This year's flu season is pretty scary. To try to minimize the effects, public officials are still urging anyone who hasn't yet gotten their flu shot to get one as soon as possible. However, even if every single person got a shot in the arm, the vaccine(疫苗)— with its excellent 36 percent effectiveness—would not prevent everyone from getting infected with the annoying virus. Knowledge is power, so here's what goes on in your body when you come down with the flu.

    The influenza virus primarily attacks your nose, throat, and the tubes that lead to your lungs. But the flu is so much more than that. Your muscles ache, your head hurts, and your appetite goes down, among other things. To our surprise, almost all of these symptoms have less to do with the virus itself than with your immune(免疫的)response to them. Unfortunately, the very defense you have in place to ge rid of the flu is the reason you feel so painful when you recover.

    The virus usually enters through your mouth, typically by way of your hands. But it takes a few days for symptoms to set in. While this process might cause some harm to your nose and throat, it's nothing major, and nothing like the symptoms that typically accompany a bad or even mild case of the flu.

    The real fun starts when your immune system begins to fight. Your immune system comes in two parts: the innate system and the adaptive. The innate immune system is essentially an all-purpose tool. As soon as your body senses the presence of any injury or invader (入侵者), the innate immune system launches into action by producing tiny proteins called cytokines and chemokines. The cytokines reproduce almost immediately and start to attack the virus. This increase in immune cells creates an serious inflammation(炎症) throughout the body. But the worst is still to come. Meanwhile, the chemokines work with the adaptive immune system to help create T cells. These cells are a special type of white blood cell that works in a much more specific way: They find the influenza virus, identify what's special about it, and create something unique on their surface that finds and destroys similar invaders.

    Scientists have always been interested in the high level of organization in ant societies. American researchers have watched ants build life-saving rafts to keep afloat during floods. They also have recorded how ants choose their next queen — the female whose job is to produce eggs.

    New technology is helping to improve researchers' understanding of the insects. But there is still a lot to be learned.

    Fire ants living in Brazilian forests are perfectly at home in an environment where flooding is common. To save themselves, the insects connect their legs together and create floating rafts. Some ant rafts can be up to 20 centimeters wide.

    David Hu is an engineer with the Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech, saying, "If you have 100 ants, which means 600 legs, 99 percent of those legs will be connected to a neighbor. So they're very, very good at keeping this network. "

    David Hu and other Georgia Tech researchers wanted to study ants and the secret of their engineering. They froze ant rafts and then looked at them with the help of computed technology, or CT images. The pictures showed that larger ants serve in central positions to which smaller ants hold. The larger ants create pockets of air that keep the insects afloat.

    Scientists say small robots or materials that can change shape could be programmed in a similar way, working towards a shared goal.

    Researchers at North Carolina State University are also studying ants. They examined how Indian jumping ants choose the leader of the colony when they lose their top female or queen.

    We're surrounded by chemistry in everyday life. Sometimes it is easy to see, like when your science teacher conducts a big experiment in class. At other times, it can be extremely hard to see everyday chemistry at work, but nearly everything you touch or use has some element of chemistry in it.

    Something as simple as toothpaste contains at least three chemicals, if not more. It is the mixture of them and its chemical reaction that keeps your teeth clean. Other things you use every day are created by chemistry, such as hair products, shampoo and soap. Adding detergent (洗涤剂) to water involves chemistry. Without chemistry, we would never have realized that we need soap to get the oil out of clothes or skin.

    Chemistry not only helps us make products for use, but it also helps us understand the world around us. Chemistry helps us understand what the ozone layer (臭氧层) is and how it protects us. Chemistry also gives us sunscreen to protect us from the sun. Thanks to chemistry, we know bleach (漂白剂) can't be mixed with vinegar, because it can produce poisonous gas. Without chemistry, we wouldn't have had fireworks displays on important days like the Spring Festival.

    Chemistry plays a big role in food preparation. Cooking food causes it to go through a chemical change. That is why cooked food often tastes different from raw (生的) food. Baking is a great example of chemistry. Too much or too little of any ingredient makes a difference to the result of baking, for example, the dough (面团) won't rise or the cake will be flat.

    Chemistry isn't something that just lives in a lab; it's something that you come across hundreds of times every day. If you know how chemistry works, you will get a greater comprehension of the science behind some of the simplest looking things.

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    So what is rewilding?

    Imagine our natural homes growing instead of shrinking. Imagine species (物种) diversifying instead of declining. That's rewilding. Rewilding is ecological restoration. Rewilding offers hope for wildlife, humans and the planet.

    Why is rewilding important and necessary?

    Our natural ecology is broken. The places where you would expect wildlife to exist have been reduced to wet deserts. The seabed has been destroyed and there have been no living creatures any more.

    Our wildlife is disappearing. Many wonderful species have declined over the past century. We've lost more of our large animals than any European country.

    We need keystone species. These vital species, including top predators (食肉动物), drive ecological processes. Their loss has worsened our living systems.

    Nature looks after us. Good natural ecology can provide us with clean air and water, prevent flooding and store carbon. Rewilding can leave the world in a better state than it is today.

    What are challenges?

    As a long-term project, our "rewilding britain" has its challenges. Many people are not interested, because we have got used to the lack of native forests. Many farmers oppose the idea. They thought it a crazy idea to bring back predators because they would start killing farm animals. It takes time to educate them. Above all, we need money! So we need your help!

    Make a donation.

    Help us bring back living systems and restore wild nature!

With your help we can…

    Open up new chances for rewilding and push for change.

    Develop tools to educate, influence and spread the word.

    Thanks for your support.

The Trip to Alishan in Taiwan

    It was the fourth day of our trip to Taiwan, bright but cold. After a good breakfast we put on our jackets and gloves, pulled on our hats and got into a car. We travelled for about two hours, up, and up, and up the mountain road.

    We finally arrived at the top of the mountain. It was Christmas Day. So imagine my joy to see icicles(冰柱)hanging form branches and the whiteness of the scenery. Indeed, it was my first Christmas in the northern hemisphere(半球)and, guess what? It even started snowing too. How amazingly exciting for me to have Christmas in my grandmother's hometown, and to experience icicles and snow. Alishan is really beautiful, especially seen form this dizzy height. After Sun parked the car, we got out and looked down through the trees. It hadn't snowed hard enough so there was no snow on the ground, just loads of pine needles. There was a most wonderful smell of pine sap(松液)drifting up to us form the ground. It was very quiet, except for the twittering of birds, and the odd car passing along the road. Quietness in Taiwan is something to treasure.

    Over the road was a small stall so we went over to it. They were selling some drink steaming hot in paper cups, too hot to hold immediately. We jumped around to get warm. There was a cool wind blowing up the side of the mountain, and the clouds above us were moving along quickly. I could imagine there was quite a strong wind blowing up there, so I was glad we were down on the ground! The drink cooled down fairly rapidly. I picked up my share and, wow, what a lovely smell was coming from it. It was the smell of ginger(姜).I took a sip. How delicious, and so this was ginger tea, which I had never tried before. It warmed my body so quickly that I could feel the heat travel right down to my fingers and to my toes. This was very good stuff. And then it was time to leave as we were going down to Hualian to attend a Buddha bi-bi, eat hot pot, and drink some Shaoxing rice wine.

    I was in the middle of the Amazon (亚马逊) with my wife, who was there as a medical researcher. We flew on a small plane to a faraway village. We did not speak the local language, did not know the customs, and more often than not, did not entirely recognize the food. We could not have felt more foreign.

    We were raised on books and computers, highways and cell phones, but now we were living in a village without running water or electricity It was easy for us to go to sleep at the end of the day feeling a little misunderstood.

    Then one perfect Amazonian evening, with monkeys calling from beyond the village green, we played soccer. I am not good at soccer, but that evening it was wonderful. Everyone knew the rules. We all spoke the same language of passes and shots. We understood one another perfectly. As darkness came over the field and the match ended, the goal keeper, Juan, walked over to me and said in a matter-of-fact way, "In your home, do you have a moon too?" I was surprised.

    After I explained to Juan that yes, we did have a moon and yes, it was very similar to his, I felt a sort of awe (敬畏) at the possibilities that existed in his world. In Juan's world, each village could have its own moon. In Juan's world. the unknown and undiscovered was vast and marvelous. Anything was possible.

    In our society, we know that Earth has only one moon. We have looked at our planet from every angle and found all of the wildest things left to find. I can, from my computer at home, pull up satellite images of Juan's village. There are no more continents and no more moons to search for, little left to discover. At least it seems that way.

    Yet, as I thought about Juan's question, I was not sure how much more we could really rule out. I am, in part, an ant biologist, so my thoughts turned to what we know about insect life and I knew that much in the world of insects remains unknown. How much, though? How ignorant (无知的) are we? The question of what we know and do not know constantly bothered me.

    I began collecting newspaper articles about new species, new monkey, new spider…, and on and on they appear. My drawer quickly filled. I began a second drawer for more general discoveries: new cave system discovered with dozens of nameless species, four hundred species of bacteria found in the human stomach. The second drawer began to fill and as it did I wondered whether there were bigger discoveries out there, not just species, but life that depends on things thought to be useless, life even without DNA. I started a third drawer for these big discoveries. It fills more slowly, but all the same, it fills.

    In looking into the stories of biological discovery, I also began to find something else, a collection of scientists, usually brilliant occasionally half-mad, who made the discoveries. Those scientists very often see the same things that other scientists see, but they pay more attention to them, and they focus on them to the point of exhaustion (穷尽), and at the risk of the ridicule of their peers. In looking for the stories of discovery, I found the stories of these people and how their lives changed our view of the world.

    We are repeatedly willing to imagine we have found most of what is left to discover. We used to think that insects were the smallest organisms (生物), and that nothing lived deeper than six hundred meters. Yet, when something new turns up, more often than not, we do not even know its name.