2 . David Grant and Yvonne Faulkner-Grant of Warwickshire. England always let their 13-year-old dog, Scruff. pick up the plastic bottles he finds while out on their daily walks. The dog carries the bottle for a while, and they kick it or throw it for him to chase. The game is over when Scruff loses interest and drops it.

Throughout 2021, David and Yvonne observed Scruff’s habit of finding even the most well-hidden bottles. They also noticed a marked increase in the amount of litter in their rural area. David says they were both taught never to drop their trash as children, so they couldn’t believe that people were littering so much. At the start of 2022, David and Yvonne decided to start picking up the bottles to bring home with them. It was the large number of litter that made them decide to train Scruff to gather other people’s trash.

Since starting this journey, Scruff has become a local celebrity in his neighborhood. David and Yvonne never let Scruff pick up anything dangerous, like glass. They also remain appalled by the amount of litter they’ re seeing, and hope that people will hear Scruff’s story and either stop dropping trash or, perhaps, try picking it up themselves. Plus, Yvonne thinks Scruff took to his duties so well, other dogs could easily be trained to do what he does as well.

In the end, Scruff was able to gather up 1,334 bottles-along with three cups, a Pringles tub, and a baby feeding bottle. “If we walk the same route every day, he will find bottles on that route every single day,” said David. “We feel a bit of pride that we are picking them up, but a bit of anger that they’ re even there,” Yvonne said.

6 . The San Diego County Water Authority has an unusual plan to use the city’s scenic San Vicente Reservoir (水库) to store solar power so it’s available after sunset. The project could help unlock America’s clean energy future.

Perhaps ten years from now, if all goes smoothly, large underground pipes will connect this lake to a new reservoir, a much smaller one, built in a nearby valley about 1100 feet higher. When the sun is high in the sky, California’s abundant solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir. It’s a way to store the electricity. When the sun goes down and solar power disappears, operators would open a valve (阀门) and the force of 8 million tons of water, falling back downhill through those same pipes, would drive machines capable of producing 500 megawatts of electricity for up to eight hours. That’s enough to power 130, 000 typical homes.

“It’s a water battery!” says Neena Kuzmich, Deputy Director of Engineering for the water authority. She says energy storage facilities like these will be increasingly important as California starts to rely more on energy from wind and solar, which produce electricity on their own schedules, without considering the demands of consumers.

Californians learned this during a heat wave this past summer. “Everybody in the state of California got a text message at 5:30 in the evening to turn off their appliances,” Kuzmich says. The sun was going down, solar generation was disappearing, and the remaining power plants, many of them burning gas, couldn’t keep up with demand. The reminder worked:People stopped using so much power, and the grid (电网) survived.

Yet earlier on that same day, there was so much solar power available that the grid couldn’t take it all. Grid operators turned away more than 2000 megawatt hours of electricity that solar generators could have delivered, enough to power a small city. That electricity was wasted. There was no way to store it for later, when operators desperately needed it.

8 . United Kingdom officials are on a mission to limit the region’s impact on global warming and climate change. As part of a large-scale approach to fulfilling this goal, there’s one area of focus that sticks out: cows.

In March, the government launched its Net Zero Growth Plan, an initiative to limit reliance on fossil fuels, which significantly influences global temperature rise. One of the approaches is a focus on agricultural emissions, officials explained in their plan that they are expecting products effective in reducing greenhouse gas to enter the market in 2025 to help.

Agriculture and other land-use emissions make up about 11% of the U.K.’s net greenhouse gas emissions, officials said. “Livestock (particularly cattle) currently make up the largest share of these emissions,” the Net Zero Growth Plan says. Experts say these emissions from livestock are mostly from cow burps (打嗝).

U.K. officials put out a call in August for agriculture experts to provide information on how to make burp blockers (阻断剂) to reduce emissions, such as seaweeds, essential oils, and organic acids.” More than 200 people responded to the call, including NGOs, farmers and businesses.

“I don’t think we know enough yet about the impact those burp blockers will have on the efficiency of reducing emissions,” said Tom Bradshaw, deputy president of the U.K.’s National Farmers’ Union, “but it’s something that we have to investigate to try and reduce emissions from cow burps.”

And it appears as though this emphasis on cow burps is only one small part of the U.K. government’s plans, which aim to provide support to stimulate farm productivity, innovation, research and development.

Hundreds of farmers have joined the plan’s implementation. The website for the plan says, “It will help achieve our ambitious targets for the environment and climate, playing our role in tackling these huge, global challenges.”

9 . According to a new study, human noise is a “major global pollutant” that harms a wider range of animal life than we tend to think. Published in the journal Biology Letters, the study suggests noise pollution not only harms lots of animals, but also threatens the survival of more than 100 different species.

Lots of species rely on sound for communication, for example, including many amphibians, birds, insects and mammals which use sound for vital business like finding mates or warning about predators (捕猎者). If noise pollution drowns out enough of these messages. it can threaten survival and the stability of their populations.

On the other hand, noise pollution can make it harder for some predators to find food Bats and owls rely on sound to hunt, for instance, which may not work if noise pollution drowns out the sounds of their prey like insects and mice. Even if noise pollution is mild, it might still force them to spend more time and energy searching for food, which could be enough to cause a decline.

Noise pollution is a well-known risk for whales and dolphins, but it threatens other sea animals, too. The researchers cite fish larvae, which are easily drawn to the sounds of coral reefs (珊瑚礁). This is how they find suitable habitats, but if their journey features too much noise from ships and other human sources, more fish larvae may get lost or move into wrong reefs, potentially reducing their lifespan.

Similarly, noise pollution influences the way animals migrate (迁徙), which in turn can have chain effects for ecosystems along migration routes. Some migrating birds avoid areas with noise pollution, the researchers note, which may change not only where they travel, but also where they establish long-term homes and raise their young. Many ecosystems and non-migrating species have come to depend on the arrival of migrating birds, and many others may be unprepared for their sudden absence, so this could cause a series of ecological changes.

“Noise must be considered as a global pollutant and we need to develop strategies to protect animals from noise for their livelihoods,” says Kunc, the lead author of the study.

10 . Rain is vital to life on Earth. However, rain isn’t just made of water anymore—it’s partly made of plastic.

Millions of tiny pieces of plastic, called microplastics, are wandering around Earth’s atmosphere and traveling across entire continents, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 12. Another study, published in the journal Science in June 2020, has revealed that every year more than 1,000 tons of the particles (颗粒)—equivalent to over 120 million plastic bottles—fall in rain.

Microplastics are plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter (直径) and come from a number of sources. Plastic bags and bottles released into the environment break down into smaller and smaller bits. Some microplastics are manufactured deliberately to provide abrasion (研磨) in a host of products, such as toothpaste and cleansers, according to the Daily Mail. Another major source is your washing machine. When you wash synthetic (合成的) clothing, tiny microfibers get flushed (冲掉) away with the wastewater. Even though the water is treated by a wastewater plant, the microplastics remain, and they are released into the sea, according to American magazine Wired.

Plastic rain may remind people of acid rain, but the former is far more widespread and harder to deal with. The tiny particles, too small to be seen with the naked eye, are collected by the wind from the ground. They are so light that they stay in the air to be blown around the globe. As they climb into the atmosphere, they are thought to act as nuclei (核心) around which water vapor (水蒸气) condenses (凝结) to form clouds. Some of the dust falls back to land in dry conditions, while the rest comes down as rain, according to the Daily Mail.

Microplastics have been found everywhere you can imagine. From fish and frogs to mice and mosquitoes, their bodies have been found, on average, to contain 40 pieces of microplastic, reported Daily Mail. As the top of the food chain, humans are exposed to microplastics, too. “We live on a ball inside a bubble,” microplastic researcher Steve Allen at University of Strathclyde, Scotland, told Wired. “There are no borders, there are no edges. It (plastic rain) raining on the land and then getting blown back up into the air again, to move somewhere else. There’s no stopping it once it’s out.”