On a hot September afternoon, Peter and his friend Isabel were on their way to the library. When they passed by Tubman park, Isabel suggested cutting through it to get to the library. As they entered the park, the sight of the swings (秋千) and the merry-go-round brought back a flood of memories of their childhood spent there. But now everything looked so old, sad, and dirty. Litter lay on the ground next to an overflowing trash bin. There were still young schoolchildren playing there but they had to avoid the trash that littered the playground. A little boy told them that the city took the other trash cans away and the remaining one never got emptied often.

As they headed toward the library, the two high school students wrinkled their forehead. In the library, they encountered Mrs. Evans, their kind-hearted fifth-grade teacher, retired yet still passionate. Mrs. Evans listened as Isabel and Peter eagerly explained what they’d seen. Finally, she recommended them to go to the City Hall to voice their concerns.

The next day, Isabel and Peter went into the building of the City Hall but were met with an impatient officer. They were informed that the city couldn’t help with their problem due to a tight budget. Discouraged, they left and turned to Mrs. Evans for help.

Under her guidance, they decided to ask Go Green, a non-profit organization whose goal is to protect the environment, for help. “This group is good at raising money for projects just like yours, ” said Mrs. Evans. She promised to arrange them to present their ideas to Go Green. Hearing this, their face lit up.

Two main tasks remained ahead: researching ways to clean up the park and preparing a convincing presentation. As Isabel was good at researching while Peter always had a talent for speaking, they cooperated quite well. Isabel learned from a science magazine that a new type of trash bin can squeeze the trash down without being emptied often, which saves time, money, and energy. Based on this, Peter practiced his presentation over and over again.

A week later, Peter stood nervously at the back of the hall where Go Green was meeting.

After the meeting, Isabel excitedly told Peter the good news.

5 . A Norfolk sheepdog named Peggy spent most of her life working on a farm and helping her human herd animals from place to place. She was great at her job, which requires keen intelligence and the ability to listen to a shepherd’s signals. But everything changed when Peggy suddenly went deaf for unknown reasons.

Peggy was sent to an animal shelter in 2018. With the shelter full, staffers tried to find a foster family for her to spend the holidays with. Thankfully, animal welfare manager Chloe Shorten stepped up to take her in! “We decided she could stay with us temporarily while we found somewhere more permanent to take her in, but we completely fell in love with her almost immediately and it soon became clear that she wouldn’t be going anywhere!” Chloe said. “She was greasy and out of condition, untrusting, and frightened,” the shelter added.

“She soon started to bond with me and we started taking her fun places like the beach, something we don’t think she has ever experienced before,” Chloe said. “With some tender loving care and good food, Peggy soon started to adjust to life. Several months on and Peggy has blossomed into a dog who is continuing to improve daily.”

One of the biggest ways Peggy’s new family helped her adjust was getting her back to work. Working dogs are bred to do a specific job, and without a purpose, they can grow depressed and bored. So Chloe introduced the dog to hand signs and taught her to use her eyes in place of her ears while on the job. Now that she’s 10, she’s “generally retired,” but she still enjoys herding and continues to impress her family with how quickly she learns new skills.

6 . Batman may not have any superpowers, but his inspiration certainly does.

More than 1,400 bat species live around the world, except in Antarctica and a few remote islands. Over their 50 million years of evolution, bats have developed clever solutions to life’s challenges, from a built-in sonar (声呐) system for finding food to fast, flexible wings that produce the fastest level-flight speed of any animal on Earth.

“There is still a lot to learn, but it is clear that bats really do have superpowers,” says Rodrigo Medellín, an ecologist. “Bats are showing us how to live a better life, for instance, by serving as models for healthy living and long lives.”

As a general rule in biology, smaller animals have shorter lives than larger ones. But bats are rule breakers: they’re the longest-lived mammals (哺乳动物) relative to their body size. Recently, scientists looked inside bats’ cells for the secrets to their exceptionally long lives. They focused on telomeres (端粒), which are the protective structures found at the ends of chromosomes (染色体). In most animals, telomeres tend to get shorter with age. But the telomeres of the longest-lived group of bats, Myotis, do not appear to shrink (收缩) with age. Understanding why bats live so long may help humans live longer one day.

In addition to living longer, bats remain healthy throughout their lives, with very low risk of developing cancer. Furthermore, bats can carry deadly viruses without getting sick. So further research into their unique immune (免疫的) systems may actually give insight into how people can live with viruses and not get sick.

Beyond their own abilities, bats also support many other parts of their ecosystems. Three out of every four bat species eat insects. Many are pests that cause damage to important agricultural crops, such as cotton. Scientists estimate that insect-eating bats may save U.S. farmers about 1 billion per year. In addition, many bat species help improve plant health and diversity.

“Bats are unsung heroes of biodiversity,” says Medellín. “It’s about time we appreciated them.”

7 . Animal rescuer and cinematographer Douglas Thorn’s passion for animals began when he was a little kid. “I started rescuing orphaned baby animals,” Thorn says. “And I wanted to be a wildlife cinematographer.”

When Thron grew up, he did just that, working for shows like Discovery Channels Shark Week, filming the great white sharks off the coast of Santa Cruz, California. But Thron says it was the Paradise Fire in California in 2018 that “pushed” him to do animal rescue activism work, putting his aerial cinematography skills to good use.

At the time, Thron was filming a man who was rescuing cats after the fire using an infrared hand-held camera. The camera uses heat to detect the animals at night Thron and the man talked about how incredible it would be to put one on a drone to detect animals more easily. “The animal's body temperature will glow on the screen and you can pick them out among the bricks and stones,” explains Thron.

The first animal Thron ever rescued was a dog in the Bahamas after a category-5 hurricane hit, which wiped out hundreds of houses. Thron tested out putting an infrared scope on a drone and found the dog.

“The drone really shaves off critical time so that the really badly hurt animals are able to be rescued,” Thron says. Once the scope picks up the “heat signature of an animal”, Thron turns a spotlight on the animal and zooms in on it, so he and the rescue crews can go and save the animal.

Thron has basically been “going non-stop since then”. His TV show, Doug to the Rescue, shows some of his heart-warming animal rescues, including after Hurricane Laura in Louisiana in 2020 and after fires in Northern California and Oregon. Thron also helped rescue koalas after fires damaged parts of Australia in 2020.

8 . I have worked as a keeper at the National Zoo, Paris for 11 years. Spot and Stripe are the first tiger cubs that have ever been born here. Globally, a third of Sumatran cubs in zoos don't make it to adulthood, so I decided to give them round-the-clock care at home.

I've got two children—the younger one, Kynan, was extremely happy about the tigers arriving - but all of us really looked forward to being part of their lives and watching them grow. I wasn't worried about bringing them into my home with my wife and kids. These were cubs. They weighed about 2.5 kg and were so small that there was absolutely no risk.

As they grew more mobile, we let them move freely around the house during the day, but when we were asleep we had to contain them in a large room, otherwise they'd get up to mischief. We'd come down in the morning to find they'd turned the room upside down, and left it looking like a zoo.

Things quickly got very intense due to the huge amount of energy required to look after them. There were some tough times and I just felt extremely tired. I was grateful that my family was there to help. We had to have a bit of a production line going, making up “tiger milk”, washing baby bottles, and cleaning the floors.

When Spot and Stripe were four months old, they were learning how to open doors and jump fences, and we knew it really was time for them to go. It was hard for us to finally part with them. For the first few days, Kynan was always a bit disappointed that the cubs weren't there.

I'm not sad about it. I'm hands-on with them every day at the zoo, and I do look back very fondly on the time that we had them.

As is well-known to us all, ants move between their home and sources of food frequently,     1     which their survival depends. Motsch and his colleagues wondered if ants on the move could get     2     （stick）in the jams.

Therefore, they controlled traffic density（密度）by constructing bridges of a     3     （vary）of widths between ants' home and a source of food.     4     only goal was to try to find out at what point they would have a traffic jam. They just waited and watched. But the ants never, at one point, just stopped.

The flow of ants did increase as ants started to fill the bridge. But it never slowed down, even when the bridge was crowded with ants. The researchers then     5     （far）looked at how the behavior of an individual ant affected traffic. They found when ants     6     （sense）overcrowding, they adjusted their speeds and avoided entering high-density areas and running into each other, thus     7     （prevent）jams.

Can ants help us solve our own traffic problems? “Not likely,” says Motsch. That's     8     when it comes to getting from point A to point B as fast as possible, human drivers put their own goals first. Ants have no choice but     9     （be）more cooperative in order to feed     10     （they）.

10 . The measurable threat to the environment has been worsened by the spread of COVID-19 that increases the need for plastic protective equipment. Most plastic is made from fossil fuels. Millions of tons of greenhouse gas are released from the development of these resources and plastic production and burning.

The end life of plastic is just worrisome. Less than 10% of the plastic produced has been recycled. Even more of it has been burned. But the vast majority of plastic has been buried inland, and it is increasingly polluting the environment. We hear mostly about ocean plastic and the harm done to sea creatures that mistake plastic bags and bits for food. But microplastic is even more worrisome. Plastic doesn't break down biologically but instead breaks down into tiny particles（a very small piece of something）, which have been found in every corner of the planet, on land and in the air, in drinking water and food sources.

Yet the public has not given this global environmental disaster the attention it requires. Instead, they have viewed single-use plastic—which makes up about 40% of plastic used each year—as a litter issue that can be solved through better recycling and waste management. That attitude must change because the recent global breakdown of the market for recycling has made it clear that it has never been, nor ever will be, able to keep up with plastic trash use.

California has been the forerunner of plastic waste reduction—it was the first state to ban single-use plastic bags and may be the first state to transform the way goods are packaged. The state also came close to passing an act which would have required that products sold in plastic packaging in the state have a proven recycling rate of 75% by 2032. California, though influential, can't solve this crisis alone. The US has long been producing a great amount of plastic trash and it should engage in reducing the use of plastic as well.