1 . When people get old and have difficulty working full time, they retire and begin a new, more relaxing lifestyle. But what about old industrial buildings? Can they start anew?

China seems to find a good solution for them. In recent years, many abandoned factories, railway yards, warehouses and mills( 磨 坊 )have been transformed into cultural and tourist sites. According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, there are now 194 items on the country’s national industrial heritage list.

The 798 Art Zone in Beijing is an iconic example. Built in the 1950s as No. 718 Joint Factory, it was gradually abandoned in the 1990s as production slowed down. In 2006, Beijing’s municipal government invested over 120 million yuan and improved its infrastructure( 基础设施)condition, turning the factory complex into a cultural and creative industrial base. Now the art zone holds about 200 galleries, art centers as well as fashionable boutiques( 精品店), cafes, and restaurants, which also earns it a place on the bucket list of many tourists, noted The Paper.

Jack Liu is a frequenter of the art zone who visits it every weekend. “In the art zone, you can refresh memories of the development of Chinese manufacturing through its old buildings,” said the 28-year-old to Teens. “However, in art galleries here you will feel pulled into a fashionable, modern world. It’s amazing.”

Industrial heritage sites, which used to be filled with the rumbling of machines, are now precious pages of the book on the industrial culture of China, noted People’s Daily.

Since these heritage sites are rich and diverse in content, cities in China also spare no effort to explore new ways and models to protect and utilize them.

For example, a beer museum has been set up inside a century-old plant of the Tsingtao Brewery in Qingdao, Shandong province, bringing people closer to the long history of the brewery. Some abandoned plants in Beijing have also been remade for city explorers to take adventures in.

Just as the elderly need our care and love, these industrial heritages are also expected to be injected with vitality through protection and development. “It is not only an inevitable trend of the innovation-driven development of cities, but a necessity for promoting new drivers of development,” noted People’s Daily.

2 . No student of a foreign language needs to be told that gram mar is complex. By changing the order of the words and by adding a range of auxiliary verbs(助动词)and suffixes(后缀),we can turn a statement into a question, state whether an action has taken place or is soon to take place, and perform many other word tricks to convey different meanings. However, the question which many language experts can’t understand and explain is who created grammar?

Some recent languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. Since the slaves didn’t know each other’s languages, they developed a make-shift language called a pidgin. Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowners. They have little in the way of grammar, and speakers need to use too many words to make their meaning understood. Interestingly, however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it at the time when they learn their mother tongue. Slave children didn’t simply copy the strings of words used by their elders. They adapted their words to create an expressive language. In this way complex grammar systems which come from pidgins were invented.

Further evidence can be seen in studying sign languages for the deaf. Sign languages are not simply a group of gestures; they use the same grammatical machinery that is found in spoken languages. The creation of one such language was documented quite recently in Nicaragua. Previously, although deaf children were taught speech and lip reading in the classrooms, in the playgrounds they began to invent their own sign system, using the gestures they used at home, It was basically a pidgin and there was no consistent grammar. However, a new system was born when children who joined the school later developed a quite different sign language. It was based on the signs of the older children, but it was shorter and easier to understand, and it had a largerange of special use of grammar to clarify the meaning. What’s more, they all used the signs in the same way. So the original pidgin was greatly improved.

Most experts believe that many of the languages were pidgins at first. They were initially used in different groups of people without standardization(标准化)and gradually evolved into a widely accepted system. The English past tense—“ed” ending — may have evolved from the verb “do”. “It ended” may once have been “ It end-did”. It seems that children have grammatical machinery in their brains. Their minds can serve to create logical and complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.

6 . It was late, about 10:15 p. m. Janice Esposito got off the train at Bellport, New York, went to her car and started driving home. She was so familiar with the route that she almost drove automatically. However, when Esposito's car had just crossed the railroad tracks—bam!, it hit another vehicle and was pushed back onto the tracks. Injured but mostly shocked by the crash and by the airbags that popped up, she was stuck in the vehicle.

As it happened, Pete DiPinto was just about to go to sleep when he heard a sharp noise. As a volunteer firefighter, he fetched a flashlight and rushed out without hesitation. “Any firefighter would have done what I did,” he said. “We're always on duty.”

After making sure that the driver was all right, DiPinto discovered Esposito's car straddling the railway tracks. And then he heard the bell ring, which signaled a train's arrival.

DiPinto rushed to Esposito's car and broke the window on the driver's side. Esposito looked up at him, with her eyes glazing over. “I don't know where 1 am,” she said.

“I have to get you off right now!” DiPinto yelled. The train was running toward them at a high speed. The driver's door cannot be opened due to the collision (硬撞), so DiPinto quickly ran to the other side and managed to open the door. He pulled her toward him across the passenger seat until finally got her out to safety. Several seconds later, the train crashed into the vehicle. “It was like a Hollywood movie,” DiPinto told reporters the next day.

“Last night,” said Gregory Miglino Jr, Chief of the Department in South Country Ambulance, “the hero arrived in pajamas (睡衣裤), not in a fire truck.”

7 . Biologists from the John Innes Centre in England discovered that plants have a biological process which divides their amount of stored energy by the length of the night. This solves the problem of how to portion out（分配） energy reserves during the night so that the plant can keep growing, yet not risk burning off all its stored energy.

While the sun shines, plants perform photosynthesis（光合作用）. In this process, the plants change sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into stored energy in the form of long chains of sugar, called starch（淀粉）. At night, the plants burn this stored starch to fuel continued growth.

“The calculations are precise so that plants prevent starvation but also make the most efficient use of their food,” said study co-author Alison Smith. “If the starch store is used too fast, plants will starve and stop growing during the night. If the store is used too slowly, some of it will be wasted.”

The scientists studied the plant Arabidopsis, which is regarded as a model plant for experiments. To give the plants some math tests, the biologists let night arrive unexpectedly early or late for them.

During one of the exams, they shut off the lights early on them that had been grown with twelve-hour days and nights. Putting them into darkness after only an eight-hour day means they didn’t have time to store as much starch as usual. And this forced the plants to adjust their normal nightly rhythm.

Amazingly, even after this day length trick, the plants did very well in their exams and ended up with just five percent of starch left over at the end of the night. They had neither starved, nor stored starch that could have been used to fuel more growth.

The authors suggested that similar biological calculators may explain how a migratory bird, the little stint, can make a five-thousand-kilometer journey to their summer habitat in the Arctic and arrive with enough fat reserves to survive only approximately half a day more, on average.

The results of the study were published in e Life.

8 . Inspired by the movement to protect the Carmanah Valley and Clayoquot Sound, I decided to devote myself to producing images for conservation full-time in 1992. Since that time my work has taken me all over the world and my photos have appeared in many major magazines. However, many of my most rewarding moments have come from working on projects in British Columbia, Canada, and sharing those images in slide show tours I have given throughout Canada, the U.S. and Europe.

The more I travel and photograph in other parts of the world, the more I have come to realize the wilderness we have in Canada is truly special and rare.

I have always felt that as a photographer my goal is to approach the natural environment with the sense of wonder and curiosity that comes so naturally to children. This, I believe, is one of the basic keys not just to producing meaningful images, but more importantly, to gaining a full appreciation and enjoyment of the natural world.

I find that not only my best images, but also my most enjoyable experiences in nature, occur when I have an open mind and follow my intuition (直觉). When I feel drawn to a certain scene, I try to make the scene simple and not include anything that is not relevant. I also try all ways to look for beautiful light. Early morning and the end of the day almost always produce light that results in more pleasing images than those taken under the strong light in the middle of a sunny day. Soft cloudy skies are wonderful for photographing all day, especially in our beautiful forests or for small subjects like wildflowers. Rain, storms, and snow also provide wonderful opportunities for new and different kinds of images.

9 . Parrots have been known to imitate words, but have you ever thought how they communicate? The sounds they make may sound meaningless to us, but new research has found that wild parrots are actually given names by their parents.

According to a study led by Karl Berg of Cornell University in the US, baby birds are given a unique sound of their own, which stays with them for their entire lives.

In the study, the team placed hidden cameras in the nests of 17 different wild parrots. After studying their sounds, the team identified slight differences in the calls parents used to communicate with each chick. And even before the baby birds had learned to communicate properly, the baby birds seemed to recognize and imitate their calls.

Sounds very similar to humans, doesn’t it?

The study also proved that these signature calls are acquired socially not genetically. To do this, scientists switched the eggs in nine of the 17 nests, so that half of the parrots were raising baby birds that weren’t theirs. Using the recordings, the scientists concluded the baby birds all used names similar to those the parents (whether biological or nonbiological) called them for the first weeks of their lives.

Lucie McNeil, from National Geographic, said, “this would be the first [proven] example of a non-human species teaching acoustical (声学的) communication.”

Lead scientist for the study, Karl Berg told National Public Radio of the US, “Most people say, ‘Well, all those calls are just noise,’ but I think they’re having conversations.”

Fox News also asked Berg what else the parrots might be saying? He replied, “The theory is that these birds are deciding where the food is, ‘Do we want to go 3 km North-Northwest?’ “Do we want to go to that field?’ They are sort of arguing or discussing.”

Natural science author, Virginia Morell, wrote: “Very gradually, scientists are learning to decode the conversations of very different animals that live lives rich with plans, quarrels, and romance.”

You never know, if the science of animal translation keeps advancing, we might one day be watching a reality series about parrots.

Perhaps no one knows the power of imagination better than Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin. Until four years ago, Liu worked full-time as a computer engineer at a power plant in Yangquan, Shanxi province. He only wrote science fiction in his spare time. But it was during this time that Liu，s imagination took flight. He did what he might never have the chance to do in real life 一 wander in space，fight with aliens, and visit planets light-years away.

But even with such a powerful imagination, Liu, 55，probably hadn’t expected that he would become the first Asian to win the Hugo Award, science fiction’s highest prize, in 2015. Perhaps neither did he think that former US president Barack Obama would read his novel The Three-Body Problem (《三体》, 2006), nor that on Nov 9 in Washington DC, he would win the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. It’s the first time a Chinese writer has ever won the award.

In his acceptance speech, Liu said that he owed his imagination to Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), a famous UK sci-fi author. He said that reading Clarke’s classic novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (《2001太空漫游》) in the early 1980s had a great effect on him and his inspiration (灵感).

“My mind opened up like never before. I felt like a narrow stream finally embracing the sea, That night, in my eyes, the starry sky was completely different from the past. For the first time in my life. I was awed (使……敬畏) by the beauty and mystery of the universe.” Liu said.

But no matter how far away Liu，s imagination takes him，somehow his novels always stay grounded (理性的). In The Three-Body Problem, for example, Liu tells a tale of aliens invading (侵略) Earth. But unlike other alien stories, with their fancy weapons and strange creatures, Liu talks more about relationships between civilizations, rules of survival, and the meanings of life. And in The Wandering Earth (《流浪地球》, 2008), Liu looks ahead to the day when our solar system comes to an end and humans have to look for a new place to live. However, all his visions (设想) and solutions are based on “hard science”. Liu’s works aren’t simply daydreams.

Rather, it’s the fact that his imagination is based on reality that makes it such a powerful tool. In this Liu is like his mentor (引路人) Clarke, who, we read on the website of the Arthur C. Clarke Award，believed that “Humankind’s most powerful tool to shape its future is its imagination.”