1 . To protect people living in areas that are likely to suffer flooding and rising sea levels, a group of architects has designed a floating home.

The project is a collaboration between British architect firm Grimshaw and Dutch manufacturer Concrete Valley. Currently at the design stage, the home will be constructed using a concrete and glass framework, which sits on a floating pontoon structure. In the event of a tidal surge or flooding, the pontoon rises with the water level to keep the home safe. Fitted with solar panels and heat exchangers, the water home will be able to produce their own electricity during power cuts, in the event of a storm.

Other firms are exploring floating homes, too. In the UK, Baca Architects has partnered with manufacturer Floating Homes. Their design was originally an entry to a competition to reduce London’s housing shortage, and has since been turned into a prototype. Baca Architects is exploring ways to provide practical, affordable, flood-resistant additional city housing, which could occupy unnecessary docks, canals and other waterways throughout London, director Richard Coutts told the Guardian.

As the planet’s atmosphere warms, areas such as the Arctic are melting fast, contributing to rising sea levels and higher risk of flooding. The ocean is already reclaiming land in some parts of the world. With the global population set to reach 9.8 billion people by mid-century, extreme flooding could further add pressure to limited land, water, food and other resources. These challenges are at the heart of the Virtual Ocean Dialogues, an initiative by the World Economic Forum and Friends of Ocean Action. The online event provides a forum for more than 50 world leaders to address the most pressing challenges facing our oceans and develop ways to protect them.

While floating homes may be a common feature in parts of Asia and other developing regions, they are emerging as a way to relieve overcrowding and protect people in busy cities and urban areas which are likely to suffer from flooding.

4 . For Cruz, who grew up in Peru’s mountainous region of Cuzco, fog represents a massive opportunity. As a boy, he had to hike for more than an hour every day across hills to collect water from the nearest source. But over time, he realized that during the rainy season, droplets of water would gather in the large leaves of banana trees. So one day he and his father tried to build a canal system with the leaves to collect water and it turned out a success. But afterwards, he moved to Lima at the age of 25.

There, shocked by the water shortages and expensive water supply that some of the city’s poorest residents were faced with, Cruz set up El Movimiento Peruanos sin Agua in 2005. The idea was to deploy the method he learned in his hometown on a larger scale, which would provide free, independently sourced and easily accessible water to those who needed it most. He began installing (安装) a traditional fog catcher model developed in the 1980s.

At the highest point of Los Tres Miradores, there is a curious set of large structures that resemble a fleet of ships in the sky. They are so-called “fog catchers”. Netted devices, made of high density Raschel polyethylene and spanning several meters wide, are lined up at the top of a misty mound and linked by a network of tubes that lead to storage containers. The 40 fog catchers there provide enough water for 180 families, whether to bathe, clean, drink or to irrigate crops on small garden patches.

Supporters believe that fog catchers have the potential to improve water supply for communities around the world among the ever-challenging circumstances. German researcher Lummerich says, “They are cheap, easy to construct.” In a world searching for water supply systems, it is one important puzzle piece that can make an essential difference locally.

However, there are some issues. For one, fog catchers require space, which is not always easy to come by in cities, let alone urban slums. At the same time, fog catchers must be properly cleaned and maintained to stay effective. Most crucially, appropriate climate conditions are required. Fog isn’t everywhere.

5 . Cats and many other animals, including most dogs, can reflect light from their eyes. That’s why cats’ eyes will usually shine brightly in photos taken in a dimly lit room or glow when lightened in the dark by a flashlight or a car’s headlights.

Species whose eyes glow have evolved to see better in low light because they either forage or need to look out for predators (天敌) throughout the night, or they do most of their hunting at dawn and dusk. In fact, domesticated cats can see in conditions that are only 16% as bright as what people require.

Cats accomplish this because their pupils (瞳孔) — the openings that appear black in the middle of their eyes that widen and narrow in response to light conditions—are special. Pupils operate like windows, with bigger ones letting more light into the eye. And a cat’s pupils can become up to 50% larger than human pupils in dim light. They also have a higher number of a specific type of light-sensing cell in the back of their eyes than we do. These cells, called rods (杆细胞), catch low-level light. In addition to having large pupils and lots of rods, cats have something people don’t: a tapetum lucidum (荧光膜), a Latin medical term that translates to “bright or shining tapestry”. The tapetum lucidum is also known as “eyeshine”.

It’s located in the back of the eye behind the retina (视网膜) — a thin layer of tissue that receives light, converts the light to an electrical signal and sends this signal to the brain to interpret the image．

A cat’s tapetum lucidum is made up of cells with crystals that, like a mirror, reflect light back to the retina. This gives the retina a second chance to absorb more light.

In cats, the tapetum most often glows yellow-green or yellow-orange, but the color varies, just like their irises (虹膜) — the colorful part of their eye, which can be green, yellow, blue or golden. Variation in tapetum color is not unique to cats and can be found in lots of species.

7 . According to the United Nations, 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come directly from the way that we currently produce our electricity.71 percent of the earth is covered in water yet only around 1.5 percent of the global energy is produced through wave power. That’s what inspired Eco Wave Power CEO, Inna Braverman to take on the challenge.

Two weeks after she was born in Ukraine in 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred and she got hurt, suffering from breathing arrest and a clinical death. But thanks to her mother, who was a nurse, she was saved. Growing up, she felt it her purpose to find green and sustainable energy.

Inna found that previous wave energy developers have decided to pursue offshore technologies, contributing to huge installation and maintenance costs, incredibly vulnerable stations in storms, and consequently lack of funding. Her innovative version, however, is to install the power station on land. The only part of the system in the water is the floaters which bob up and down with the waves. These push compressed air into a tank where the energy is stored to produce electricity. The floaters are attached to existing man-made structures such as banks, piers, and breakwaters.

The simplicity of the design makes it cheaper to install and maintain as well as being better protected from rough weather and therefore, insurable. Once a commercial plant producing 20 megawatt s or more (enough for 20,000 homes) is in place, the unit cost significantly reduces. “Our price of energy decreases to about $0.05 US (€0.05) per kilowatt hour, which is comparable to the prices of onshore wind,” Inna explains.

A pilot station was installed in Gibraltar in 2016. It was the first wave energy system to be connected to the grid in Europe. More tests of the wave energy system have been arranged in different countries and regions.

8 . Adverse impacts on health due to extreme weather and vector-borne disease risks could increase in the United Kingdom (UK) under a warming climate, according to a report published on Monday by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

The report, written by 90 experts, is based on climate projections using a high-end warming scenario (可能发生的情况) or a “worst-case scenario” of approximately 4.3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. “Our changing climate poses one of the greatest health security and societal challenges, impacting everything from the air we breathe to the quality and availability of our food and water,” Isabel Oliver, chief scientific officer at UKHSA, said in a statement. The report estimates that there will be up to 10,000 deaths in the country by the 2050s as a result of extreme heat.

Based on a high-end warming scenario, the report anticipates a substantial surge in heat related deaths, with an increase of over 1.5 times by the 2030s and an over 12-fold rise by the 2070s. It also states that vector-borne diseases, such as chikungunya, dengue and Zika viruses, could become transmissible in London and other parts of the UK due to more Aedes albopictus (Asian tiger mosquitoes) and Culex mosquitoes.

The report also warns that more people will be at high risk of flooding in the future due to changing rainfall patterns.

“Action is needed now to adapt our policies, environments and our behaviors to secure health, well-being and livelihoods,” Oliver said, adding that much can be done to “avert (避免) and prevent” the impacts of climate change on health.

UKHSA, an executive agency sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Care, is responsible for planning, preventing and responding to external health threats.

This year is set to be the hottest year on record in human history, according to a report published by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) at the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.