Spotted lanternflies (斑点灯笼蝇) are an invasive species. Since 2014, they have been seen all across the eastern United States. The insects are harmful to many plants, and can disturb entire ecosystems. State officials have urged people to kill spotted lanternflies wherever they see them.

When Joy saw the pests in her school courtyard, she thought she had to do something. “I’ve always wanted to take environmental action,” she says, “and show people that no one is ever too small to make a difference.”

So she started a club called Squash (压扁). Its mission is to kill spotted lanternflies around the school. More than 20 students have joined. At first, they trapped the pests in empty water bottles and then squashed them. In a single day, the club managed to kill more than a hundred spotted lanternflies.

Joy wanted to do more. With research, she discovered a plant called milkweed. It’s nutritious for pollinators (传粉昆虫) such as monarch butterflies but poisonous to spotted lanternflies. Joy thought that using milkweed along with the traps made specifically for spotted lanternflies would be a better way to kill them. The issue was that they didn’t have enough money to buy milkweed and the traps.

The kids were hoping to raise money for their school to address the big problem. Their goal was to raise $200, the cost of the equipment needed to kill spotted lanternflies around their school. They got part of the way there, with about $75. They decided to attract more fundraisers. “We discovered that if you find your voice,” Joy says, “you can do much more.”

In May, Joy and other students from Squash gathered in Columbus Park, in New York City. They set up a table with lemonade, cookies, and origami figures for sale. The money will be used to buy milkweed and the traps.

To attract more attention, the students divided their work into various roles.

As the day progressed, the students’ efforts paid off.

3 . Goldfish may seem like simple creatures swimming in a glass tank, but they possess a rather complicated navigation system, as discovered by researchers at the University of Oxford Led by Dr. Adelaide Sibeaux, the study aims to shed light on our understanding of how fish, and potentially humans, estimate distances using what could be described as an internal GPS.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Sibeaux and colleagues report how they created a tank in their experiment with 2cm-wide black and white vertical stripes (条纹) on the walls, connected by similar stripes across the floor. The team trained nine goldfish to swim a set distance of 70cm and then return to their starting point when waved at. The experiment aimed to investigate how the fish would estimate this distance without any gestures, under different patterns.

Over multiple trials, the goldfish averaged a swim distance of 74cm, give or take 17cm, when presented with the vertical 2cm-wide stripes. However, when the stripe pattern was altered to either narrower vertical stripes, checked patterns, or horizontal stripes, the fish’s behavior changed significantly. Narrower vertical stripes led them to overestimating the distance by 36%, while horizontal stripes resulted in highly inconsistent estimations.

According to the researchers, the goldfish appeared to be using an “optic (光学的) flow mechanism” based on the visual density of their environment. They kept track of how frequently the vertical pattern switched between black and white to estimate how far they had traveled. The study suggests that different optic flow mechanisms are used by mammals, including humans, based on angular (有角度的) motion of visual features. The study implies that the use of visually based distance information could have emerged early in the evolutionary timeline.

“This study is novel because, despite knowing that fish respond to geometric information regarding direction and distance, we don’t know how they estimate distances,” Professor Colin Lever, although not involved in the study, said, “it’s exciting to explore fish spatial mapping because fish navigation evolved earlier and better than most mammals.”

Walking around a digital exhibit hall in Yongle Palace in Yuncheng, Shanxi province, it is difficult not to be amazed and     1     (inspire) by 3D printing, digital murals (壁画) and other exhibition projects. All this is thanks to the great effort     2     has been put into digitally preserving the Yongle Palace murals.

Yongle Palace (palace of eternal joy), one of the three biggest Taoist temples in China, is the     3     (large) of all Taoist temples     4     (remain) from the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) and was among the first national key cultural relics protection items.

In 2016 experts found that its murals were deteriorating (恶化) and that the wooden     5     (component) of the four halls were deformed and cracked, and     6     rescue operation then began.

A digital collection of murals, buildings and other movable cultural relics was created and     7     (eventual) made available to the public on the internet.

Xi Jiulong, head of the Yongle Palace mural art protection research institute, says technological intervention has helped bring life to history to help the public better understand it.

Visitors could also immerse     8     (them) in the splendid artworks and learn more about the antiquities by scanning the QR code attached     9     each item.

Over the past two years digital exhibitions of murals in Yongle Palace     10     (hold) around China to great acclaim (赞扬，称赞).

7 . Biologists are becoming more and more concerned that global climate change will probably reduce biodiversity. Some biologists estimate that 35% of animals and plants could become extinct in the wild by 2050 due to global climate change. Before the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rarely climbed above 280 ppm; But during the 2014 calendar year, carbon dioxide levels ascended to 402 ppm.

In the fall of 2014, the National Audubon Society released a report entitled Birds and Climate Change. It is a comprehensive, first-of-its kind study that predicts how climate change could affect the ranges of 588 North American birds. Of the 588 North American bird species, more than half are likely to be in trouble. The National Audubon Society’s models indicate that 314 species will lose more than 50 percent of their current climatic range by 2080. Of the 314 species at risk from global warming, 126 of them are classified as climate endangered. These birds are projected to lose more than 50 percent of their current range by 2050. The other 188 species are classified as climate threatened and expected to lose more than 50 percent of their current range by 2080 if global warming continues at its current pace.

In January 2020, two widely reported studies were carried out to show the dramatic impact of climate disruption on our wildlife and fisheries along the California coast. The first study showed that from 2014 to 2016, over a million common murres from Alaska through California died as a result of a marine heat wave. The second study shows that acid rainfall caused by carbon emissions is harming shell-building animals in the ocean. The study found that larval Dungeness crabs’ shells suffer damage in west coast seawater, putting at risk the most profitable fishery in California and a beloved local seafood.

These newly documented impacts provide more evidence that we are running out of time to take action by drastically reducing our use of fossil fuels in order to slow the rate of climate disruption and to give birds and other animals more time to adapt.

Visit our How You Can Help Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions page to learn what you can do to help protect these species at risk from climate disruption.

8 . Two 18-year-old girls, Jrasnatt and Marisa, learned about a major challenge faced by the cricket (蟋蟀) farmers. Bigger crickets often attack the smaller ones. When attacked, a cricket will cut off its own legs to escape. But after abandoning a leg, this animal will often die or becomes less valuable to buyers.

Jrasnatt and Marisa were determined to solve the problem. After some research, they learned that colored light can influence the behaviors of some animals, including insects. To find out, the teen researchers transferred groups of 30 newly hatched crickets into each of 24 boxes. The crickets in six boxes were exposed only to red light. Another six boxes were lit with green. Six more boxes were lit with blue. These three groups of insects spent daytime hours throughout their lives — about two months — in a world bathed in just one color of light. The last six boxes of crickets lived in natural light.

“We see they’re growing every day and take notes on what’s happening,” says Marisa. “We’re like the parents of the crickets.” Throughout, the teens kept track of the crickets. The share of crickets with missing legs was about 9 in every 10 among those living in red, blue or natural light. But fewer than 7 in every 10 crickets who grew up in a world of green lost legs. Also, the survival rate for crickets in the green box was four or five times higher than that in the other boxes.

Crickets’ eyes are adapted to only see in green and blue light. So, in red light, the world would always look dark. Without being able to see, they are more likely to hit each other. That results in crickets losing legs. Besides, crickets are more attracted to blue light than green light, which pulls them closer together and leads to more fights. In the green light box, the crickets were most likely to mind their own business and avoid struggle.

Creating a green-light world for crickets is a solution that could be brought to the farms. Jrasnatt and Marisa are already in talks with the farmers. Those farmers plan to try out green lighting to see if it will boost their profits.

9 . We’re shopping online more than ever now, including various personal care and food items. Of U.S. Internet users, one-third do it at least once a week. Seeing your limited toilet paper (TP), you might pull up your smartphone and after a few taps have a fresh order of TP set to arrive in a day, maybe even less, and all done right from the toilet seat.

But this type of shopping — numerous small, quick-to-ship orders placed through e-tailing companies like Amazon — might be the worst for the environment, according to a recent study in Environmental Science & Technology. With their current business model of free shipping and fast delivery, greenhouse gas emissions linked with transporting “fast consumer goods” are high. “The online-only retailers are growing rapidly,” says lead author Sadegh, a scientist at Radboud University in the Netherlands.

Previous analyses haven’t agreed on whether online or in-store shopping is better. In fact, some studies have found that online shopping has a lower impact, because it saves the emissions associated with driving your car to the store (95 percent of Americans drive to go shopping). But this benefit can vary, or even disappear, depending on how fast we want that TP to arrive. And if you’re shopping in real life, factors like how you transport those items, how far you travel, and how much you buy at once all affect the carbon footprint of your purchase. “There have been some contradicting results, with some saying online shopping is better and some saying traditional shopping is better,” says Sadegh. So he tried to settle the debate with an approach that showed how likely one option was to be better than the other.

Sadegh and his team compared three shopping styles: traditional in-store shopping, online ordering from a physical store (which they called “bricks and clicks”), and ordering through an online-only retailer. Nearly two-thirds of the time, bricks and clicks shopping resulted in fewer emissions per item than in-store shopping — and was better than online shopping 97 percent of the time. In-store shopping had fewer emissions than online — only 81percent of the time.