2 . Four Pre-College Summer Science Programs

Sustainable Animal Husbandry

This 3-week program is worth attending! In addition to some lectures and class discussions, students will also tour a variety of animal farms, practice animal handling techniques, and learn about the relationships between domestic (家养的) animals and humans.

Where: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

How Much: $6,310 including tuition (学费) and room & board

Biological Research and the Health Professions

You will spend six weeks exploring different aspects of life as a researcher or doctor in this program. Activities include dissecting (解剖) a chicken with a world-famous zoologist, learning about non-traditional medical therapies (疗法), measuring electrical communication signals in living fish, talking with a top cancer researcher, and much, much more.

Where: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

How Much: $12,825 including tuition and room & board

Clark Scholars Program

The seven-week summer research program offers students an opportunity for hands-on practical research with leading researchers and members of Texas Tech University. This unique opportunity, which includes weekly discussions and field trips, also pays students a $750 tax-free stipend (津贴) and provides room and board.

Where: Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas

How Much: Students receive a $750 tax-free stipend

Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists

Mathematics is an important part of science, and this 6-week program is the perfect summer program for ambitious and motivated students to improve their math skills. They’ll team up with other students, research mathematicians, and professors, and visit scientists for a typical day of number theory lectures, seminars, independent and group work and research, hands-on experiments, and plenty of fun activities.

Where: Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts

How Much: $6,600 including tuition and room & board

3 . Landslides of ash, gas and rock that flow out downhill during volcanic eruptions may be even more dangerous than scientists had realized.

Laboratory and field measurements show pulses of high pressure form within these slides, known as pyroclastic (火山碎屑的) flows. Those pressures can be far stronger, and more destructive, than disaster evaluations typically assume. “It’s not a small difference,” says Cert Lube, a volcanologist at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. Conventional disaster evaluations might suggest a certain flow will only burst windows, but he says, “When actually, the pressures are so strong, they knock down the walls of the building.”

Pyroclastic flows are the deadliest volcanic disaster, in part because of the pressures they cause. Due to their violent nature, researchers often have to evaluate average pressures in the flows using computer simulations (模拟) based on measurements of geologic deposits left by past flows.

At Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, researchers freed mixtures of hot rock, ash and gas down a channel to copy volcanic landslides known as pyroclastic flows. These pyroclastic flows have an inner rhythm (节奏) that makes them especially destructive. To directly study the inner workings of these forces of nature, Lube and colleagues reproduced smaller versions of the flows in experiments, measuring the destructive power. That let the team calculate the pressures inside the flows. The researchers also analyzed the first measurements of pressures in natural flows, collected in 2019, when pyroclastic flows burst from the Whakaari volcano and swallowed a set of sensors.

To the researchers’ surprise, pressures in the flows shook rhythmically. These pressure pulses would successively damage barriers like blows from an electric drill, Lube says. The pulses sometimes smashed more than three times as hard as the average pressure evaluates typically suggested by conventional simulations.

4 . A recent study has found that being exposed to low temperatures creates more good fat which burns calories in the body. Being cold is similar to the effects of exercise, protecting against being too fat and improving health. The researchers have discovered that exposure to cold changes the make-up of gut bacteria (肠道细菌), which can lead to burning fat and reduce body weight.

While ordinary white fat, known as bad fat, piles on when we eat more calories than we burn, brown fat seems to burn extra calories to produce heat. Babies have lots of brown fat — they need it to keep warm — but there are small amounts in the necks of adults, too. Studies have shown that staying in a cold environment can speed the formation of more brown fat in the body.

Researchers predicted the health benefits of being exposed to cold may have something to do with gut bacteria. They exposed the first group of mice to a cold temperature of 6℃for up to 10 days and discovered this caused a major change in the make-up of the mice’s gut microbes (微生物), preventing the mice from gaining weight.

Then, the gut bacteria were put into the second group of mice that did not have gut microbes. It was found that they increased tolerance (忍耐力) to cold temperatures. The mice also lost weight as the changes in gut bacteria promoted the formation of brown fat. However, after three weeks of cold exposure, the body weight began to remain stable.

Professor Mirko Trajkovski said, that they provide powerful evidence that gut microbes play a key role in people’s ability to adapt to the environment. They are excited about testing whether gut microbes could be a promising approach to preventing being fat.

6 . New York-based Ecovative has been creating environmentally friendly packaging made from mushrooms and agricultural waste since 2009. Now, the company wants to bring their amazing material into homes and offices with a new line of compostable (可堆肥的) furnishings that are grown using just three materials: mycelium (the vegetative part of mushrooms), hemp (麻类植物), and salt.

While creating hard material from mushrooms might sound magical, the company’s CEO Eben Bayer says it is a relatively low-tech process and compares it to “making bread”. The company begins by adding a few mycelium cells to damp hemp or other agricultural waste.

The mycelium that grows like little hairs is allowed to twist with the waste until everything is ”glued“ together. The combination is then mixed again and placed into the desired mold (模具) where it continues to grow and harden. The resulting material is then baked in the oven. In addition to making it as strong as wood, the heat also kills the mycelium, thus giving the compostable material a similar shelf life to wood.

Also, though the table tops of the stylish Tafl and King’s tables released at the recently held Biofabricate 2016 conference in New York City resemble marble, they are far from it. The perfectly carved blocks are made of a material grown by a North Carolina-based company named bioMASON using grains of sands and bacteria.

As you have probably guessed, this waste-free furniture does not come cheap. Customers can expect to pay anywhere from $249 USD for the Tafl to $699 USD for the King’s table, both of which are only available in limited quantities. Those that cannot afford those prices can choose cheaper GIY (grow it yourself) ones made of various products ranging from Christmas tree decorations to lamp shades.

7 . Have a hard time waking up when it’s cold out? Scientists say your brain is to blame. A study conducted by scientists from Northwestern University made it possible to offer some explanations for this phenomenon.

Their study on fruit flies shows how seasonally cold and dark conditions can prohibit neurons within the fly brain that promote activity and wakefulness from sending out signals, particularly in the morning. It helps explains why, for both flies and humans, it is so hard to wake up in the morning in winter.

“By studying behaviors in a fruit fly, we can better understand how and why temperature is so vital to regulate sleep,” said Marco Gallio, associate professor of neurobiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

The study describes for the first time “absolute cold” receptors in the fly antenna, which respond to temperature only below the fly’s “comfort zone” of about 25°C. Having recognized those neurons, the researchers followed them all the way to their targets within the brain. They found their targets are a small group of brain neurons that are part of a larger network that controls rhythms of activity and sleep. When the neurons they discovered are active, the target cells, which normally are made active by morning light, are shut down.

“Temperature sensing is one of the most fundamental abilities,” said Gallio, whose group is one of only a few in the world that are systematically studying temperature sensing in fruit flies. “The principles we are finding in the fly brain, the logic and organization, may be the same all the way to humans. And future studies on human brain will surely find some reference information in this study.”

9 . Could J. K. Rowling please leave Harry Potter in peace? 2010 was a good time to move on. We all know that Harry Potter’s last adventures hit the bookstore in 2007, and three years later the Warner Bros adaptations ran their course in cinema, too. For many fans, the young wizard had worked his magic through most of their childhood. But in 2018, a new Harry Potter extended universe film, Fantastic Beasts: The Crime of Grindelwald, was out.

I love Harry Potter series and I always will. It’s all there in my memory: I remember the first delight at reading “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal”. The wizarding treasure hunt, thrown by my parents for my ninth birthday with my dad dressed as Hagrid in the garden, was so clear in my mind. I remember deciphering (破译) my copy of the Deathly Hallows, the first book I read in English, and having to check the French for “wand”. The 2001 trip to the cinema to see Philosopher’s Stone, and all the ones that followed are kept clearly.

However, someone needs to call a halt to the endless afterlife of Potter’s fictional universe. It was enough in the seven books and eight films. We didn’t and don’t need a community website, a theatre play, the printed script of said movie, and even more movies.

Rowling has created 21^st-century modern literary classic. I always look up to her as the textbook classy writer: respectfully drawing attention from readers, successful but wise enough to withdraw. She also cares much about the causes she holds dear. In 2011 alone, she donated 16% of her net worth to charities. Of all contemporary authors who hit gold, Rowling remains one of the very most inspirational.

The saddest thing is that Rowling helped with the writing of the Cursed Child. She regularly “revealed” new details about Potter’s magical world on Twitter. Today, I decided to give up: I don’t follow Rowling on Twitter. I don’t want to see the new film. Thank you, Joanne Kathleen Rowling. I have enough valued stories—I don’t need new ones any more.