4 . As cities balloon with growth, access to nature for people living in urban areas is becoming harder to find. If you’re lucky, there might be a pocket park near where you live, but it’s unusual to find places in a city that are relatively wild.

Past research has found health and wellness benefits of nature for humans, but a new study shows that wildness in urban areas is extremely important for human well-being.

The research team focused on a large urban park. They surveyed several hundred park-goers, asking them to submit a written summary online of a meaningful interaction they had with nature in the park. The researchers then examined these submissions, coding (编码) experiences into different categories. For example, one participant’s experience of “We sat and listened to the waves at the beach for a while” was assigned the categories “sitting at beach” and “listening to waves.”

Across the 320 submissions, a pattern of categories the researchers call a “nature language” began to emerge. After the coding of all submissions, half a dozen categories were noted most often as important to visitors. These include encountering wildlife, walking along the edge of water, and following an established trail.

Naming each nature experience creates a usable language, which helps people recognize and take part in the activities that are most satisfying and meaningful to them. For example, the experience of walking along the edge of water might be satisfying for a young professional on a weekend hike in the park. Back downtown during a workday, they can enjoy a more domestic form of this interaction by walking along a fountain on their lunch break.

“We’re trying to generate a language that helps bring the human-nature interactions back into our daily lives. And for that to happen, we also need to protect nature so that we can interact with it,” said Peter Kahn, a senior author of the study.

5 . If you visited a big aquarium such as SeaWorld or the Miami Seaquarium a decade ago, performances by tiger whales were probably a centerpiece of the visiting experience. However, animal advocates have pushed to end the harmful practice of keeping these enormous whales locked up in small pools and forcing them to perform for audiences. Now the good news is emerging from this continuing movement Lolita, one tiger whale living in the Miami Seaquarium, may soon be released to the Salish Sea where her mother lives.

Lolita’s possible homecoming is a longtime coming. The enormous animal was caught in 1970 in the Salish Sea, a body of water off the coast of Washington, which is home to tiger whales. Until now she has spent the past 52 years in captivity in Miami. Her tank is considered the smallest among those of captive whales in America. She has been forced to perform for crowds for decades. This has resulted in injuries. She has hit her head while performing “fast swims”, and her blood work has been abnormal.

Whales in captivity can suffer severe health issues. Lolita outlived her tank-mate Hugo, who died of aneurism (动脉瘤) caused by hitting his head on the aquarium walls. “Lolita’s lucky,” said Howard Garrett, a whale researcher and activist. “It’s against all odds that she is still alive. I think is her mental health that keeps her physical health in good shape. She is a complete miracle in her ability to stay healthy.”

According to the United States, Department of Agriculture, Lolita may not be getting enough food and water. This only adds to the list of health concerns which can appear in captivity. Activists who have been pushing for decades may at last see Lolita return to the Salish Sea, where her mother, a 93-year old tiger whale known as “Ocean Sun”, leads a pod. Returning these magnificent creatures to their natural habitat is a humane solution advocated for by the likes of the International Marine Mammal Project.

7 . The brown paper bag hit the ground. A Michelin engineer picked it up and opened it, revealing a cracked, leaking egg. The third graders at A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School were disappointed when they saw the runny mess.

It was engineering week at A.J. Whittenberg, a public primary school in Greenville, South Carolina. One week per month, engineers from local industries visit the classrooms and talk to students about their careers.

Greenville is now introducing the idea of a career path to students in primary school and giving students the option to follow those programs to middle and high schools. Each primary school focuses on a specific technical skill. The district allows students to attend schools outside of their attendance boundaries as long as space is available, which means students can choose to continue to follow their chosen career pathway at a middle school with corresponding programs.

The effort in Greenville is part of a growing national trend in which school districts partner with local industries to develop curriculum (课程) and expose students to specialized careers at a young age.

Some education experts worry the focus on industry qualifications has resulted in schools taking on responsibilities that should fall to businesses, like training workers for specific job duties, damaging a more comprehensive education in schools. “Schools are to not just prepare people for work and strengthen the economy, but also a place where students should experience art, music and think creatively,” said Jack Schneider, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts.

A teacher from Greenville, however, said, “Career exposure has a big impact on kids. We’re not really wanting them to make a decision—‘I’m in the second grade and now I’m locked in to being whatever when I graduate from high school in 10 years.’ We just hope students walk across the graduation stage with plans for a career in mind.”

Modern times need modern solutions. When students leave school, they need to be already down their road to college, if that’s what they’re going to do, or schools need to give them something that allows them to get to work and earn a living. Just getting out with a high school degree doesn’t do that.

8 . Natural silence — the kind when you hear nothing but the sound of nature around you — is becoming increasingly scarce. The noise of man-made can be heard even in the remote corners of national parks and deep in the Arctic Ocean.

This is having some troubling effects. In humans, noise pollution has been linked to physical, mental health problems and cognitive impairment (认知功能障碍) in children. In wildlife,it’s disturbing navigation, pairing, communication and can cause hearing loss. “We’re losing the ability to listen to nature without noise pollution,” says sound recordist Matt Mikkelsen. He’s part of the non-profit organization Quiet Parks International, which aims to identify and preserve the planet’s last quiet places.

Recently, this took him to Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota. No cars, motor boats, electricity or telephone lines are allowed in the one-million-acre area,making it a strong candidate for Quiet Park status. But listening back to the recording, Mikkelsen can hear the low hum (嗡鸣声) of a commercial plane flying far away.

Quiet Parks hasn’t yet decided if Boundary Waters meets its criteria — it’s one of 260 potential sites around the world that the organization is currently exploring. The team will analyze the sound recordings from each location and consider them alongside other data.

In recent years, the world has been getting louder, with cities and towns expanding and an increasing number of noises from cars, airplanes or ships. But during the COVID-19 pandemic (流行病), there has been momentary delay.In2020,global air travel was down by 60% and road transport decreased by almost half. Scientists in Europe found that noise caused by humans fell by up to 50% after lock downs were carried out.

“People enjoyed the silence,” says Mikkelsen. “There were no airplanes in the sky and cars weren’t on the street. It was an incredible thing to be able to hear the world, all of a sudden, free from noise pollution,” he says. Since the start of the pandemic, Quiet Parks says it has experienced a huge increase in interest for quiet places. “I hope that we can take that desire for a world with less noise forward,” says Mikkelsen, “and appreciate the spots we have, where we can go and not experience noise pollution.”

9 . Besides “wow” and “great”, what else would you say when flying over the Earth in space? Samantha Cristoforetti, the first Italian female astronaut in space, posted several lines of a famous ancient Chinese composition on Twitter to share her joy.

She first wrote in Chinese, and then attached an accurate translation of the lines in both Italian and English to help more people understand. “Looking up, I see the immensity of the cosmos; bowing my head, I look at the multitude of the world. The gaze flies, the heart expands, the joy of the senses can reach its peak, and indeed, this is true happiness,” it says. Two days before she landed on Earth, the beauty of space and Chinese literature resonated on her Twitter account. Before long, her posts went viral on Twitter with thousands of retweets, likes and replies.

The text she quoted is from the Preface to Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion,a Chinese calligraphy masterpiece by Wang Xizhi (303-361) of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420). She also attached three photos taken in space of China’s Bohai Bay and the day-night view of Beijing. “The poem and views are both magnificent as well as healing. If everyone could enjoy the same sight, a lot of pain in the world would be ‘dissipated’,” one user comments.

As the first Italian female astronaut in space, Cristoforetti carried out her first space mission on Nov 23, 2014. In 2022, she started the second mission in April and returned to Earth on Friday night after a 127-day stay in orbit.

Cristoforetti has also been active in Sino-European cooperation in the field of manned spaceflight. She was a working group member with Chinese counterparts to define and implement cooperation in the field of astronaut operations. When not traveling for work, she is an eager reader and has a great passion for languages. Speaking clear Chinese, Cristoforetti once told the media that the teams from China and Europe were working very well together in the field of astronaut training.

10 . Nuclear bombs. That’s the go-to answer for incoming space objects like asteroids(小行星) and comets, as far as Hollywood is concerned. Movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon rely on nuclear weapons, delivered by stars like Bruce Willis, to save the world and deliver the drama.

But planetary defense experts say in reality, if astronomers spotted a dangerous incoming space rock, the safest and best answer might be something more subtle, like simply pushing it off course by crashing it with a small spacecraft.

That’s just what NASA did on Monday evening, when a spacecraft headed straight into an asteroid called Dimorphous, which is around 7 million miles away and poses no threat to Earth. It’s about 525 feet across and orbits another larger asteroid.

In images streamed as the impact neared, the egg-shaped asteroid grew in size from a little spot on screen to have its full rocky surface come quickly into focus before the signal went dead as the craft hit right on target.

Events happened exactly as engineers had planned, they said, with nothing going wrong. “As far as we can tell, our first planetary defense test was a success,” said Elena Adams, the mission systems engineer, who added that scientists looked on with “both terror and joy” as the spacecraft neared its final destination.

The impact was the peak of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) ,a 7-year and more than $300 million effort which launched a space vehicle in November of 2021 to perform humanity’s first ever test of planetary defense technology. It will be about two months, scientists said, before they will be able to determine if the impact was enough to drive the asteroid slightly off course, probably shortening its original orbit.

NASA plans to launch an asteroid-hunting space telescope named NEO Surveyor in 2026. “We’ve tacked lots of space rocks, especially the larger ones that could cause extinction-level events. Thankfully, none currently threaten Earth. But many asteroids the size of Dimorphous haven’t yet been discovered, and those could potentially take out a city if they came crashing down. ” explains Lindley Johnson, NASA’s Planetary Defense Officer.