1 . An Inuit-developed app, named SIKU after the Inuktitut for “sea ice”, allows local communities from Alaska to Greenland to connect traditional knowledge with scientific data to track changes in the environment, and make decisions about how to manage wildlife.

A group of Inuit elders and hunters from Sanikiluaq, Nunavut, thought up the idea for SIKU more than ten years ago to document and understand the changing sea ice they were seeing in southeastern Hudson Bay. The group turned to the local non-profit Arctic Eider Society (AES) to develop a web-based platform (平台).

Over the years, SIKU has developed, and recently, the elders saw that the platform could help address a familiar challenge: sharing knowledge with younger people who often have their noses in their phones. In 2019, SIKU was reintroduced as a full-fledged (全面发展的) social network — a platform where members can post photos and notes about wildlife sightings, hunts, sea ice conditions and more. The posts tell stories of hunting and traveling; the impacts of climate change and industrial activity; and the traditions, diets and illnesses of local animals.

Inuit communities are already using the app to inform important decisions. In 2021, for example, elders in Sanikiluaq were worried that the local reindeer (驯鹿) population had reduced, so the Hunters and Trappers Association used SIKU to survey hunters and look at recent reported harvest rates. The information led the association to close the hunt for a short time to reduce pressure on the population and to reintroduce hunting slowly when the number of reindeer increased.

Traditionally, Inuit communities shared this information orally (口头上地). “We have lived in the environment for centuries and know about the wildlife. Now armed with SIKU, information is documented in a way that other people will understand. The advantage of SIKU is that it’s part science and part Inuit knowledge and it supports community-driven research,” says Lucassie Arragutainaq, a co-founder of AES.

3 . Recycled, reused and renewable textiles (纺织品) only go so far in solving the fast-fashion crisis, writes Alexandra Carlton. The answer may lie in consumption.

Australia is the world’s second-largest consumer of clothing, generating 800,000 tonnes of textile waste yearly. Individuals consume about 27 kilograms of new clothes annually and cast 23 kilograms of waste. Globally, the situation is even more severe, with an estimated 92million tonnes of clothing waste produced each year. This equates to a truckload of clothes entering landfills every second.

If you want to stop our unwanted clothes from jamming the planet, you’d assume that reusing and recycling would lead the discussion. However, full clothes recycling — breaking clothes down to their base fibres to create new ones — is no simple task. Clothes consist of various fibres, fasteners, and decorations that traditionally require painstaking manual (手工的) separation. Yet, innovation is underway, such as the Swedish large-scale sorting facility Siptex, where textiles can be sorted by color and material using infrared (红外线) technology.

Brands like Adelaide’s Autark focus on minimizing output. “I keep my collections tightly designed and production numbers slim,” says designer Sophia McMahon. Sometimes this means she doesn’t have the exact clothes someone wants in store, but customers are patient while she makes items to order because they understand her brand’s essence.

Startups like AirRobe are giving clothes a second life and could be part of the solution. The clothing resale market is currently worth 49 billion and is expected to reach 103 billion by 2025．AirRobe lets customers add new purchases to their digital wardrobe so they can be resold later without uploading photos or descriptions. “The ‘re-economy’ — the reuse and recycle market sector — will be a real opportunity for us,” says Erica Berchtold, CEO of The Iconic.

Researchers Samantha Sharpe and Taylor Brydges from the University of Technology Sydney advocate a widespread shift among consumers towards buying fewer, higher-quality clothes besides these innovations.

4 . Daniel Hove spent years serving his community in Wisconsin as the Assistant Fire Chief for the Burnsville Fire Department. In 2012, he _________ from the job he loved after doctors diagnosed him with pancreatic (胰腺的) cancer.

Daniel spent years fighting the _________ disease. And he had tons of _________ from friends and family. But his beloved 11-year-old Labrador (拉布拉多猎犬), Gunner, _________ by his side every step of the way.

As Daniel’s _________ grew more difficult, Gunner became ill, too. And he _________ highs and lows right along with his favorite human.

“When my dad would get restless, the dog would be _________,” Daniel’s daughter Heather explained. “So once we   _______ how the dog was doing—he wasn’t moving much anymore and not doing well—we knew, it was coming.”

As Gunner’s suffering hit its peak, Heather _________ knew the dog’s time on Earth was done. Gunner was __________ an animal hospital where the veterinarian put him to __________ forever. And soon after Gunner passed away, Daniel found his __________ was close. About an hour and a half later, Daniel was gone too. __________ in life, the dog and his beloved owner also remained that way in death.

Special friends are placed in our lives. And the story of this dog and his owner is a beautiful __________ that sometimes those furry friends offer lifelong __________ without words.

7 . With a brain the size of a pinhead, insects perform fantastic navigational (导航的) abilities. They avoid obstacles and move through small openings. How do they do this, with their limited brain power? Understanding the inner workings of an insect’s brain can help us in our search towards energy-efficient computing, physicist Elisabetta Chicca of the University of Groningen demonstrates with her most recent result: A robot that acts like an insect.

In search of the neural (神经的) mechanism that drives insect behaviour, PhD student Thorben Schoepe developed a model of its neuronal activity and a small robot that uses this model to navigate. Schoepe’s model is based on one main principle: always steer towards the area with the least apparent motion.

He had his robot drive through a long “corridor”— consisting of two walls with a random print on it—and the robot centred in the middle of the corridor, as insects tend to do. In other virtual environments, such as a space with obstacles or small openings, Schoepe’s model also showed similar behaviour to insects.

“The model is so good,” Chicca concludes, “that once you set it up, it will perform in all kinds of environments. That’s the beauty of this result.”

The fact that a robot can navigate in a realistic environment is not new. Rather, the model gives insight into how insects do the job, and how they manage to do things so efficiently.

Chicca explains, “Much of robotics is not concerned with efficiency. We humans tend to learn new tasks as we grow up and within robotics. This is reflected in the current trend of machine learning. But insects are able to fly immediately from birth. An efficient way of doing that is hardwired in their brains. In a similar way, you could make computers more efficient.”