1 . Science is increasingly central to our lives — from its role in creating day-to-day objects such as the smartphones in our pockets, to the big challenges of tackling disease, addressing climate change and focusing on biodiversity loss.

Many of the changes that the discipline brings are hugely beneficial, but they often come with potential downsides that demand public debate. Will artificial intelligence take people’s jobs or destroy elections with false news? How fast can we practically achieve a net zero economy?

For the crucial public debate that is needed on all this to take place, we must have a scientifically literate population. But there is a divide between the scientifically minded and those who choose not to engage with science.

It saddens me that our culture now views science as difficult, which discourages many from taking an interest in it. A British Science Association (BSA) survey recently suggested that only around a third of 14- to 18-year-olds find scientists inspirational or consider the subject to be relevant to their lives.

In fact, science is interlinked with every aspect of our existence and people from all walks of life and of all ages should be able to access it easily. The invention of the printing press was crucial to the Enlightenment because it democratised (普及) knowledge. So, in this increasingly science-centred world, the same attention should be given to popular science writing as is given to other forms of literature.

The Royal Society Science Book Prize is the only one in the world to promote popular science writing. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which was shortlisted (把……列入入围名单) for the prize in 1989, was written for readers who had no prior knowledge of physics and has since become a universally recognised text on the universe.

Democratising science has never been more important. There are so many scientific stories to be told that can help us better understand ourselves. A society equipped with a solid understanding of the issues of the day is a society more able to respond to them in a better way.

2 . In human behavioral science, bandwagon effect is a cognitive bias (认知偏见) where people assume that an idea or belief is true because many or most others believe in it or have adopted it. As many people already support the belief others also “join the bandwagon” and do not consider questioning the decision or if there is evidence supporting the same. Cognitive biases help people think and reason more quickly, but there is a high possibility of making mistakes.

For example, when talk shows in the west had hosts wearing suits, other people started following the same trend regardless of their working conditions and climate. In India, we have climates ranging from warm to extremely hot and moderately cold conditions. It never gets cold enough for an overcoat. Also, not all shooting locations have air conditioning facilities. Even though the “suit” is not the best fit for working and climatic conditions in India, people still wear it because it is recognized by many people as classy and suitable clothes for talk shows or outdoor media events.

One more fitting example for the bandwagon effect is a whole generation of teens all over the world going crazy over a “Korean” band because they were liked by many others. With all respect to the music they made and their popularity, teens were going crazy even though they didn’t understand a word of what was being listened to. Although the band was covering much needed and sensible subjects like bullying (霸凌), elitism (精英统治), and mental health, not all people following them got the true meaning of the songs. People got onto the “bandwagon” as they wanted to go along with the trend that was a hit throughout the world.

We can use various debiasing (消除偏见) techniques in order to avoid falling for the bandwagon effect. One is to consider alternative options that are not necessarily supported by the majority but may be a better choice. Give yourself some time to think and understand what is it that you really need which will allow you to make decisions in a less biased manner. It’s also important to remember that going with the crowd is not entirely bad. In many situations, it can be beneficial while making a decision, as long as you can do it in a way that allows you to make reasonable decisions.

5 . Today, it’s impossible to imagine life without highways which connect goods with markets, employees with work places. “Everything in life is somewhere else,” wrote E.B.White, “and you get there in a car.”

Do highways bring any benefit to our natural world? Yes. Arizona’s highways rainfall softens desert soils for underground-living animals, while vultures (秃鹫) get to expand their diet by roadkill. Butterflies find home on the roadside grassland. In Britain, such habitat is called the “soft estate”—a concept that roads are able to create new ecosystems, even though they sometimes destroy existing ones. A biologist once led me under a highway bridge to show me hundreds of bats resting beneath the bridge, not bothering with the traffic overhead.

But the positive situation isn’t always the case. We tend to ignore the death number as the unavoidable cost of modernity. Although few people ever flatten an animal on purpose while driving on the road, the attraction of the car is so strong that it has caused Americans to kill about 40,000 human lives in car accidents each year, what chance does wildlife have on the road?

Northern America and Europe used to build their road networks with little regard for how they would affect nature. Today, in theory, we know better. Over the last several decades, America and European countries have built bridges for bears, tunnels for turtles, rope webs that allow monkeys to swing over highways without going down to the forest floor. In Kenya, elephants walk under the highways and railways via passages as tall as two-story houses. And road ecology has brought more than crossings: We’ve also learned to map and protect the migrations of animals to design roadsides that benefit bees and butterflies－proof that old mistakes will surely be corrected in the upcoming future.