The surface of our planet is populated by living things. Despite their apparent diversity, living things are fundamentally similar inside. Cells are the fundamental units of life. As emphasized by the cell biologist Edmund Beecher Wilson, “The key to every biological problem must finally be sought in the cell; for every living organism is, or at some time has been, a cell.”
In fairy tales, a wizard waves a magic wand and poof! There’s a carriage or a cake or a pair of shoes. We don’t have magic wands, and probably never will. But we do have 3D printers. A 3D printer can’t make something out of nothing. But it can create just about anything you can imagine. Feed one a design for an object, and it will print that object. You just have to give it a raw material to print with. Many 3D printers are small machines—around the size of a microwave oven—so they can be carried anywhere.
3D 打印将如何改变制造业 Continue reading »
Young people’s bodies change during adolescence. Their thinking and reasoning skills change. And their relationships with others change as well. Changes in relationships are a normal and natural part of growing up. Yet those relationships can sometimes be confusing.
As you’re learning, there are many amazing techniques available to modern archaeologists. These involve detailed study of small areas of ground, but how do people know where to start looking in the first place?
Flattened homes. Crumpled cars. Broken trees . Emergency shelters filled with shaken, distraught victims. This was what the Abaco Islands of the Bahamas looked like in the days after Hurricane Dorian struck in September 2019. “Everything is gone,” survivor Robert Cornea told CBS news . He and his wife had lived on the islands for more than fifty years. They lost everything they owned in the storm but escaped with their lives . Many others didn’t. Officially, seve nty people died , b ut some estimate that the actual number was in the hundreds. “People lost family members, they watched people slip away right out of their arms into the water,” June Russell, a fishing guide who lives in the Bahamas, told NBC news.
预测风暴——气旋与反气旋的科学研究和历史 Continue reading »
Do you want to visit Mars? Someday, you may get a chance. Several countries and companies have plans for crewed missions to Mars. Elon Musk, a famous inventor and founder of the company SpaceX, is planning one of those missions for 2026. But he has even bigger visions. In a 2021 speech, he said that he wants to “build a city on Mars to become a spacefaring civilization, a multi-planet species. ”
“One bug burger, please,” you say. “With lettuce and tomato.” Your meal tastes a lot like a hamburger made from beef. But the patty contains ground up mealworms, which are even more nutritious. The pale green bun was baked with algae instead of flour. And the lettuce and tomato are special varieties created to thrive inside vertical farms. You might be saying “eww” now, but twenty or fifty years from now, you could be saying “yum” instead. In the future, bugs and algae and genetically modified foods might seem normal and delicious, not gross or weird.
I didn’t set out to become a science writer. I wrote fantasy stories about magic portals and imaginary worlds all through grade school, high school, and college. But then I got an internship at a children’s magazine group, and all of their magazines were nonfiction. Toward the end of my internship, the science magazine’s editor wanted to profile a biometrics expert in one issue, and she asked me to do the interview. I agreed, but I was terrified. Would this person agree to talk to me? Would she know I’d never done this before? I knew nothing about biometrics . Would I sound stupid?
一名科普作家的写作经验 Continue reading »
An old adage holds that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The saying refers to the subjective nature of beauty. What one person finds beautiful might not appeal to someone else.
