4 . As 17-year-old Norwood drove through St. Petersburg, Florida, last February, the laughter and chatter from the four teenage girls inside her car quickly gave way to sharp cries. A car behind heavily hit them, sending their black car into a tree five meters away. As smoke rose from the other car, a bystander (旁观者) shouted, “It’s about to blow up! Get out!”

Terrified but not hurt, she got out through the window. Along with two of her friends, who’d also managed to free themselves, she ran for her life. But halfway down the street, she realized that her best friend, Simmons, wasn’t with them. Norwood ran back and found Simmons stuck in the back seat. “She wasn’t moving,” Norwood told Inside Edition. She threw open the back door and pulled her friend out, trying to avoid the broken glass.

She dragged Simmons to safety and placed her on the ground. “I put my head against her chest. No sign of life. That’s when I started CPR (心肺复苏术).” Norwood, who longed to have a career in medicine, had passed the national CPR test just the day before.

Looking down at her dying friend, Norwood knew she had only a little time to practice what she’d learned. She started pumping Simmons’s chest and breathing into her friend’s mouth. No response. She tried again and again. Slowly, Simmons began coughing and opening her mouth for air. The CPR worked! Soon, doctors arrived and rushed Simmons to the hospital. And then she heard how her best friend had saved her life. “I wasn’t shocked,” Simmons told CNN. “She will always help any way she can.”

5 . During a decline in tourism, one national park in Thailand has witnessed a dramatic rise in “visitors” recently. So many are the hermit crabs（寄居蟹）flooding into the otherwise empty beaches of Koh Lanta that shells for them to live in have become in short supply.

The Thai government moved quickly to ease the housing shortage, launching a public appeal for empty shells that netted over 200kg. On December 5 these were distributed around the park in a ceremony.

Hermit crabs rely on shells to protect their soft bodies, moving to larger shells as they grow. On Koh Lanta and the surrounding smaller islands, their rapid increase seems to be a natural phenomenon, rather than directly related to the absence of tourists. But the shortage of shells maybe man-made: pretty ones have long been gathered to be sold as goods. Crabs had begun to make do with potential death-traps such as plastic caps and bottles.

The shell drive was part of a government initiative to “regain the balance of nature”. “I have instructed all national parks to do whatever it takes,” says Varawut Silpa-archa, the minister for natural resources. His inspiration comes from the pause in tourism brought on by COVID-19. A ban on international visitors and the closure of national parks have helped nature recover, bringing endangered leatherback turtles back onto Thai beaches. In the coastal provinces of Phang Nga and Phuket, turtles have laid the largest number of eggs for 20 years.

The government has decided to try to copy the short break forced on it by COVID-19 in future. From now on, all national parks will be required to close for a short period during the off season and to limit the number of tourists through a reservation system when they are open. Although such restrictions mean reduced earnings from tourism in the short term, in the longer run more parks may help to keep the tourists coming.

6 . The sea could be the food bowl of the future. In Jervis Bay, south of Sydney, seaweed, which is rich in fibre and omega 3, is grown and harvested.

Pia Winberg is a marine scientist who runs Australia's first food-grade fanned seaweed company. Her crop is grown alongside mussels (贻贝)and is used as an additive in pasta (意大利面)and other products.

Seaweed is also raised in large tanks, where it absorbs carbon dioxide waste from a wheat processing factory. The business is small, but could help to reduce the ecological footprint of traditional farming.

“We used ten percent of seaweed instead of wheat in breads and pastas, we've eliminated a million hectares of land, we've eliminated all of the carbon dioxide emissions associated with that, and we've also reduced the pressures on very precious fresh water.” said Pia Winberg.

Spiny sea urchins (多刺海胆虫)are another blue economy resource. They can destroy marine habitats, but a recent competition for environmental start-ups in Australia, saw them not as a pest but a delicacy (美味).

Martina Doblin, CEO of Sydney Institute of Marine Science, said, “By 2050 we will have some ten billion people on the planet, and about half the food they eat will come from the ocean. So, we really do need to pay attention to the way that we manage the blue economy-generating wealth from the ocean but in a sustainable (可持续的)way.”

Farming at sea has its challenges. Infrastructure (基础设施)has to be sound, as do supply chains and biosecurity. But get these things right, and the ocean might just be the next great economic frontier.

7 . Gene therapy (基因治疗) is a revolutionary new technique for treating people with health problems. Up until very recently, the most commonly available methods for treating patients were either through drugs or operations. Gene therapy provides a third option for treatment by transforming or replacing cells with new genetic materials and instructions. Scientists can be very precise in the kinds of changes they make in patients.

Gene therapy works by using a delivery system, such as a virus, to enter a patient's body. Once inside the body, the virus combines with a host cell and delivers the new DNA. The proteins then begin to repair the affected cells. New techniques have focused on removing cells from the patients and transforming them outside the body before reintroducing them to the patients.

The two types of gene therapy are called somatic and germline. Somatic therapy refers to changing or replacing a body cell. In this case, the treatment is restricted to the patient only. This will not affect the patient's future children because the patient's germ (生殖) cells are unaffected. In germline therapy, the patient germ cells are treated, which may affect the patient's future generation.This is highly controversial (有争议的) because it is not clear exactly how this might affect them and further generations. For this reason, many countries have passed laws that prohibit this kind of treatment.

Despite the promise of gene therapy, there are still many barriers that need to be overcome before it comes into widespread use. One of the issues is that the use of viruses to deliver DNA may actually cause unexpected problems in patients if the virus grows and attacks the body. Another problem is the nature of many diseases is very complex and spread throughout multiple genes. The use of gene therapy to change a single gene in the body would probably not be sufficient as a cure. Finally, the costs of gene therapy are high. Some gene therapy procedures may cost over$1 million to undertake and require specialized doctors and equipment.

8 . Growing Pains

The term "adulting started as a sort of joke 一一 whenever a millennial（千禧一代）would do something age-appropriate, this was an act of "adulting." Now, though, millennials obviously require training in being an adult.

Rachel Flehinger has co-founded an Adulting School, which includes online courses on simple sewing, conflict resolution and cooking. The cause for such classes is that many millennials "haven’t left childhood homes" 一一 in America 34 percent of adults aged 18 to 34 still lived with their parents as of 2015, up from 26 percent a decade before.

There's a good deal of truth to this. If you're living at home, with Mom and Dad doing their best to spoil（(溺爱）you, you're less likely to know how to do laundry, cook or balance a checkbook. Dependency breeds enervation.

But here's the catch: Living at home doesn't necessarily lead to dependency. As of 1940, more than 30 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds lived at home with parents or grandparents. They were adulting, even while living at home. Parents expected their kids to do chores, to prepare for life. Instead of blaming living at home, then, we have to blame our style of parenting. The truth is that we've simply become lazier as parents.

So what's the real problem?

We're more likely to let our kids crash on our couches（长沙发）than tell them to get a job and pay rent. We don't push our kids to build families of their own, as life expectancy has increased, so has adolescence. Americans aren't expected to start building a life, particularly middle- and upper-class Americans, until they're nearing their 30s. Then the question is how we can encourage young people to "'adult" in non-circumstance-driven fashion.

9 . If you live in a town or city on the edge of a desert or coastline where sand dunes form, you might understand the threat they can have. It’s, sometimes, a piece of cake for them to cover roads, buildings, farms and other man-made developments with their unpredictable movements. Thus, figuring out how they move is important for preventing some natural disasters.

Now scientists have discovered that dunes have been secretly moving in ways we never knew before. There are different explanations on dune interaction, however, Karol Bacik, first author on the new dune study, and his colleagues have found a new one for dune movement. The researchers employed high-speed cameras to observe how dunes separated by distance can act as if they’re connected.

It turns out, currents flowing over sand dunes can carry “information” to other dunes downstream in the form of swirls(旋涡). For instance, as wind or water flows over the top of a dune, it slightly moves. This can generate “swirls” on the back of a downstream dune and push it in a direction opposite the movement of the front dune.

It’s the first time that researchers were able to provide causal explanations for some of these strange, previously unpredictable movements. The team also hopes to get out of the laboratory and into the real world, to see if their models can be applied to dune movements in complex natural systems. They plan to use satellite images over large deserts to track groups of dunes over long periods.

Perhaps they can start to alter the dune marching orders in the near future. Imagine being able to tell a dune field exactly how you want it to move. That’s the idea that this research might one day make possible.

10 . For many parents, raising a teenager is like fighting a long war, but years go by without any clear winner. Like a border conflict between neighboring countries, the parent-teen war is about boundaries: Where is the line between what I control and what you do?

Both sides want peace, but neither feels it has any power to stop the conflict. In part, this is because neither is willing to admit any responsibility for starting it. From the parents’ point of view, the only cause of their fight is their adolescents’ complete unreasonableness. And of course, the teens see it in exactly the same way, except oppositely. Both feel trapped.

In this article, I’ll describe three no-win situations that commonly arise between teens and parents and then suggest some ways out of the trap. The first no-win situation is quarrels over unimportant things. Examples include the color of the teen’s hair, the cleanliness of the bedroom, the preferred style of clothing, the child’s failure to eat a good breakfast before school, or his tendency to sleep until noon on the weekends. Second, blaming. The goal of a blaming battle is to make the other admit that his bad attitude is the reason why everything goes wrong. Third, needing to be right. It doesn’t matter what the topic is—politics, the laws of physics, or the proper way to break an egg—the point of these arguments is to prove that you are right and the other person is wrong, for both wish to be considered an authority—someone who actually knows something—and therefore to command respect. Unfortunately, as long as parents and teens continue to assume that they know more than the other, they’ll continue to fight these battles forever and never make any real progress.