1 . A forest in Staffordshire (in the UK) transformed into a hi-tech laboratory. Researchers here are investigating how the trees use carbon, and it’s difficult to find out. In an unusual experiment, extra carbon dioxide is piped to the trees, to create the kind of atmospheric conditions expected in the middle of the century. And instruments measure how the forest reacts.       

The scientist in charge says there’s still a lot to learn. And he worries that governments and companies are rushing to plant trees as an easy answer to climate change. “If you try and use trees to tidy up the mess that we’re making through emissions, you are putting those trees into a very rapidly changing climate and they will struggle to adapt,” said Professor Rob MacKenzie, University of Birmingham.

This device tracks the movement of carbon dioxide. In a healthy forest, the gas is not only absorbed by the trees but some is released as well. What scientists here are finding out is the way carbon flows into a forest and out of it is a lot more complicated than you might think. So, if mass tree planting is meant to be a solution to tackling climate change, the trees are going to have to be monitored and cared for, over not just decades, but may be centuries as well.

Of all the challenges, the task of planting is the simplest. Shelby Barber from Canada can do an amazing 4,000 trees in a day. “People talking about planting millions billions of trees around the world. Is it possible do you think, physically?” asked BBC.

“It’s definitely possible with the right amount of people, the right group of people. I’ve personally, in three years, planted just over half a million trees.” said Professor Rob MacKenzie.

Once planted, the trees need to survive, and experts are mixing different types to minimize the risk of disease. “It’s a bit like making sure you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, you’re spreading out your risk. And then if one part of that woodland fails, for whatever reason, it gets a disease or it can’t tolerate future climatic conditions, there are other parts of the forest that are healthy and able to fill in those gaps.” said Eleanor Tew of Forestry England.

Suddenly there’s momentum to plant trees on a scale never seen before. So what matters is doing it in a way that ensures the forests thrive — so they really do help with climate change.

2 . The Fight against Fast Furniture

Fast furniture is a term that refers to furniture that is produced cheaply and quickly. These items are often bad for the environment because they are made from materials that break easily and need to be replaced often.     1    

To help protect the environment, a movement to move away from fast furniture has begun. Many companies are joining the fight by finding cleaner ways to manufacture furniture. For example, IKEA has agreed to switch to using renewable or recycled materials for their furniture by the year 2030.     2    

There is also a push to encourage shoppers to buy more used furniture for their homes. Small businesses that help transform old chairs and sofas into completely new products have even popped up recently. At the end of the day, consumers will play the most important role in the fight to end fast furniture. Shoppers should try to think more about the long term when preparing to purchase new furniture. They should stay away from furniture that is made from cheap materials like fiberboard or plastic because they will often fall apart after a few years.     3    

A much better alternative is furniture made from real wood because it won’t break as easily. If wood furniture is damaged, it can often be repaired to last longer. High-quality metals are another good material, as they are durable. If the furniture is no longer fit for use, these metals can still be recycled and used to make new products.

    4     So, the next time you buy furniture, think about whether it’s something that will last a long time or it’s just fast furniture that will break soon and go into the trash.

3 . THE GLOBAL WASTE TRADE IS ESSENTIALLY BROKEN

Cut into hillside in northern Malaysia stands a large, open-air warehouse. This is a recycling factory, which opened last November. On a very hot afternoon in January, Shahid Ali was working his very first week on the job. He stood knee-deep in soggy, white bits of plastic. Around him, more bits floated of the conveyor belt and fell to the ground like snowflakes.

Hour after hour, Ali sorts through the plastic jumble moving down the belt, picking out pieces that look off-color or soiled-rejects (废品) in the recycling process. Though it looks like backbreaking work, Ali says it is a great improvement over his previous job, folding bed-sheets in a nearby textile factory, for much lower pay. Now, if he eats simply, he can save money from his wages of just over $l an hour and send $250 a month to his parents and six brothers and sisters in Peshawar, Pakistan, 2,700 miles away, “As soon as I heard about this work, I asked for a job,” says Ali, 24, a bearded man with glasses and an easy smile. Still, he’s working 12 hours a day, seven days a week. “If I take a day off, I lose a day’s wages,” he says.

In the warehouse, hundreds of bags are stacked more than 60 feet high-each stuffed with plastic wrappers and bags thrown away weeks earlier by their original users in California. The fact that the waste has traveled to this distant corner of the planet in the first place shows how badly the global recycling economy has failed to keep pace with humanity’s plastics addiction. This is an ecosystem that is deeply dysfunctional, if not on the point of collapse: About 90% of the millions of tons of plastic the world produces every year will eventually end up not recycled, but burned, buried, or dumped.

Plastic recycling enjoys ever-wider support among consumers: Putting yogurt containers and juice bottles in a blue bin is an eco-friendly act of faith in millions of households. But faith goes only so far. The tidal wave of plastic items that enters the recycling stream each year is increasingly likely to fall right back out again, casualties of a broken market. Many products that consumers believe (and industries claim) are “recyclable" are in reality not, because of hard economics. With oil and gas prices near 20-year lows, so-called virgin plastic, a product of petroleum feed-stocks, is now far cheaper and easier to obtain than recycled material. That unforeseen shift has yanked the financial rug out from under what was until recently a practical recycling industry. “The global waste trade is essentially broken,” says the head of the global plastics campaign at Greenpeace. “We are sitting on vast amounts of plastic with nowhere to send it and nothing to do with it.”

A new way to reduce poaching

Researchers are working on a pilot program backed by Russia’s Rosatom Corp to inject rhino horns (犀牛角) with radioactive material, a strategy that could discourage consumption and make it easier to detect illegal trade.

Poachers (偷猎者) killed 394 rhinos in South Africa for their horns last year, government data shows, with public and private game     1     lacking the resources needed to monitor vast tracts of land and protect the animals that live there. While the toll was a third lower than in 2019 and the sixth     2     drop, illegal hunting remains the biggest threat to about 20,000 of the animals in the country — the world’s biggest population.

Thousands of     3     sensors along international borders could be used to detect a small quantity of radioactive material     4     into the horns, according to James Larkin, a professor at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg, who has a background in radiation protection and nuclear security. “A whole new     5     of people could be able to detect the illegal movement of rhino horn,” he said. Some alternate methods of discouraging poaching, including poisoning, dyeing and removing the horns, have raised a variety of opinions as to their virtue and efficacy.

Known as The Rhisotope Project, the new anti-poaching     6     started earlier this month with the injection of an amino acid (氨基酸) into two rhinos’ horns in order to detect whether the compound will move into the animals’ bodies. Also,     7     studies using computer modeling and a replica rhino head will be done to determine a safe dose of radioactive material. Rhino horn is used in traditional medicine, as it is believed to cure disease such as cancer,     8     as a show of wealth and given as gifts.

“If we make it radioactive, these people will be hesitant to buy it,” Larkin said. “We’re pushing on the whole supply chain.”

Besides Russia’s state-owned nuclear company, the University of Witwatersrand, scientists and private rhino owners are involved in the project. If the method is     9     feasible, it could also be used to curb illegal trade in elephant ivory.

“Once we have developed the whole project and got to the point where we completed the proof of concept, then we will be making this whole idea     10     to whoever wants to use it,” Larkin said.

Beethov-hen’s first symphony

On a grey Friday morning at a Hawke’s Bay farm, members of New Zealand’s symphony orchestra dressed in black to perform their latest composition in front of a large crowd.

The music contained many marks of traditional classical music, but as it began, the instruments started to make loud, rough sounds more commonly     1     (hear) in chicken coops than in an auditorium.

However, no feathers were angered by this departure from tradition,     2     the audience that gathered to listen to the concert last week was, in fact, a couple of thousand chickens.

The piece of music – Chook Symphony No.1 –     3     (create) specifically for the birds out of an unlikely partnership between the orchestra and an organic free-range chicken farm which wanted a piece of chicken-friendly music to enrich its flocks’ lives.

“We’ve been playing classical music for the chickens for some years now because     4     is well researched that the music can calm the chickens down,” says Ben Bostock, one of the two brothers who     5     (own) the Bostock Brothers farm.

Research has shown animals can respond positively to classical music, and chickens are particularly responsive to baroque (巴洛克风格), according to some studies.

The composer, Hamish Oliver,     6     used the baroque tradition as a starting point and drew inspiration from composers such as Corelli, Bach, and Schnittke, wanted the piece to be playful by including sounds from a chicken’s world. “The trumpet imitates the chicken… the woodwind instruments are the cluckiest, especially if you take the reeds off.”

The early stages of composition were spent     7     (test) out which instruments and sounds the chickens responded to best.

“They didn’t like any big banging,” Bostock said, adding that when the birds respond positively to the music, they tend     8     (wander) farther among the trees. Bostock now hopes chicken farmers around the world will use the piece of music to calm their own birds.

For Oliver, having input from the farmers about     9     the chickens were responding to particular sounds and instruments was a highlight of the project.

The symphony has searched exhaustively     10     any other examples of orchestras making music specifically for chickens and believes this to be a world-first, says Peter Biggs, the orchestra’s chief executive.

7 . WHAT ARE RIP CURRENTS?

Rip currents are like the rivers of the sea, transporting water near the shore back out into the ocean depths. The presence of these currents can be hidden by the wild movements of the surrounding waves. This means that as well as carrying seaweed and pieces of materials quickly out to sea, they can rapidly sweep away even the strongest swimmers. Around 80 percent of all lifeguard rescues are caused by powerful rip currents pulling a swimmer into danger.

If you find yourself being pulled out to sea by an unsuspected rip current, you should remain calm, focus on staying afloat and, if you can, swim parallel to the shore. Your instincts might tell you to swim towards land, as this is where you’re aiming to get to, but the current will be too strong to swim against. Instead, aim to move across the current and into slower flowing water next to it. A rip current may only pull you just past the breaking waves, but in some cases they can take you hundreds of metres offshore. The strength of currents can be hard to predict, so it’s safest to stay on lifeguarded beaches and not to swim if you see any indication of a rip current.

The Lights of Aurora

On the night of 2 September1859, the dark sky over Europe and North America was suddenly full of light! The light did no come from the sun or the moon and it had a strange colour. The light moved across the sky,     1     (come) and going, like clouds in a strong wind in the United States, a man in Boston was using the telegraph to speak to a man in Portand 160km away. They both turned off the electricity for the telegraph, but     2     could still speak to each other for the next two hours. The electricity was coming from the light in the sky. How was this possible? And what was the light in the sky?

The light is called the aurora. Usually, you can see it only at the very north of the earth,     3     it is called aurora borealis or Northerm Lights, or at the very south, where it is the aurora australis or Southern Lights. But in 1859, something happened in the sun — a very large storm — and it moved the aurora across the middle of the earth. We do not think that his ever happened before 1859, and we know that it     4     (not happen) since then.

Why does the aurora happen? And why can we only see it at the top or bottom of the earth? The aurora is made by something     5     (call) the ‘solar wind’( wind from the sun). We cannot see this wind, or touch it. It is a wind of particles that travel away from the sun at the time at about 400 kilometers a second. Most of the particles never touch the earth. The earth has a kind of ‘wall’ around it that defends it     6     these particles. This wall is called the earth’s magnetic field, and it pushes the particles away on either side. But the earth's magnetic field has two “windows” in it: the magnetic north, and the magnetic south. At these places. the earth’s magnetic field turns down into the earth. And some of the particles from the solar wind come through these magnetic ‘windows’. These solar particles crash is to the particles that are already in our sky. And     7     this happens, we see the beautiful lines or clouds of light of the aurora.

Alaska is a good place     8     (see) the auurora borealis, and you can also go to places like Iceland, Siberia, the north of Greenland, Norway, Sweden, and Scotland to see the aurora australis, go to the south of Australia, Tasmania, or New Zealand.

People travel thousands of kilometers to see the aurora, and they can never be sure     9     it will happen. But     10     do see it says that they will never forget it.