3 . Maggie, a girl of thirteen years old, lived on the west coast of the United States. She had never experienced an earthquake before; she only prepared for it. As long as she could remember, preparing for an earthquake was common at her school. Her family had made plans as well in case of a natural disaster.

One day, Maggie arrived home from school at the usual time. However, it was not the same as usual. She was home alone. Her mom would be driving home on the busy freeway and her dad was to arrive at the airport. He was coming home from a two-week business trip.

After finishing her homework, Maggie felt a little hungry, so she went to the kitchen to find something to eat: Just then she felt a shake, then the violent shaking. Maggie quickly ran under the large table in the dining room. The sounds of breaking glass and the crashing of many things were deafening, and Maggie hugged herself in fear.

After what seemed like a very long time, the earthquake appeared to be over. Maggie could hear the sound of water rushing below her in the basement. And there was the smell of natural gas in the air. Maggie knew where the main water valve(阀门) was and how to turn it off. Dad had ever shown her before.

Slowly and carefully she came out from under the table. The once tidy home was then almost unrecognizable. Walls had fallen down and many things in the room were in a mess. As Maggie approached the open basement door, she could see the steps. Carefully she made her way down into the dark basement.

While placing her feet firmly on the floor, Maggie felt a sudden pain as a large wood hit her head and shoulder. She fell unconscious onto a pile of boxes. An hour later, she woke up and found her parents beside her. She was happy that she was still alive!

4 . In habitats across the planet, animals periodically drop everything to walk, fly or swim to a new place. Some animals such as whales and geese learn migration paths by following their parents. Others, including small songbirds, gain the distance and direction of their migration within their genetic code. And some animals use a combination of genetics and culture to guide their migration.

Another group of migrators does not quite fit either model, and researchers have only recently started to figure out how they find their way. The Cory’s shearwater is an oceangoing seabird that migrates over the Atlantic every year. The young do not migrate with their parents, so culture cannot explain their journeys. And the exact paths vary wildly from individual to individual, making genetics equally unlikely.

Cory’s shearwaters are long-lived, rarely producing young successfully before age nine. This leaves an opening for learning and practice to develop their migration patterns. Researchers call this the “exploration-refinement”, and until now it has been hypothetical (假设的) because of difficulties in tracking migratory animals’ movements.

But a team of researchers has done that by attaching small geolocators to more than 150 of the birds aged four to nine. They found that younger birds traveled longer distances, for longer periods, and had more diverse paths than older birds. “We finally have evidence of the ‘exploration-refinement’ for migratory birds,” says Letizia Campioni, who led the study. Younger Cory’s shearwaters are able to fly just as fast as the adults——but they do not, suggesting that the young do more exploring, which gradually fades as they mature and settle into a preferred course.

“Although it may seem less efficient than other strategies, exploration refinement could be beneficial to birds and other organisms in a rapidly changing world due to unpredictable man-made changes,” says Barbara Frei. “It might be safer to repeat a behavior that was recently successful than to rely on patterns that were perfected long ago but might no longer be safe.”

5 . After years of heated debate, gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. Fourteen wolves were caught in Canada and transported to the park. By last year, the Yellowstone wolf population had grown to more than 170 wolves.

Gray wolves once were seen here and there in the Yellowstone area and much of the continental United States, but they were gradually displaced by human development. By the 1920s, wolves had practically disappeared from the Yellowstone area. They went farther north into the deep forests of Canada, where there were fewer humans around.

The disappearance of the wolves had many unexpected results. Deer and elk populations — major food sources (来源) for the wolf — grew rapidly. These animals consumed large amounts of vegetation (植被), which reduced plant diversity in the park. In the absence of wolves, coyote populations also grew quickly. The coyotes killed a large percentage of the park’s red foxes, and completely drove away the park’s beavers.

As early as 1966, biologists asked the government to consider reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone Park. They hoped that wolves would be able to control the elk and coyote problems. Many farmers opposed the plan because they feared that wolves would kill their farm animals or pets.

The government spent nearly 30 years coming up with a plan to reintroduce the wolvers. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service carefully monitors and manages the wolf packs in Yellowstone. Today, the debate continues over how well the gray wolf is fitting in at Yellowstone. Elk, deer, and coyote populations are down, while beavers and red foxes have made a comeback. The Yellowstone wolf project has been a valuable experiment to help biologists decide whether to reintroduce wolves to other parts of the country as well.

6 . Tips for Green Travel with Kids

Travelling doesn’t mean letting go of all the eco-friendly choices we work so hard to achieve in our daily life. Here are a few tips for green travel with kids.

Booking nonstop flights whenever possible will reduce carbon emissions (碳排放). If the closest local airport doesn’t have nonstop flights to a certain place, check with other local airports to see if nonstop flights are available.     1    

It’s easy when travelling to pull in to fast food restaurants for snacks.     2     My kids love to help plan snacks. I let them create their own snacks for the trip at home.

    3     At the airport, keep your reusable bottles empty until you have passed through the security (机场安检区). Fill them up on the other side of the security checkpoint. Single-use plastic water bottles create unnecessary waste and the plastic can be harmful to your health.

    4     In addition, opening a few windows and turning off the air conditioner (空调) are also good ways to save energy. You should also help your children keep their good, green habits while travelling. Sometimes vacation can mean more than one shower each day-once in the morning and again after getting out of the pool. Pay attention to the number of showers (淋浴) and the length of showers.     5    

7 . Plastic straws (吸管) have been a major problem in global discussions of environmental damage. Maybe because of their small size, the production cost of straws is low. In many countries, straws are offered freely after buying soft drinks. Therefore, plastic straws are one of the most used plastics and pollutants in the world.

The plastic straw is light and small. Due to their small size, plastic straws are often eaten by sea animals. Environmentalists have shown that the death of many sea animals is caused by eating plastic straws. The other damaging characteristic of plastic straws is that they are made of materials which cannot degrade. That means the materials cannot be changed into small harmless (无害的) ones.

The most effective way of dealing with the environmental pollution caused by plastic straws is the reuse or banning (禁止) the use of plastic straws. Being plastics, the straws can be made new items. Many organizations around the world change used straws into new products. In Africa, local communities collect used plastic straws and use them to make mats and bags. Another way of dealing with environmental pollution caused by plastic straws is placing a ban on their production and use. Experts advise governments to ban using plastic straws to save the environment. A few countries in the world such as Rwanda, Macedonia, China, Kenya have already banned the use of plastic bags and are expected to include plastic straws and bottles. But it will be a long way to do this effectively.

There are few environmentally friendly and biodegradable productions to take the place of plastic straws. These productions include paper straws, bamboo straws. However, such straws are usually expensive as their production cost is high. It’s still a question whether they can entirely take the place of plastic straws.

9 . A month after Hurricane Katrina, I returned home in New Orleans. There lay my house, reduced to waist high ruins, smelly and dirty.

Before the trip, I’d had my car fixed. When the office employee of the garage was writing up the bill, she noticed my Louisiana license plate. “You from New Orleans?” she asked. I said I was. “No charge,” she said, and firmly shook her head when I reached for my wallet. The next day I went for a haircut, and the same thing happened.

As my wife was studying in Florida, we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage (抵押贷款) on our ruined house. We looked at many places, but none was satisfactory. We’d begun to accept that we’d have to live in extremely reduced circumstances for a while, when I got a very curious e-mail from a James Kennedy in California. He’d read some pieces I’d written about our sufferings for Slate, the online magazine, and wanted to give us (“no conditions attached”) a new house across the lake from New Orleans.

It sounded too good to be true, but I replied, thanking him for his exceptional generosity, that we had no plans to go back. Then a poet at the University of Florida offered to let his house to me while he went to England on his one-year paid leave. The rent was rather reasonable. I mentioned the poet’s offer to James Kennedy, and the next day he sent a check covering our entire rent for eight months.

Throughout this painful experience, the kindness of strangers has done much to bring back my faith in humanity. It’s almost worth losing your worldly possessions to be reminded that people are really nice when given half a chance.

10 . A new study has found that all dogs have different personalities—even dogs of the same breed(品种).

Elinor Karlsson studies genetics at the University of Massachusetts. She co-wrote a report about the study, which appeared recently in the publication Science.

Karlsson said, “Every dog really is an individual,” noting that there is “a huge amount of difference” even between dogs that look the same.

At a New York dog park, dog owners talked about the different characteristics of their pets. Elizabeth Kelly owns an English springer spaniel. She called her dog friendly, but also “kind of the queen bee.” In other words, her dog likes to act like it is in charge of other dogs. Suly described her yellow Labrador as “calm, lazy and shy.”

The idea of dog breeds is quite recent. Around 160 years ago, humans began to breed dogs to have certain physical qualities, such as fur, color and ear shape.

Karlsson said her aim was to learn how much a dog’s breed affects their behavior. The answer? Breed does not decide an individual dog’s personality.

Karlsson’s team gathered information from 18,000 dog owners and studied the genetic code of over 2,000 dogs. The researchers found that some qualities are based on genetics. However, it is not sure that two dogs of the same breed will behave in the same way.

For example, huskies and beagles, may be more likely to howl—or make a long, loud barking sound. But many of these dogs do not howl, as owner observations showed.