In Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? a thirty-something Nigerian woman attempts to find herself a wedding date and learns some valuable lessons about life and love.

Violeta       by Isabel Allende       $ 25.76

Isabel Allende’s expansive collection of works continues with Violeta — the story of a woman named Violeta Del Valle who gives readers a front-row seat to historic moments of the 20th century, from the Spanish flu to the Great Depression to the women’s rights movement, as she recounts the highs and lows of her 100-year life in a series of letters to her grandson.

The Perfect Escape       by Leah Konen       $15.64

Loved Leah Konen’s All the Broken People? Prepare yourself for her newest thriller (惊悚小说), The Perfect Escape, which is about a group of friends whose girls’ weekend goes wrong when they land themselves in deep trouble in the Catskills and one of them goes missing.

Greenwich Park      by Katherine Faulkner       $24.84

Talk about suspense! Katherine Faulkner’s Greenwich Park, told from three angles, centers on a pregnant woman who meets another mom-to-be who couldn’t be more different from her. As their friendship develops, they realize they may be more connected than they think.

5 . In Singapore, it seems like art can be seen at every turn. Throughout the year, festivals, live performances, and concerts add to the vibrancy (活力) of the creative community. Here are some of the biggest art festivals.

SINGAPORE ART WEEK

When: January

Over the course of 10 days, this massive visual art celebration organizes more than 130 art events at museums, galleries, independent art spaces, and public places across Singapore from the city center to the heartland neighborhoods. Visitors can have discussions with artists, and attend art exhibitions and workshops that explore art and culture in Asia. Whether you’re interested in Sudanese architecture or cute Japanese paintings, there’s an event for everyone.

ART SG

When: January

During the biggest art fair in Southeast Asia, more than 150 of the world’s best galleries will showcase their collection of more than 1,000 artists at the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Center. From 12-15 January, this large-scale art show highlights paintings, sculptures, and photography from galleries like the influential Gagosian and London’s White Cube.

SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF ARTS

When: May

This annual performance art festival pushes the boundaries of physical and virtual spaces and explores The Anatomy of Performance through music, film, dance, musicals, and plays. The festival’s lineup includes a broad range of programs from local and international artists, ranging from orchestral performances to different styles of modern and traditional dances.

SINGAPORE NIGHT FESTIVAL

When: August

For one week each August, the Bras Basah. Bugis district lights up for this multi-dimensional art festival, with more than a dozen light installations (装置), stage shows, and theater performances. The National Museum of Singapore sponsors the event. It also acts as a major venue for various performances and demonstrations along with the Singapore Art Museum and the Peranakan Museum.

6 . The Stanford marshmallow (棉花糖) test was originally conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. Children aged four to six at a nursery school were placed in a room. A single sugary treat, selected by the child, was placed on a table. Each child was told if they waited for 15 minutes before eating the treat, they would be given a second treat. Then they were left alone in the room. Follow-up studies with the children later in life showed a connection between an ability to wait long enough to obtain a second treat and various forms of success.

As adults we face a version of the marshmallow test every day. We’re not tempted by sugary treats, but by our computers, phones, and tablets — all the devices that connect us to the global delivery system for various types of information that do to us what marshmallows do to preschoolers.

We are tempted by sugary treats because our ancestors lived in a calorie-poor world, and our brains developed a response mechanism to these treats that reflected their value — a feeling of reward and satisfaction. But as we’ve reshaped the world around us, dramatically reducing the cost and effort involved in obtaining calories, we still have the same brains we had thousands of years ago, and this mismatch is at the heart of why so many of us struggle to resist tempting foods that we know we shouldn’t eat.

A similar process is at work in our response to information. Our formative environment as a species was information-poor, so our brains developed a mechanism that prized new information. But global connectivity has greatly changed our information environment. We are now ceaselessly bombarded (轰炸) with new information. Therefore, just as we need to be more thoughtful about our caloric consumption, we also need to be more thoughtful about our information consumption, resisting the temptation of the mental “junk food” in order to manage our time most effectively.

7 . On 20 December, in Newdale, a series of huge waves caused by an undersea earthquake raced across the ocean near Gold shore. Worse still, it ________ thousands dead. Gold shore Beach was the only local beach to ________ the disaster without any loss of life. A 10-year-old girl, Sabrina Andron, helped around 100 people escape danger with her   ________ of tsunamis (海啸).

The day began like any other on Gold shore Beach. People were walking, running or simply siting on the sandy beach, ________ the warm sea air and enjoying the soft ________ that brushed their hair. Sabrina was one of the happy tourists until she noticed something ________. “The water was like the bubbles (气泡) on the top of a beer,” she later explained. “It wasn’t ________ and it wasn’t going in and then out. It was just coming in and in and in.” It struck her that these were the ________ of an upcoming tsunami, which Sabrina had just learnt about in a Geography lesson.

Sabrina was ________, but she soon kept her head. She warned her parents of the ________, thought at first they just thought she was ________. However, Sabrina was certain that a terrible disaster was ________ and kept asking her parents to talk to a safety officer. To her great relief, the officer ________ realized the coming danger. The beach was rapidly cleared of people, just ________ the huge waves ________ into the coast.

8 . Housing officials say that lately they are noticing something different: students seem to lack the will, and the skill, to deal with ordinary conflicts. “We have students who are mad at each other and they text each other in the same room,” says a teacher. “So many of our conflicts are because kids don’t know how to solve a problem by formal discussion.”

And as any pop psychologist will tell you, bottled emotions lead to silent discontent (不满) that can boil over into frustration and anger. At the University of Florida, emotional conflicts occur about once a week, the university’s director of housing education says, “Over the past five years, roommate conflicts have increased. The students don’t have the person-to-person discussions and they don’t know how to handle them.” The problem is most dramatic among freshmen; housing professionals say they see improvement as students move toward graduation, but some never seem to improve, and they worry about how such students will deal with conflicts after college.

Administrators guess that reliance on cell phones and the Internet may have made it easier for young people to avoid uncomfortable encounters. Why express anger in person when you can vent (发泄) in a text? “Things are posted on someone’s wall on Facebook like: Oh, my roommate kept me up all night studying,” says Dana Pysz, an assistant director at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s a different way to express their conflict to each other, consequently creating even more conflicts as complaints go public.” In recent focus groups at North Carolina State University, dorm residents said they would not even deal with noisy neighbors on their floor.

Administrators point to parents who have fixed their children’s problems in their entire lives. Now in college, the children lack the skills to attend to even modest conflicts. Some parents continue to interfere (干涉) on campus.

9 . The world’s forests may hold more secrets than previously thought: a new global estimate of tree biodiversity suggests that there are about 9,200 tree species remaining undocumented. Most are likely in the tropics, according to the new research.

The new research drew on the efforts of hundreds of contributors, who have categorized trees in two huge data sets: One, the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative, records every species found in extensively documented forest plots worldwide. The other, TREECHANGE, puts together sightings of individual species. Together they suggest there are approximately 64,100 recorded tree species on the planet — up from previous estimates of around 60,000.

The researchers reached their estimate of an additional 9,200 yet undocumented species on the basis of the number of rare ones already in the databases. Most unknown species are likely to be defined as rare, found in limited numbers in small geographical areas, says the quantitative forest ecologist Jingjing Liang. The team’s result is “a rather conservative estimate,” Liang says, “because scientists know less about the preponderance of uncommon trees in places such as the Amazon, where out-of-the-way spots could host pockets of unusual species found nowhere else.” “If we can focus the resources on those rain forests in the Amazon,” Liang adds, “then we would be able to estimate it with higher confidence.”

Silman, a conservation biologist, who was not involved in the new study agrees that the study result is likely an underestimate. His and his colleagues’ local surveys suggest there are at least 3,000 and possibly more than 6,000 unknown tree species in the Amazon basin alone. Tree species often get grouped together based on appearance, he notes, so new genetic analysis techniques will likely lead to the discovery of even more biodiversity. Sliman wonders how many species will go extinct before scientists describe them. “How many are already known to native peoples in the Amazon — or were known to peoples or cultures who have themselves been made extinct through colonization, disease, or absorption? How many “species” already have dried samples sitting in a cabinet?” he says.

Searching for the new species will inform not only conservation but the basic evolutionary science of how and why species diversify and die out, Silman says. “Just the fact that there are thousands of species of something as common as trees out there that are still left to be discovered,” he adds, “I find pretty inspirational.”