They wear the latest fashions with the most up-to-dateaccessories(配饰). Yet these are not girls in their teens or twenties but women in their sixties and seventies. A generation which would once only wear old-fashioned clothes is now favoring the same high street looks worn by those half their age.

    Professor Julia Twiggy, a social policy expert, said,“Women over 75 are now shopping for clothes more requently than they did when they were young in the 1960s. In the 1960s buying a coat for a woman was a serious matter. It was an expensive item that they would purchase only every three or four years—now you can pick one up at the supermarket whenever you wish to. Fashion is alot cheaper and people get tired of things more quickly.”  Professor Twiggy analyzed family expending data and found that while the percentage of spending on clothes and shoes by women had stayed around the same—about 5 or 6 percent of spending, the amount of clothes bought had risen sharply.

    The professor said,“Clothes are now 70 percent cheaper than they were in the 1960s because of the huge expansion of production in the Far East. In the 1960s Leeds was the heart of the British fashion industry and that was where most of the clothes came from, but now almostall of our clothes are sourced elsewhere. Everyone isbuying more clothes but in general we are not spending more money on them."

    Fashion designer Angela Barnard, who runs herown fashion business in London, said older women were much more affected by celebrity style than in previous years. She said,“When people see stars such as Judi Dench and Helen Mirren looking attractive and fashionable in their sixties, they want to follow them. Older women are much more aware of celebrities. There's also the boom in TV programmers showing people how they can change their look, and many of my older customers do yoga to stay in shape well in their fifties. When I started my business a few years ago, my older customers tended to be very rich, but now theyare what I would call ordinary women. My own mother is 61 and she wears the latest fashions in a way she would never have done ten years ago.”

    Space is where our future is — trips to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Most people would think that aside from comets(彗星) and stars, there is little else out there. But, since our space journey started we have left so much trash(垃圾) there that scientists are now concerned that if we don't clean it up, we may all be in mortal(致命的) danger.

    The first piece of space junk was created in 1964, when the American satellite Vanguard Ⅰ stopped operating and lost its connection with the ground center. However, since it kept orbiting around the Earth without any consequences, scientists became increasingly comfortable abandoning(抛弃) things that no longer served any useful purpose in space.

    It is estimated(估计) that there are now over 500,000 pieces of man-made trash orbiting the Earth at speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour. The junk varies from tiny pieces of paint chipped off rockets to cameras, huge fuel tanks, and even odd items like the million-dollar tool kit that astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn Piper lost during a spacewalk.

    The major problem with the space trash is that it may hit working satellites and damage traveling spacecraft(飞船). Moreover, pieces of junk may collide(碰撞) with each other and break into pieces which fall back to the Earth. To avoid this, scientists have invented several ways for clearing the sky. Ground stations have been built to monitor larger pieces of space trash to prevent them from crashing into working satellites or space shuttles. Future plans include a cooperative effort among many nations to stop littering in space and to clean up the trash already there.

    Differences are important and they should be respected. For example, many important people throughout history were considered different, such as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and Abraham Lincoln. They did great things, but some people thought they were strange because they had strong feelings about something. I can understand these people because I've been in that situation before many times.

    It all started in elementary school when I realized that I wasn't like everyone else. My mom says that I have a tendency to be obsessed(着迷)with certain subjects. Unfortunately, these subjects don't interest other kids of my age and they really don't interest my teachers. In fact, my kindergarten teacher said she would scream if I mentioned snakes or lizards one more time while she was teaching the days of the week. I would get into trouble for not paying attention and the teasing began.

    In the third grade, my teacher informed me that I have Asperger's Syndrome（症状）. I said, “So what? Do you know that Godzilla's suit weighs 188 pounds?”

    Later, I asked my mom, “What's Asperger's Syndrome? Am I gonna die?” She said that it's like having blinders on, and that I can only see one thing at a time, and that it's hard to focus on other things.

    People also make fun of me for knowing facts about volcanoes, whales, tornadoes and many other scientific things. My mom says that she has been able to answer many questions on Jeopardy! just by listening to what I have to say, but I've even been laughed at for being smart.

    Maybe someday I'll become a gene engineer and create the real Godzilla. I can dream, Can't I?

    Half an hour into a cooking competition at Green Street Academy, Tyana Givens, 15, dipped a plastic spoon into a pot with tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, garlic and mushrooms over a burner in a science classroom. She and the two other students, Kalimah Ball and Maya Smith, were making meat sauce.

    The girls had spent the past five weeks learning how to grow their own produce using food computers-tabletop greenhouses controlled by computer programs-at Green Street Academy, a charter school in Baltimore. The course, which weaved together lessons on programming, food systems and agriculture, ended with an “Iron Chef”-style cooking contest.

    With the help of instructor Melanie Shimano, the girls finished their contest successfully using the food they planted in tabletop greenhouses. The tabletop greenhouses can control temperature, light and water inside using the computer code that the students wrote by themselves. Shimano, a 26-year-old entrepreneur, piloted(试行)the course as part of Green Street Academy's junior biotechnology class in the spring and will expand the program to other schools in the fall.

    “Technology is not something that a lot of teachers have a lot of resources for all the time, but it's something that's not difficult to do with a relatively low amount of funding,” Shimano said. “Baltimore is a center for startups and food, so kind of fostering that culture of being into technology and into design and seeing all the pieces fit together is really cool.”

    While her course is unique to Baltimore, it's part of a broader program born at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab called the Open Agriculture Initiative, or OpenAg, which aims to create inventive, sustainable food systems through open-source technology. In addition to 10 full-time staff and researchers, OpenAg is primarily an online community of about 1,400 educators, growers, chefs and retailers in 47 countries, according to Hildreth England, OpenAg's assistant director.

    “The interest level across the board generally comes from folks who are concerned about food systems and concerned about the environment, and it's usually a combination of the two,” England said.

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    When athletes at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics collect their medals, they'll not only be wearing something that celebrates their sporting performance, but something that symbolizes lastingness. For both the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, organizers aim to make all of the gold, silver, and bronze medals out of used electronics. This strong message about how to make use of e-waste has gotten a lot of Japan involved.

    Starting in April 2017, the Japanese Olympic Committee began collecting old laptops, digital cameras, smartphones, and other abandoned electronics. The initiative(倡议)has achieved great  success. Already, the quantity needed for bronze medals has been met, and they're in the homestretch for silver and gold medals, meaning the collection process can pack up at the end of March.

    When looking just at the number of cell phones collected, the amount of waste is shocking. In a period of about 18 months, a little over 5 million smartphones were collected thanks to cooperation with NTT DOCOMO.

Japan's largest mobile phone operator allowed the public to turn in phones at their shops, which counted a lot in the project's success.

    After being taken apart and sorted, the small electronics underwent a smelting process to extract(提炼)all the gold, silver, and bronze elements. Thanks to this initiative, the worldwide struggle with e-waste will have a global platform. According to a study published by the United Nations University—44.7 million metric tons of e-waste were made in 2016. Only 20% of that was actually recycled. Unfortunately, this figure is set to rise significantly in the coming years, moving to 52.2 million metric tons by 2021. So while the Tokyo Olympics initiative might be just a drop in the bucket, it's a good start in showing what the public can do if they're made more aware of the issue.