1 . I was very thrilled to go to camp the year I turned 11 — the first time I would venture so far from home. Leading up to the date, I convinced my mother I was ready to go for two whole weeks.

Finally, the day came. We reached the camp after a six-hour drive. After registering and meeting my counselor, I waved my mom away with confidence, eager to take the swim test and start having fun. Camp was more than I had imagined: crafts and games; singing and swimming; making bracelets (手镯) for new friends; listening to our counselor read to us before falling asleep to the sound of rain on a metal roof.

When the weekend arrived, there was a luncheon (午宴) for visiting parents and families. I met some of my camp mates’ relatives, then suck away with a sandwich. I went down to the dock to watch the water bugs skate across the surface of the lake. My counselor came and companionably beside me. She quietly asked me if I was okay. I told her it was too far for my family to visit.

I remember not looking at her or saying anything for what seemed like a long time. It felt like talking might change the magic of the place. But I also wanted her to know me just a little better, so I told her that my dad had died only a few weeks before whispering “cancer”, just like I had heard the adults say it.

She put her arm around my shoulder, and we sat for a while longer. It felt like she understood.

Summer camp gave me the opportunity to be an ordinary kid for a brief time that year — just a girl learning, laughing and having fun like everyone else.

3 . When a tiny glass frog sleeps, its body becomes so transparent that it almost cannot be seen. The frog’s glass-clear skin makes no shadows. Even the red blood disappears. It’s an unusual trick—most see-through animals live in water all the time, which don’t produce red blood cells.

But when the frogs are active, blood begins to flow again, forming a pattern of bright red that can be seen. So, scientists set out to discover what happens to all that blood.

In a new study, researchers found out how, while sleeping, a glass frog sends most of the red blood cells to its liver(肝脏). In the process, the liver grows in size by about 40% to accommodate the extra cells. Like its heart and some other organs, the frog’s liver is covered in a mirrored part, which reflects lights, that helps the frog hide itself from enemies.

“If these frogs are awake, stressed or under anesthesia(麻醉), their blood systems are full of red blood cells, and they are not transparent,” explains an expert. “The only way to study transparency is when these animals are happily asleep, which is difficult to achieve in a research lab.”

Luckily, there is an imaging technology which can check red blood cells without breaking the skin of frogs. The team used this technique on frogs while they were sleeping. They found the animals moved a shocking 89% of their red blood cells to their livers while sleeping.

How exactly these frogs can pack their red blood cells together without getting blood clots (血栓) remains a mystery. Most other animals’ blood becomes very thick if the cells bump into each other, which can help cure a wound or—in a worse situation—stop blood from flowing to important areas. Understanding more about how the frogs stay healthy while jam-packing their livers with red blood cells could help advance blood clot research in humans.

5 . Plastic pollution is disastrous for the environment and our health, and the issue is growing worse. Even when plastic producers are responsible and attempt to help relieve the problem, it doesn’t always go smoothly. Such has been the case for the company Torus Pak.

Torus Pak produces packaging for frozen meals. Last year, a Torus Pak customer contacted the company about ensuring the packages are recyclable. Like many other black plastic products, the Torus Pak packages were technically recyclable to begin with, but they used a carbon-based pigment (色素). This pigment disturbs the sorting technology that’s used by many recycling facilities, so black plastic usually ends up being thrown away because the machines can’t identify it.

A 2017 study found that only about 9% of all the plastic waste humans have ever created has actually been recycled. That amounts to less than 600 million tons out of over 6 billion. Some studies estimate that by 2050, the plastic polluting the ocean will outweigh the fish if we don’t make some changes. This would obviously be bad for fish, but also for anyone who eats seafood. If you eat something that eats plastic, it will end up in your own system. That’s bad enough, but what’s worse, producing plastic also releases emissions that contribute to climate change, and harmful chemicals that can sicken communities near plastic-related facilities.

The solution is obvious — stop using so much plastic, starting with many of the items we use just once for a few minutes. Companies also need to shift toward using more reusable containers, and packaging made from materials that are less harmful to the environment instead of plastic. Besides, governments must take an active part to direct such changes too.

We know how to live without plastic. We’ve just got used to a convenient consumption (消费) culture. The benefits of using plastic on such an unnecessarily large scale don’t outweigh these costs. Reducing our dependence on plastic will help to keep our planet clean and healthy.

7 . Like members of a street gang, male dolphins call on their buddies when it comes time to attack—or, in their case, to catch and defend females. A new study shows that they do this by learning the whistles, of their closest allies—sometimes more than a dozen animals—and remembering who consistently cooperated with them in the past. The findings indicate dolphins have a concept of team membership—previously seen only in humans—and may help reveal how they keep such complicated and tight-connected societies.

Male dolphins typically cooperate as a pair, which researchers call a “first-order alliance.” These small groups work together to find and catch a female. Males also cooperate in second-order alliances consisting of as many as 14 dolphins which defend against opponent(对手) groups attempting to steal the female. Some second-order alliances join together in even larger third-order alliances, providing males in these groups with even better chances of having allies nearby if enemies should attack.

But how do the males keep track of everyone in these complex groups?

Scientists have argued that their whistles are key. Every dolphin learns a unique signature whistle from its mother, which it keeps for life; dolphins recognize and remember each other’s whistles, similar to how we recognize each other’s names.

To further investigate how the male dolphins use their whistles, King and her colleagues turned to a population of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins. The team has tracked the animals with underwater microphones since 2016, enabling them to identify which dolphin produces which whistle.

The researchers expected that males hearing the whistle of their first-order alliance partners would respond most strongly. But when they reviewed the videos, they found the strongest responses came from males in the dolphins’ second-order alliances—animals who had a firm cooperative history of fighting off attackers with them.

“It was so striking,” says King, leading author of the study. “In 90% of experiments, dolphins who heard whistles of second-order alliance members turned immediately and directly toward the speaker.” The findings, she says, suggest dolphins—like humans—have a “social concept of team membership, based on an individual’s previous cooperative investment, rather than how good friends they are.”

On September 26, 2022, NASA     1     (successful) completed its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission by intentionally crashing     2     unmanned spacecraft into the asteroid (小行星) Dimorphos. The goal was to change its orbit. With the success, NASA proved the concept     3     this technique could keep a potentially dangerous asteroid     4     crashing into Earth in the future.

NASA noted that Dimorphos is not a     5     (threatening) to Earth, but because it passes relatively close to Earth, it     6     (choose) as the target for the test mission.

“If you were going to do this for planetary defence, you would do it 5, 10, 15, or 20 years in advance for this technique     7     (work).” said NASA program executive Andrea Riley. “This is why we test. We want to do it now rather than when there’s an actual need.”

Asteroids can be a significant danger to planet Earth. For example, around 66 million years ago, an asteroid around 6 to 9 miles across struck the Earth,     8     (cause) one of the largest extinction events in Earth’s history. Therefore, DART’s success     9     (be) an important step forward in protecting the planet from potential damage from an asteroid. This shows humans are no longer     10     (power) to prevent this type of natural disaster.