1 . Human beings have somehow managed to engineer the night to receive us by filling it with light. This kind of control is no different from the feat ( 壮 举 ) of damming a river. Its benefits come with_________ — called light pollution — whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design. _________ lighting washes out the darkness of night, altering light levels and light rhythms to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have_________. Wherever man-made light spills into the natural world, some aspects of life-migration, reproduction, feeding-is affected.

For most human history, the phrase “light pollution” would have_________. Imagine walking towards London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth’s most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, _________ candles, torches and lanterns, as they always had. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been more likely to_________ London than to see its dim collective glow.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were a(n) _________ country. As a matter of fact, among mammals (哺乳动物) alone, the number of species active at night is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet attracting them to it. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being_________ by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop.

It was once thought that light pollution only affected astronomers, who need to see the night sky in all its glorious clarity. Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need a_________ view of the night sky for our work. __________, like most other creatures, we do need darkness. __________ darkness is pointless. It is as essential to maintaining our biological welfare as__________ itself; the price of modifying our internal clockwork means it doesn’t operate as it should, causing various physical discomforts. So fundamental are the regular rhythms of waking and sleep to our being that__________ them is similar to altering our center of gravity.

In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to__________ our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best__________ against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way — the edge of our galaxy — arching overhead.

3 . Flower scents (香味) help pollinators (传粉者) locate their favorite plants. Scientists have established that air pollutants change those scents, throwing off the tracking abilities of such beneficial insects as honeybees. But new lab experiments are the first to confirm that one pollinator, the tobacco hawkmoth, can quickly learn that a pollution-changed scent comes from the jasmine tobacco flower that the insect likes.

Chemical ecologist Markus Knaden and colleagues focused on one pollutant-ozone, the main element in smog. In the lab, his team blew an ozone-changed scent from a tiny tube into a tunnel, with a moth (飞蛾) awaiting at the far end of the tunnel. Usually, when the moth smells the unchanged scent, it flies upwind and uses its long, skinny mouthparts to probe the tube the way that it would a flower. The researchers expected that the changed scent might throw the moth off a little. But the insect wasn’t attracted at all.

In addition to scent, tobacco hawkmoths track flowers visually, so Knaden’s team used the feature, along with a sweet snack, to train the moth to be attracted to a pollution-changed scent. The researchers wrapped a brightly-colored artificial flower around the tube to trick the moth back across the tunnel, despite the unfamiliar scent. And the team added sugar water to the artificial flower. After a moth was given four minutes to taste the sweet stuff, it was attracted to the new smell when sent into the tunnel 15 minutes later, even when neither the sugar water nor the visual signal of the artificial flower was present.

This study focused on only one moth species, but Knaden’s team is now working on planning experiments with other pollinators that are easier to follow than tobacco hawknoths. While he guesses honeybees might also be as adaptable as the moth was, that won’t be true of every pollinator. “The situation can become very bad for insects that are not as clever or cannot see that well. I don’t want the take-home message to be that pollution is not a problem.”

5 . The effect on happiness of exposure to nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), a gas mostly produced in diesel fumes(柴油机), is comparable to the effect from losing a job, ending a relationship or the death of a partner, research suggests.

The study found a “significant and negative association” between life satisfaction and levels of the pollutant, which causes lung problems. Sarah J Knight and Peter Howley of York University took life satisfaction data from the British Household Panel Survey and UK Household Longitudinal Survey and compared it with detailed air quality records from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Given that far more people are exposed to NO₂ than suffer unemployment or end a relationship, Knight and Howley suggest that the benefits to society from reducing such emissions(排放) would be substantive.

The highest levels of NO₂ occur in London, with the lowest levels in parts of south-west England. The capital has the honour of being home to the worst NO₂ hotspot in Europe: Marylebone Road, which recorded the highest annual mean levels of the pollutant, more than double the legal EU limit.

Pollution from nitrogen oxides (NO) is responsible for tens of the thousands of premature deaths（过早死）across Europe, with the UK suffering a particularly high toll. Much of the pollution is produced by diesel cars, which emit about six times more than allowed in the official lab-based tests.

The European Environment Agency said the UK had 11, 940 premature deaths in 2013 from NO₂. The number was down from 14, 100 in the previous year, but was still the second worst in Europe after Italy.

7 . Rain is vital to life on Earth. However, rain isn’t just made of water anymore—it’s partly made of plastic.

Millions of tiny pieces of plastic, called microplastics, are wandering around Earth’s atmosphere and traveling across entire continents, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on April 12. Another study, published in the journal Science in June 2020, has revealed that every year more than 1,000 tons of the particles (颗粒)—equivalent to over 120 million plastic bottles—fall in rain.

Microplastics are plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter (直径) and come from a number of sources. Plastic bags and bottles released into the environment break down into smaller and smaller bits. Some microplastics are manufactured deliberately to provide abrasion (研磨) in a host of products, such as toothpaste and cleansers, according to the Daily Mail. Another major source is your washing machine. When you wash synthetic (合成的) clothing, tiny microfibers get flushed (冲掉) away with the wastewater. Even though the water is treated by a wastewater plant, the microplastics remain, and they are released into the sea, according to American magazine Wired.

Plastic rain may remind people of acid rain, but the former is far more widespread and harder to deal with. The tiny particles, too small to be seen with the naked eye, are collected by the wind from the ground. They are so light that they stay in the air to be blown around the globe. As they climb into the atmosphere, they are thought to act as nuclei (核心) around which water vapor (水蒸气) condenses (凝结) to form clouds. Some of the dust falls back to land in dry conditions, while the rest comes down as rain, according to the Daily Mail.

Microplastics have been found everywhere you can imagine. From fish and frogs to mice and mosquitoes, their bodies have been found, on average, to contain 40 pieces of microplastic, reported Daily Mail. As the top of the food chain, humans are exposed to microplastics, too. “We live on a ball inside a bubble,” microplastic researcher Steve Allen at University of Strathclyde, Scotland, told Wired. “There are no borders, there are no edges. It (plastic rain) raining on the land and then getting blown back up into the air again, to move somewhere else. There’s no stopping it once it’s out.”

8 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.

At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.

In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.

Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.

9 . Most of our everyday plastic items end up in landfill, left to rot away for many years. But some of it blows away, spoiling the countryside and causing damage to the natural environment and harming wildlife. The problem is most severe in our oceans. Research has found a deserted island in the South Pacific is littered with the highest density (密度) of plastic waste anywhere in the world.

The study described how remote islands act as a ‘sink’ for the world’s rubbish. They become collecting points for fishing items and everyday things including toothbrushes, cigarette lighters and razors-things that we throw away. Dr Jennifer Lavers from the University of Tasmania says “Almost every island in the world and almost every species in the ocean is now being impacted one way or another by our waste.”

This highlights the potentially deadly effect of our disposable (用后即丢弃) culture. When we throw something away, it doesn’t just disappear, it goes somewhere and because of the nature of plastic, it takes a long time to rot away and stays there causing great damage to the ocean’s ecology (生态). And worse still, plastic is broken down into tiny particles over a long period by the wind and the waves, then sea creatures at the bottom of the food chain swallow them. These creatures are eaten by the fish that we eventually consume.

The solution to this problem would be to use less plastic. Several countries now charge for using plastic carrier bags which reduces the amount used and some products now use natural and recyclable materials.