Recordings of angry bees are enough to send big, tough African elephants running away, a new study says. Beehives (蜂窝)—either recorded or real—may even prevent elephants from damaging farmer's crops.

    In 2002, scientist Lucy King and her team found that elephants avoid certain trees with bees living in them. Today, Lucy wants to see if African honeybees might discourage elephants from eating crops. But before she asked farmer to go to the trouble of setting up beehives on their farms, she needed to find out if the bees would scare elephants away.

    Lucy found a wild beehive inside a tree in northern Kenya and set up a recorder. Then she threw a stone into the beehive, which burst into life. Lucy and her assistant hid in their car until the angry bees had calmed down. Next，Lucy searched out elephant families in Samburu National Reserve in northern Kenya and put a speaker in a tree close to each family.

    From a distance, Lucy switched on the pre-recorded sound of angry bees while at the same time recording the elephants with a video camera. Half the elephant groups left the area within ten seconds. Out of a total of 17 groups, only one group ignored the sound of the angry bees. Lucy reported that all the young elephants immediately ran to their mothers to hide under them. When Lucy played the sound of a waterfall (瀑布) instead of the angry bees to many of the same elephant families, the animals were undisturbed. Even after four minutes, most of the groups stayed in one place.

    Lucy is now studying whether the elephants will continue to avoid the sound of angry bees after hearing it several times. She hasn't tested enough groups yet to know, but her initial (最初的) results were promising enough to begin trials with farmers. She has now begun placing speakers in the fields to see if elephants are frightened away.

    When thinking about placing a human being in space, one of the most important questions was how to design special clothing needed to protect a person from the dangers of the space environment. The cold of space will freeze skin in a short time. The fierce heat of the sun can cause serious burns. The lack of atmosphere can cause gases in the body to expand(扩大) and even burst. With no oxygen to breathe, a human being will die in only a few moments. Radiation from the sun is another risk in space. So is damage from small pieces of rock and objects like meteoroids (陨石).

    In 1933, an American flyer, Wiley Post, designed one of the first successful devices to protect a pilot at extreme heights. It was a large device that looked like a can surrounded the pilot's head. Astronauts in the American space agency (NASA) flew the first American space flights in the early 1960s. The clothing was similar to that invented by Wiley Post.

    Today, astronauts wear very different protective clothing. It lets them move, do useful tasks, and stay outside their spacecraft in comfort and safety for several hours. The spacesuit is called the shuttle extravehicular mobility unit or EMU. It was designed to endure longer and to permit more movement than earlier spacesuits.

    The EMU has a number of parts that an astronaut can link together by using only one hand, which makes it possible for each astronaut to select the parts that fit correctly.

    Nowadays, NASA scientists are also considering the kind of spacesuits that would be needed for exploration on the planet Mars. Because of the gravity on Mars, spacesuits may have to be designed to be lighter than suits used in orbit or on the moon. The equipment may also have to protect astronauts from dust carried in the winds on Mars. And, they must be easy to repair and keep clean during a longer flight to and from the red planet.

    Cigarette ends are everywhere — littering our streets and beaches — and for decades they've been thought of as "unrecyclable". But a New Jersey based company, called Terra Cycle, has taken on the challenge, and has come up with a way to recycle millions of cigarette ends and turn them into industrial plastic products. Its aim is to recycle things that people normally consider impossible to reuse.

    Obviously it would be even better for the environment if everyone just stopped smoking, but the statistics show that although there has been an increase in anti-smoking ads and messaging, between 2000 and 2014, global sales of cigarettes increased by 8 percent, and a whole lot of those cigarette ends are ending up as trash. Since most of our litter eventually ends up in waterways, cigarette ends can surely pollute the surrounding environment. "It only takes a single cigarette end to pollute a liter of water," Terra Cycle founder, Tom Szaky, said. "Animals can also mistake littered cigarette ends for food."

    So how do you go about turning all those poisonous ends into something useful? Terra Cycle does this by first breaking them down into separate parts. They mix the remaining materials, such as the tobacco and the paper, with other kinds of rubbish, and use it on non-agricultural land, such as golf courses. The filters(过滤嘴) are a little harder. To recycle these, Terra Cycle first makes them clean and cuts them into small pieces, and then combines them with other recycled materials,  making them into liquid for industrial plastic products.

    They're now also expanding their recycling offerings to the rest of the 80 percent of household waste that currently can't be recycled, such as chocolate packaging, pens, and mobile phones. The goal is to use the latest research to find a way to stop so much waste ending up in landfill(垃圾填埋), and then get companies to provide money for the process. And so far, it's working.

    "We haven't found anything that we can't recycle, "communications director of Terra Cycle, Albe Zakes, said. "But with the amount and variety of packaging and litter in the world, we are always looking for new waste streams to address."

    Do women make BETTER astronauts? Russia locks an all-female crew in space simulator (太空模拟器) for eight days to find out. Six Russian women have been sent into a spaceship to begin a unique experiment testing how an all- female crew would relate to others on a trip to the Moon and back.

    "It's interesting for us to see what is special about the way a female crew communicates," said Sergei Ponomaryov, the experiment's leader." it will be particularly interesting in terms of psychology," said the institute's director Igor Ushakov. "I'd like to wish you a lack of conflicts, even though they say that in one kitchen, two housewives find it hard to live together," he added.

    The volunteers include scientific researchers, a doctor and a psychologist. The test period simulates (模仿) a flight to the Moon and back, with the women carrying out 10 experiments covering psychology and human biology. Russia sent the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963 but has fallen behind since. Last year, it sent its fourth female astronaut into space, Yelena Serova. Serava complained of a great deal of media interest in how she would wash her hair aboard the International Space Station, pointing out that male astronauts did not face the same line of questioning.

    The women found themselves fielding questions at a press conference about how they would act without men or makeup for eight days, "We are very beautiful without makeup," said participant Darya Komissarova. Her colleague Anna Kussmaul was more direct: "We are doing work. When you're doing your work, you don't think about men and women." They plan to spend their 11/2 hours per day of free time watching films, reading and playing board games. Team leader Yelena Luchnitskaya said she expected the women to deal with any conflict.

    Being able to land safely is a critically important skill for all flying animals. Comparatively speaking, ground living animals face no particular challenge when they need to stop running or crawling, while flying animals move at much higher speed, and they must be careful about how they land. Hitting the ground, or even water, at full flight speed would be quite dangerous. Before touching down, they must decrease their speed in order to land safely. Both bats and birds have mastered the skill of landing, but these two types of flyers go about it quite differently.

    In the past it was believed that, in terms of flying mechanics, there was little difference between bats and birds. This belief was based only on assumption, however, because for years nobody had actually studied in detail how bats move their wings. In recent years, though, researchers have discovered a number of interesting facts about bat flight. Bats are built differently from birds, and their wings are made up of both their front and hind limbs (肢体). This makes coordinating (协调) their limbs more difficult for bats and, as a result, they are not very good at flying over longer distances. However, they are much better at the ability to adjust themselves: a bat can quickly change its direction of flight or completely reverse it, something a bird cannot easily do.

    Another interesting characteristic of bat flight is the way in which bats land-upside down! Unlike birds which touch down on the ground or on tree branches, bats can be observed flying around and then suddenly hanging upside down from an object overhead. One downside to this landing routine is that the bats often land with some force, which probably causes pain. However, not all bats hit their landing spots with the same speed and force; these will vary depending on the area where a bat species makes its home. For example, a cave bat, which regularly lives on a hard stone ceiling, is more careful about its landing preparation than a bat more accustomed to landing in leafy treetops.

    Attitudes toward new technologies often fall along generational lines. That is, generally, younger people tend to outnumber older people on the front end of a technological change. It is not always the case, though. When you look at attitudes toward driverless cars, there doesn't seem to be a clear generational divide. The public overall is split on whether they'd like to use a driverless car. In a study last year, of all people surveyed, 48 percent said they wanted to ride in one, while 50 percent did not.

    The fact that attitudes toward self-driving cars appear to be so steady across generations suggests how transformative the change to driverless cars could be. Not everyone wants a driverless car now-and no one can get one yet—but among those who are open to them, every age group is similarly involved.

    Actually, this isn't surprising. Whereas older generations are sometimes reluctant to adopt new technologies, driverless cars promise real value to these age groups in particular. Older adults, especially those with limited mobility or difficulty driving on their own are one of the classic use-cases for driverless cars.

    This is especially interesting when you consider that younger people are generally more interested in travel-related technologies than older ones.

    When it comes to driverless cars, differences in attitude are more pronounced based on factors not related to age. College graduates, for example, are particularly interested in driverless cars compared with those who have less education: 59 percent of college graduates said they would like to use a driverless car compared with 38 percent of those with a high-school diploma or less.

    Where a person lives matters, too. More people who lived in cities and suburbs said they wanted to try driverless cars than those who lived in rural areas.

    While there's reason to believe that interest in self-driving cars is going up across the board, a person's age will have little to do with how self-driving cars can become mainstream. Once driverless cars are actually available for sale, the early adopters will be the people who can afford to buy them.