“One thing I enjoy about my job is that I can work on something that is actually active,” says Game McGimsey, an American volcanologist(火山学家). Part of his job includes keeping an eye on Alaska's many active volcanoes and giving people a heads-up when a volcano might erupt(喷发).

    Like most jobs in the science, volcanology requires a lot of education. McGimsey received an undergraduate degree in geology at the University of North Carolina, then landed an internship(实习期) with a geologist at the USGS(美国地质勘探局) whose work field was about volcanoes. After earning a graduate degree at the University of Colorado, McGimsey accepted a job with the USGS and has been with the Alaska Volcano Observatory for 25 years.

    Volcanoes can influence the world in ways we might not think about. For example, on Dec.15 1989, a 747 jetliner (a large airplane) flew through a thick ash cloud produced by Mount Redoubt, an Alaskan volcano that hadn't erupted in 25 years. The ash caused all four engines to die, and the plane's electronics went dead.

    “The plane was within several thousand feet of flying into the mountains below when the pilots got a couple of engines restarted and landed safely in Anchorage,” McGimsey says. It cost nearly $80 million to repair the damage to the plane.

    Such situations show just how dangerous volcanoes can be. However, volcanologists know the risks and are prepared to protect themselves.

    McGimsey admits, “There is certainly a higher danger level in volcanology than some other jobs. We understand how serious the danger is, and we don't like taking unnecessary chances. We avoid getting too close to an erupting volcano, because it is not worth injury or death simply to get a rock or a photograph.”

    Many businesses today use conferences as a means of discussing new plans of the company. As people are paying more attention to the environment and green problems, more businesses are looking for ways to reduce their negative effect on the environment. Many businesses do this by using Web conferencing.

    Web conferencing is a technology that allows people to communicate more effectively over the Internet. It's an easy way of hosting and attending conferences without having to leave the office. Each of the people involved in a web conference will be posted an invitation to the conference with the time and date of the Web conference on it. When the conference is ready to begin, all participants must sit at their computers and they will be connected over the Internet.

    With Web conferencing all participants attend conference from the comfort of their own desks. Obviously, in doing this no fuel is used in traveling to and from a conference, and less work is taken up in attending a conference.

    Any material to be used during Web conference is simply e-mailed to all the participants before the conference. Participants can then either choose to print material or read it on screen.

This not only saves paper but also greatly reduces mailing costs for the business.

    As a conference hall or business center isn't being used, it means that the only power that is used is the power that is used by the participants' personal computers. Similarly, conference organizers don't have to arrange for food or overnight accommodation. All this means that less energy is used.

    Often in business some companies actively choose to do business with other companies that do many things to reduce their negative impact on the environment. And Web conferencing helps you show other businesses that you are willing to work hard for the green cause.

    So Web conferencing is much cheaper and greener and more people are willing to host and attend a web conference.

    Like people, plants experience stress. And also, like people, the response to that stress can determine success.

    Bad environmental conditions, such as drought, flood, heat and other stresses, affect yields (产量) more than crop pests and diseases. We are trying to find a way to equip plants with the ability to tolerate environmental stress and maintain high yields, said Stephen Howell, a professor of genetics and cell biology.

    Plant cells produce proteins (蛋白质) and ship them to different parts of the cell. Under normal conditions, these proteins are folded into their normal, healthy structures as they are produced. When a plant is under stress, its cells produce poorly folded or unfolded proteins. Then a built-in system senses this and “sets off an alarm in the cell,” said Howell.

    In response to the alarm, another protein (IRE1) starts working and creates a different process which activates (激活) the stress response genes whose products bring about defensive measures that help the plant survive.

    “As it turns out, responses that are activated under stress conditions actually inhibit the growth of plants,” said Howell. “This allows them to preserve their energy to survive the stress conditions.”

    For plants in the wild, this response is a help for survival, he said. In production of agriculture crops, however, this response reduces yields.

    “You don't want crop plants to stop growing,” Howell said. “You want them to continue to grow and produce even though they are under stress.”

    With the new understanding of this stress response, the next step may be to silence the alarm system, said Howell. “What may be important is to disable some of these stress responses. That may make the plant more productive under stress conditions.”

    Cao Yuan, a PhD student from China, had two papers published on strange behaviour in atom-thick layers of carbon that have opened up a new field of physics.

    Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at MIT was already layering and rotating (旋转) sheets of carbon at different angles when Cao joined the lab in 2014. Cao's job was to find out what happened when one graphene (石墨烯) sheet was twisted only slightly wiht respect to the other, which one theory predicted would thoroughly change the material's behaviour.

    Many physicists doubted the idea. But when Cao set out to create the subtly twisted stacks, he spotted something strange. Exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero, the graphene—which ordinarily conducts electricity—became an insulator. That by itself was surprising. But the best was yet to come: with a slight change to the field, the twisted sheets became a superconductor, in which electricity flowed without resistance.

    The ability to get atom-thick carbon into a complex electronic state through a simple rotation now has physics demanding to engineer exciting behavior in other twisted 2D materials. Some even hope that graphene could shed light on how more-complex materials superconduct at much higher temperatures. "There are so many things we can do," says Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University. "The opportunities at hand now are almost irresistible."

    Hitting graphene's “magic angle”—a rotation between parallel sheets of around 1.1°—involved some trial and error, but Cao was soon able to do it reliably. His experimental skill was extremely important, says his supervisor Jarillo-Herrero. Cao pioneered a method of tearing a single sheet of graphene so that he could create a stack of two layers, from which he could then fine-tune alignment (微调校准).

    Cao loves to take things apart and rebuild them. A heart, he is “a tinkerer”, his supervisor says. On his own time, this means photographing the night sky using homemade cameras and telescopes—pieces of which usually lie across Cao's office. "Every ime I go in, it's a huge mess, with computers taken apart and pieces of telescope all over his desk," says Jarillo-Herrero.

    Recently whenever I turned on my computer or my mobile phone, news about the great effect of Hurricane Harvey on thousands of people caught my eyes. We saw many unfortunate events. However, there were also the bright news that confirmed the goodness of mankind. As a journalist, I wrote many human interesting stories during my career. That's why the story about the guys in the bakery caught my eyes.

    When the staff at a Mexican bakery chain in Houston were trapped inside the building for two days, they didn't sit there feeling sorry for themselves. They used their time wisely after flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey. While they were waiting for the eventual rescue that came on Monday morning, four decided to make as many loaves of bread as possible for their community.

    The flood water rose in the street outside. They took advantage of their emergency power supply to bake bread. They used more than 4,200 pounds of flour to create hundreds of loaves and sheets of sweet bread. Although the water kept rising, they continued baking to help more people. By the time the owner managed to get to them, they had made so much bread that we took the loaves to loads of emergency centers across the city for people affected by the floods.

    The store manager, Brian Alvarado, told The Independent, "Whenever a disaster occurs, nobody should just feel forlorn. Instead，we should take positive action to save ourselves and help others. Our acts of kindness will make a big difference."

Humans' overconsumption of resources is a leading contributor to global climate change, says University of Arizona researcher Sabrina Helm. Therefore, it's increasingly important to understand the choices consumers make and how those decisions affect the health of a planet with limited resources. In a new study, published in the journal Young Consumers, Helm and her colleagues explore how materialistic values influence pro-environmental behaviors in millennials, who are now the nation's most influential group of consumers.

The researchers focused on two main categories of pro-environmental behaviors: reduced consumption, which includes actions like repairing instead of replacing older items; and "green buying," or purchasing products designed to limit environmental impacts. The researchers also looked at how engaging in pro-environmental behaviors affects consumer well-being.

More materialistic participants, the researchers found, were unlikely to engage in reduced consumption. However, materialism did not seem to have an effect on their likelihood of practicing "green buying." That's probably because "green buying," unlike reduced consumption, still offers a way for materialists to fulfill their desire to get new items, Helm said.

Study participants who reported having fewer materialistic values were much more likely to engage in reduced consumption. Consuming less was, in turn, linked to higher personal well-being and lower psychological suffering. Green buying—which may have some positive environmental effects, although to a smaller degree than reduced consumption—was not found to improve consumer well-being, Helm said.

The take-home message for consumers: "The key is to reduce consumption and not just buy green stuff. Having less and buying less can actually make us more satisfied and happier," Helm said. "If you have a lot of stuff, you have a lot on your mind," she said. "For example, it requires maintenance and there's a lot of burdens of ownership, and if you relieve yourself of that burden of ownership, most people report feeling a lot better and freer."

Helm and her colleagues additionally looked at how materialism affects millennial consumers' proactive financial behaviors, such as budgeting and saving. Examining financial behaviors alongside pro-environmental behaviors provides a picture of how young adults proactively deal with resource limitations in two contexts: environmental and financial, Helm said.

As expected, Helm and her colleagues found that those who reported having more materialistic values engaged in fewer proactive financial behaviors than their less materialistic counterparts (对应的人). The researchers also found that, consistent with previous studies, proactive financial behaviors were associated with better personal well-being, life satisfaction and financial satisfaction, as well as lower psychological suffering.

Understanding how materialistic values impact consumer behaviors, and how those behaviors in turn affect personal and environmental well-being, is important, Helm said. However, she acknowledges that for many consumers, shifting behaviors to be more financially proactive and consume less will be challenging.