1 . A sleeping animal cannot look for food or flee from danger. But the fact that sleep is widespread among animals shows its restorative powers are essential. Some animals, though, try to have their cake and eat it. Dolphins and ducks sleep with half their brains, leaving the other half on guard. A paper in Science by Dr Le reports another innovative workaround. Chinstrap penguins take their sleep in thousands of naps, tiny micro- sleeps-or at least when they are nesting.

Chinstraps sleep with either their whole brain or just one half. Data confirmed they sleep in the ocean or on land. Ducks sleep in long periods, while the penguins nod of for several seconds at a time, hundreds of times an hour. The naps average 4 seconds in length; 72% lasted less than 10 seconds. Micro-sleeps aren’t unknown. Exhausted humans, like jet-lagged (倒时差) tourists and parents of newborn babies, can experience them. Totaling the duration, the researchers concluded Chinstraps get around 12 hours of sleep daily.   

Two explanations are given for Chinstraps’ sleep pattern. The first is to do with external threats. Penguins hatch eggs alone while their partners are away seeking for food. Colonies (领地) are threatened by big birds that’ll steal unattended eggs. Broken sleep is a clever strategy of getting some shut-eye during long egg-guarding periods.   

Penguins with nests near the edge of the colony are at greater risk than those in the centre, but enjoy more extended naps. The second is threats from within, as penguin colonies are noisy, crowded places. They steal nesting materials from careless neighbors, so penguins in the crime-ridden centre find it harder to sleep than those in the safer suburbs.   

Choosing between those theories requires more research. Dr Lee said, “Nor can we measure how restorative such naps are. Chinstraps are evidently able to hatch their young under such conditions, which suggests they’re getting something from their constant nodding-off. So, humans nurturing their newborns should take heart.”

2 . In the animal world, speed is king. Fast animals have a leg up in outrunning other animals, which puts them high on the food chain. It would seem that all animals would go for speed, but then there’s the sloth (树懒). While a lion can go from 0 to 60 miles an hour in only five seconds, it takes a sloth all day to cover no more than 50 meters.

Sloths live entirely in trees on a diet of leaves. And for this, they are extremely rare. While most of the land world is covered in trees, there are very few vertebrates (脊椎动物) that call the tree home. The aim of a 2016 study, says Jonathan Pauli, a University of Alabama professor of forest and wildlife ecology, was to help uncover why sloths are indeed so unique. “Among vertebrates, this is the rarest of lifestyles”, says Pauli. “When you picture animals that live off plant leaves, they are almost all big-things like deer. What’s super interesting about sloths is that they can’t be big.”

For their research, Pauli and his Wisconsin team studied wild sloths at a field site. When the researchers measured the energy use of sloths, they found a wildly low burning of as little as 110 calories of energy a day. And for this, they take the cake: it is the lowest measured energetic output for any mammal (哺乳动物).

“The measurement was intended to find out what it cost sloths to live over a day,”says Pauli, who adds that a diet of little but leaves lacks nutritional value and the animal’s small size doesn’t allow for overeating-so sloths need to find ways to make the most of their diets, which means using tiny amounts of energy, dramatic control of body temperature and living at an extremely slow pace.

Their reward? A wonderfully widespread ecological system to call their own, one slow inch at a time.

3 . Whenever I order food for delivery, I play a little game to guess how many sets of tableware(餐具)the restaurant will provide with my meal. Sometimes restaurants will throw in two, three or four sets for just one order. But I rarely need any tableware at all, and the waste goes into the trash or collects dust in a kitchen drawer.

Researchers working with Chinese technology group Alibaba tried a simple approach to this problem. Instead of just wastefully doling out tableware, the company required food-delivery customers in some cities in China to pick how many sets of tableware they wanted to receive.The default (默认设置)was set at zero. The result, published today in the journal Science, was a 638% increase in the share of no-tableware orders. If applied across China, researchers found, the approach would save nearly 22 billion sets of plastic tableware. The study doesn’t cover carbon emissions, but it’s safe to say that the impact would be significant. It struck me as a useful reminder of the many low-hanging fruits across the economy that can cut waste, and emissions.

Nudging its customers cost Alibaba nothing more than a few hours of software engineering time and the impact it brought was immense. The concept of nudging comes from the field of behavioral economics known as nudge theory. It suggests that a slight action can encourage good human behavior without the need for policies that limit choice or economic punishment that raises the cost of bad behavior. To nudge customers to eat better, for example, a restaurant might organize its menu by listing healthy options first and bury unhealthy ones at the bottom. More recently, some big companies like Google have also begun to use nudges to advance climate objectives.

Behavioral economics broadly, and nudges more specifically, aren’t without controversy. Some might think it assigns consumers responsibility for addressing environmental challenges. But there is another way to look at it. In the absence of necessary policy—and policy is needed一companies can help encourage a widespread shift of consumer behavior.

And all of that behavioral change can add up. The International Energy Agency found in 2021 that small behavioral changes in energy consumption such as walking instead of driving and adjusting the thermostat could in total shave off 4% of global emissions. The more that companies can do to facilitate such changes, the better.

4 . When most kids go to the beach, they’re too focused on making sandcastles and splashing around to notice litter, but several years ago, for 7-year-old Cash Daniels, noticing a plastic straw sparked a lifelong passion for saving the planet.

Cash, who is now known as the “conservation kid”, has always loved nature. He grew up fishing along the Chattanooga River, after all! But once he learned that 80 percent of all trash from land and rivers ends up in the ocean, he couldn’t sit back.

He started with cleanups along the river, something that quickly went from a family affair to a community effort with volunteers and neighbors. In 2019, Cash, together with a Canadian conservationist, Ella Galaski-Rossen, started a nonprofit called the Cleanup Kids. Despite living in different countries, they managed to create educational videos on their YouTube channel. “We hope to be a really big nonprofit that eliminates plastic in the U. S. and Canada,” Cash said. “We want to inform kids and adults in the landlocked states of how their actions are connected to the water and the ocean,” Cash said.

Cash was selected as one of America’s top 10 youth volunteers of 2021 by the Prudential Spirit of Community Awards. He also earned the title of National Honoree, where he received a$5,000 grant to go to a nonprofit of his choice, and he became the first person to win the Youth Conservationist Award two years in a row from the Tennessee Wildlife Federation.

“I want to travel the world, teach others, and help them feel connected to the ocean. Because if you are connected to the ocean-if you love it and what lives in it—you’ll want to protect it,” he said. “This is my fun, and it becomes more fun with every new discovery.”

5 . Cornwall Council apologised to the public after a citizen complained that one of its buildings was lit up “like a Christmas tree” at midnight during an energy crisis.

On Saturday, a dog walker, Stuart, discovered a brightly-lighted Chy Trevail building in Bodmin, which accommodates more than 600 staff. The witness said, “How can the council explain for leaving all the lights and TVs on? We’re constantly told there is an energy crisis. They put our council tax up. For what reason? Because they employed staff that forget how to use a light switch?”

There were complaints about a similar issue last summer when Lys Kernow, formerly the New County Hall in Truro was pictured with all the lights on past midnight both inside and outside.

A council spokesman admitted it was an error. “Following an investigation, we can confirm some lights at Chy Trevail were left switched on accidentally,” he said, “Training will be given to the workers who made the mistake to ensure this is not to happen again. Cornwall Council is committed to reducing its energy use and has taken many steps to do so, including the installation (安装) of solar panels at both County Hall in Truro and at Chy Trevail. A new lighting control system has also been installed in Truro to ensure the amount of time lights are left switched on is minimised.“

Chy Trevail includes a central hall for the main reception and public facilities, as well as open- plan flexible workspaces over three floors. The building has “a special design driven by a challenging display energy certificate rating and includes 200kw photovoltaics (太阳能光伏) to generate on-site renewable energy, low energy LED lighting, improved insulation, air-tightness and measures to reduce water consumption.

Cornwall Council previously declared a climate emergency and hopes to be carbon neutral by 2030.The local authority has invested in LED lighting at Lys Kernow and uses renewably-sourced energy to power the building, including solar energy from panels installed on the roof.

6 . Leave-No-Trace Camping

For those of us who love spending time in the great outdoors, wild spaces are very special. These are places we visit to recharge, or to fill our hearts with natural beauty.    1    If you feel this way, then you’re the perfect person to promote and practice Leave-No-Trace camping.

Its principles are to treat the wilderness the way a decent visitor would and leave everything just as you found it, with no evidence that you passed through.    2    That’s because your visit makes a minimal impact on the environment.

You can carry out these ideals in a number of ways. Begin by packing out all your litter. Whenever you go camping, take an empty trash bag with you and put all garbage into the bag. In addition, try not to damage vegetation.    3    Wherever you go, think about what your heavy shoes or boots are doing to the plants underneath and try to keep damage to a minimum.

It’s also important that you should not take things away from the wilderness. Rocks, plants, flowers and seashells are all part of the natural landscape.    4    Plus, many animals find homes and food in abandoned shells and flower-heads, and these are things they would miss if you collected them.

Leave-No-Trace camping is about being respectful and thoughtful. It’s about honoring the natural world and the creatures that live in it. If you love seeing an untouched mountain stream or a lovely field of wildflowers, then you’ve already taken the first step.    5    

7 . Raising a litter of teething wolf pups (幼崽) is not easy, but the wolves living in Yellowstone National Park are parenting experts. This spring, the park’s biologists shot a video of adult wolves repeatedly returning to their den (窝) with so-called “toys”—in the form of bones and sticks—to keep their little ones happy between meals.

Once they stop eating their mother’s milk, pups rely on adults to go out, hunt, and then bring back food to the den. But when that’s not possible, the adults instead retrieve odd items for the wolf pups to play with.

“Pups wait for food deliveries from successful hunts, but in the absence of food, adults bring ‘toys’,” the park wrote on Facebook. “The behavior of bringing items back to the den may be enhanced from generation to generation and probably helps keep adults from being surrounded by sharp puppy teeth.”

The adult wolves are part of “Mollie’s Pack”, one of ten known wolf packs living within Yellowstone as of January 2023. This particular pack is named after Mollie Beattie, who in 1993 became the first woman to serve as director of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Beattie, who died in 1996, advocated for the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park to help rebalance the ecosystem after the animals were systematically killed within the park Wolf reintroduction was a highly controversial initiative that many people opposed. And yet, Beattie and other wildlife managers ultimately achieved their vision and successfully relocated 41 wolves from western Canada to the park between 1995 and 1997. Today, that number has blossomed to at least 108 wolves living in Yellowstone.

Today, gray wolves are protected under the Endangered Species Act in many states. In late 2020, the administration removed the animals from the endangered list. But in February 2022, they were re-listed as endangered after a judge reversed the decision.

8 . Scientists have shown how plants can protect themselves against genetic (基因的) damage caused by environmental stresses. The growing tips of plant roots and shoots have an in-built mechanism (机制) that spells cell death if DNA damage is detected, avoiding passing on faulty DNA.

Plants have small populations of stem cells (干细胞) at the tips of their roots and shoots, which enable them to continuously grow and produce new tissues throughout their lifetime. These stem cells serve as ancestors for plant tissues and organs. However, any genetic faults present in the stem cells will continue to exist and be passed on permanently throughout the plant’s life, which could last thousands of years.

Given the critical role of stem cells and their exposure to potentially dangerous environments at the growing tips of roots and shoots, safeguards are necessary to prevent stem cell faults from becoming fixed. Researchers Nick Fulcher and Robert Sablowski, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, aimed to uncover these protective mechanisms. Through experiments involving X-rays and chemicals, they discovered that stem cells were more sensitive to DNA damage compared to other cells.

When DNA damage occurs, the cells have the capacity to detect it and cause programmed cells to die, preventing the propagation of the damaged genetic code to the rest of the plant tissues. This process has similarities to the safeguard mechanism found in animal cells, which has been broadly studied due to its relevance in preventing cancer.

The identification of a similar protective system in plants is of great interest in the field of plant development. It also helps scientists develop plants that can better handle environmental stress. So knowledge of how plants deal with these stresses is of fundamental significance to agricultural science’s response to climate change.