2 . Some ants have figured out how to avoid getting lost: build taller anthills, according to a recent study.

Desert ants living in the hot, flat salt pans of Tunisia spend their days looking for food and reach as far as 1.1 kilometers from their nests. To find their way home, desert ants use a navigation system, relying on the sun’s position and counting their steps to track their location relative to their nest.

But this system becomes increasingly unreliable as the distance from the nest increases. “We realized that, whenever the ants in salt pans came closer to their nest, they suddenly pinpointed the nest hill from several meters distance,” says Markus Knaden, a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. “This made us think that the hill serves as a nest-defining landmark.”

So Knaden and colleagues captured ants from nests in the middle of salt pans and from along their shorelines. Only salt-pan nests had distinct hills, up to 40 centimeters tall, whereas the hills on shoreline nests were lower or barely noticeable. Next, the team removed any hills and placed the captured insects some distance away from their nests. Salt-pan ants struggled more than shore ants to find homes. Shore ants relied on the shoreline for guidance and weren’t affected by the hill removal, the researchers concluded.

The team further conducted another study to see if desert ants were deliberately building a taller hill when their surroundings lacked any visible landmarks. So, the researchers removed the hills of 16 salt-pan nests and installed (安装) two 50-centimeter-tall blocks near eight of them. The other eight nests were left without any artificial visual aid. After three days, the researchers found that seven ants from the unaided nests had rebuilt their hills. But only two ants from the nests with man-made blocks nearby had bothered to rebuild.

“It implies that ants regularly assess the complexity of their environment and change their decisions based on their conclusion,” says ecologist Judith Bronstein of the University of Arizona.

Abby Jaramillo never lost her enthusiasm. She believed that with age came courage, vision (远见卓识) and a true appreciation of life — all life. That’s why, at the age of eighty-six, Abby became the only caretaker of a flock of chickens abandoned alongside one of Southern California’s busiest freeways. The chickens were never rescued. Instead, they simply lived in the roadside bushes, becoming known to locals as the Hollywood Freeway Chickens.

Like many seniors, Abby lived alone and survived on a small amount of money. But to her, life was precious and not to be cruelly given up or ignored-not even the lives of abandoned chickens. Abby simply saw creatures in need and without hesitation, stepped into action. For nine years, while others sped past unaware and unconcerned, Abby made two visits a day to provide food and water for the abandoned chickens, using what little money she had available. As the years passed, she worried about the day when she would no longer be able to care for her adopted chickens and her cat Tiffy. Who would look after these poor helpless creatures if she could no longer make her journey?

At ninety-five, just when the cruelties of time began to damage Abby’s body, a heroine (女英雄) appeared. Alice Kahn, a young actress and a founding member of the organization Actors and Others for Animals, was Abby’s neighbor. Alice had observed Abby and noticed that the older woman also fed many of the homeless cats in the neighborhood. Alice approached Abby to see if her neighbor could identify the owner of a stray (走失的) dog that Alice had recently rescued. A quick and lasting friendship resulted.

Learning of Abby’s concern for the fate of her flock, Alice volunteered to help

Abby is gone now, but her concern for her fellow creatures lives on.

7 . Over 7,000 species around the world are considered endangered. That number doesn’t even include the plants, animals, and other lifeforms that are listed by some scientists as vulnerable, critically endangered, or extinct in the wild.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains the most-comprehensive list of endangered species around the world. The Red List of Threatened Species, as it’s called, judges each species on five different standards for an in-depth scientific approach. According to the IUCN, an endangered species is one that meets any one of the following criteria (标准): a 50%-70% population decrease over 10 years, a total geographic area less than 5,000 square kilometers, a population size less than 2,500 adults, a restricted population of 250 adults, or a statistical prediction that it will go extinct within the next 20 years.

Though the IUCN’s Red List covers a wide range of what qualifies as an endangered species, it doesn’t quite say how a species reaches those low points. Prepare to feel guilty: the most common factor when it comes to species decline is human intervention. Loss of habitat, the introduction of a foreign species into the environment, hunting, pollution, disease, and loss of genetic variation (基因变异) are all causes of species decline and most often are a result of human activities. Take the bald eagle for example: the rise in human population and urban development of North America limited the animal’s habitat; an increase in hunting the eagles for sport lowered their population size; and the use of the pesticide DDT on farms harmed the animal’s reproductive capabilities.

But even though humans are the number one cause of species decline, classifying species as endangered encourages action to reverse the effects of human intervention. Conservation efforts by the US Fish and Wildlife Service criminalized (使非法) the hunting of bald eagles and the use of the pesticide DDT in the mid- to late 20th century. The effect was positive, as bald eagles have been on the rise and were taken off the endangered species list in 1995.

10 . Retail(零售的) stores are having an identity crisis. With foot traffic falling and customers going to online stores like Amazon, many stores are looking for new ways to keep the physical shopping experience valuable. “Physical stores find themselves at a crossroads,” says Doug Stephens, retail industry futurist and author of The Retail Revival.

If storefronts want to compete with their more convenient (and usually cheaper) online alternatives, they will have to offer unique experiences worth getting off the couch for. “My expectation will be to go to the store to learn about things, to be a participant in things, to co-create, to customize the things I’m buying, and to satisfy my own needs,” Stephens says. Here are two predictions of how the retailers of tomorrow will keep us shopping.

Stephens predicts that we’ll be transported by virtual reality. The stores of the future will “be much more visual,” he says. “Technologies like virtual reality, which a lot of companies right now are sort of experimenting with, can be used to create immersive(沉浸虚拟现实式的) shopping experiences.” Outdoor clothing and equipment maker The North Face recently worked with VR company Jaunt to let shoppers at its flagship stores put on VR headsets and take a virtual tour of Yosemite National Park, or virtually rock climb alongside star athletes. After they’ve climbed down the mountains, perhaps customers will be more willing to buy some climbing equipment.

Stores will also track and identify us, says Stephens. Remember that scene from Minority Report when Tom Cruise walks into a shopping mall and all the advertisements speak directly to him and know his shopping history by scanning(扫描) his eyeballs? That’s not so far off. A company called Hoxton Analytics offers a system that can determine a shopper’s data. Instead of scanning your eyeballs, this technology works by scanning and identifying your shoes. The goal is to help companies better understand customers and traffic patterns. The company makes sure that the system “does not collect personal information, and it does not store individual photographs, nor can it recognize individuals.”