The Self-Portrait Challenge

Have you ever done a self-portrait in an art lesson at school? Today, we're challenging you to write self-portrait poems. It's not uncommon to feel like the way people see you on the outside doesn't quite match up with how you feel on the inside. So creating a self-portrait can be a good opportunity to address those differences and present the realest, truest version of yourself. 

Your challenge is to create a self-portrait in lines, using words instead of paint. Read on for some more inspiration. 

Writing Tips

• Have a go at writing a list of metaphors exploring your physical appearance, starting from your head and working your way down towards your feet. 

• Instead of representing yourself directly, take on another character, such as a fictional character, a historical figure, or even a different version of yourself. 

• Play around with personification, by taking on the voice of a physical object in your poem. Think about what a self-portrait from the point of view of a mirror, or a bowl of your favourite food would look like?

How to enter

This challenge is for writers aged up to 25 based anywhere in the world. The deadline is 23: 59 GMT, 17 March 2024. You can send a poem, or poems, written down, or as video or audio files. We are using Submittable to accept submissions to this challenge. You will need to make a free Submittable account to submit in this way. Using Submittable helps our team to administrate and process entries more quickly. Selected poets will be published on Young Poets Network. 

Late one night in July 2020 in Reykjavik, Haraldur Thorleifsson was wandering around the city's main shopping street with his wife and two kids. During their walk, his three-year- old son was thirsty and wanted a drink from the corner store. But Thorleifsson soon discovered he couldn't help with the simple request: A 20-centimetre step blocked his access to the store. 

The barrier was all too familiar. Born with muscular dystrophy, which causes progressive weakness and loss of muscle, Thorleifsson, now 46, has been using a wheelchair since he was 25. As he waited outside, he recalled, "I thought about how strange it is that we separate families in this way. I thought about all the times I wasn't able to join my friends at restaurants, pubs and stores that are inaccessible. 

Living all over the world as a creative director and digital designer in cities such as San Francisco and Tokyo, Thorleifsson had witnessed first-hand how different cities consider and plan for accessibility, from ramps （斜坡） and sidewalks to public transportation. 

Having recently sold his digital creative agency, Ueno, to Twitter, Thorleifsson now had the financial means to make a difference in his hometown. He decided to start with a project to make Iceland wheelchair accessible, one ramp at a time. 

Ramp Up Reykjavik was launched as a non-profit in 2021 with a goal to build 100 ramps, mostly in the city's down-town, within a year. Unlike portable and temporary solutions in other cities, these ramps are permanent structures that match the aesthetic of the buildings, making them appear as if they've always been there. It's a design detail that helps provide a sense of inclusivity. 

With the help of government funding and other sponsors, the Ramp Up team finished ahead of schedule and has broadened its scope to all of Iceland, with the goal of building 1, 500 ramps countrywide by  2026. 

Do you find yourself checking social media sites as soon as you wake up? Do you answer e-mails on your phone while surfing the Web? Actually, we've lived a life in which we're all connected, all the time. Whether or not this is a good thing is the subject of Hamlet's BlackBerry, a non-fiction book by William Powers based on an essay he penned.

Early in the work, Powers questions the way we use devices, but certainly he doesn't criticize it. He does, however, recognize the downside of constantly being overstimulated—or what he calls the "problem of connectedness". Among the things disturbed by the problem, Powers says, are the ways in which people are connected and deal with each other. "Constantly switching among people on social media platforms, texts and all the new ways of connecting all day, we never have a sustained connection." His intention of writing Hamlet's BlackBerry is to help teach people how to connect more wisely. Powers looked to the past, where he found several precedents(先例)for both the current information age and the anxiety that has come with it.

One major figure Powers examines actually developed his own strategies for dealing with overstimulation. In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hamlet is informed his father is murdered by his uncle and too shocked by the news to think calmly, so he pulls out his "tables" from the pocket, an object Powers describes as a so rt of original electronic planner. In the Elizabethan age, tables were a kind of new device designed to help people bring order to their lives despite massive news. You could write notes during the day and wipe(擦掉) them away at night.

But how do we deal with the same problem? Powers has one suggestion that's child's play: just disconnect. His family, for example, takes an "Internet Rest Day" every weekend. "We don't have smart phones. Therefore we can't check our inboxes and do Web surfing that day. We really enter another zone and it's wonderful. Even when we're connected to the Internet again, we feel benefits of having been disconnected days before," he says. "It's just about that simple word—balance."

Hiking is tricky when you're carrying a threatened species. Ally Whitbread carefully walked through the wilds while carrying a cooler full of small, rare snails (蜗牛)— the Chittenango ovate amber snails.

"I feel like I've got 500 babies to take care of — just like a very crazy mother hen," she said. Whitbread is part of a team transporting a lab-grown population to a new, remote home. The snails are facing extinction — only dozens are estimated to remain at one waterfall in upstate New York. "Such a recovery process can take years to decades. There are several things remaining to be unlocked during the process — what the action is going to bring, what role that species might play, and whether they might live well. We are just racing to better understand our planet's biodiversity before the species die out."

It took the scientists years to raise this population in the lab. The hike to a hidden waterfall is a chance to examine what makes them grow well in the wild, or what doesn't. The snails don't have any known unique features critical to humans, and it's been a long journey just to attempt to save them. These efforts could figure out their hidden benefits.

Specialist Cody Gilbertson said the drive to save them can go deeper, not just the love for science. The creatures are no bigger than a fingertip and look up at their caregivers. "You know their big eyes are staring at you, like — there's no way that you're not going to kind of fall in love," Gilbertson said.

Dropping them off at their new waterfall home wasn't even the end — it'll be another 5 years before the team knows whether the snails can survive there They'll go for a hike twice a month to track their progress.

As the planet gets hotter, the need for cool living environments is becoming more urgent. But air conditioning is not always recommended for use since units produce massive greenhouse gases and use lots of energy. Now, researchers have found in a new study an inexpensive, sustainable choice to replace mechanical cooling with refrigerants (制冷剂) in hot and dry climates, and a way to mitigate the dangers of heat waves during electricity blackouts.

The researchers set out to answer how to achieve a new benchmark (基准) for passive cooling inside naturally conditioned buildings in hot climates such as Southern California. They examined the use of roof materials that radiate (辐射) heat into the cold universe, even under direct sunlight, and how to connect them with temperature-driven air exchanges (that is, air can enter buildings and circulate freely). These cool radiator materials and coatings are often used to stop roofs overheating. Researchers have also used them to improve heat rejection from coolers. But there is untapped potential for mixing them with architectural design more fully, so they can not only reject indoor heat in a passive way, but also drive regular and healthy air changes.

"We found we could keep air temperatures several degrees below the ordinary temperature and several degrees more below the reference ‘gold standard' for passive cooling," said Remy Fortin, lead author and PhD candidate at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. "We did this without abandoning a healthy airing." This was never a piece of cake, considering air exchanges are a source of heat when the aim is to keep a room cooler than the outside.

The researchers hope the findings will be used to positively impact communities suffering from dangerous climate heating and heat waves. "We hope that materials scientists, architects, and engineers will be interested in these results, and that our work will inspire more thorough thinking about how to connect breakthroughs in radiative cooling materials with simple but effective architectural solutions," said Salmaan Craig, main investigator for the project and assistant professor at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture.

The universal speed limit of any kind of wave—whether electromagnetic or gravitational travelling through a vacuum(真空)has been known since Albert Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905. But the maximum speed of sound moving through a solid or a liquid has just been calculated for the first time. It is about 36 kilometre per second, more than 8, 000 times lower than the speed of light in a vacuum. 

To make this calculation, Kostya Trachenko at Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues started with two well-known physical constants:the ratio(比率)of proton mass(质子质量)to electron mass, and the fine structure constant, which characteristics the strength of interactions between charged particles(粒子). 

Trachenko says we have a pretty good idea of these values, because if they were changed even a bit, the universe wouldn't look at all like it does. "If you change these constants by a few percent, then the proton might not be stable anymore, and you might not even have the processes in stars resulting in the combination of heavy elements, so there would be no carbon, no life, "he says.

Sound is a wave that spreads by making neighbouring particles interact with one another, so its speed depends on the density of a material and how the atoms within it are bound together. Atoms can only move so quickly, and the speed of sound is limited by that movement. 

"The common wisdom was that diamond has the highest speed of sound, because it is the hardest material, but we didn't know whether there was a theoretical fundamental limit to it, "says Trachenko. The theoretical bound is about twice the speed of sound in a diamond.

The speed of sound is also dependent on the mass of the atoms in the material, so there searchers predicted that solid metallic hydrogen—a material that theoretically exists at the centre of giant planets, but for which laboratory evidence has been hotly questioned—should have the highest speed of sound. They calculated that it should be close to the theoretical limit. They also looked at experimental data for 133 materials and found that none of them broke the limit. 

Depending on your job, you may have the chance to make a kid's day while at work. Or even better, you may have memories of an adult going the extra mile just to make you smile. For a group of construction workers, the opportunity popped up in the form of a toy truck. Excited to see some building work being done in the area, a small boy paid a visit with his tiny truck as if to join the action. What happened next is something that the little one will surely value forever. 

The heart-warming moment was shot in a video that has since gone viral. Wanting to be a part of it all and hoping to see the big excavator(挖掘机)at work, the kid placed his wheeled toy under the big metal machine. The machine operator, moved by it all, was grateful and filled the toy truck with earth. With careful precision, as if it were a crucial part of the construction work being done, he made the little boy's dreams come true. While it's hard to find the location or the time from the video alone, the excitement of the kid as the machine slowly fills the mini dump truck is universally lovely. Even the other construction workers stop for a while to witness the cute scene. All the while, the kid's mom holds him firmly to keep everyone safe until the toy truck is full and the machine is still. 

While anyone can appreciate the sweetness of a group of adults taking a few minutes to put a smile on a child's face, the video has had all kinds of positive responses. For some, it brought back memories of seeing construction work and big machines when they were little and being blown away. For others, it allowed them to enjoy the unexpected delicacy of the great machine. If there's one thing we all can agree on, it's that the boy wasn't the only one who benefited from this tiny action. As one editor wrote, "I used to work in the field. I can tell you it made everyone's day. "

Given that cancer is one of the deadliest diseases out there, any new development in our fight against it is highly praiseworthy. The latest breakthrough was made by Heman Bekele in 2023, a 14-year-old student from Virginia. The student has created a bar soap to treat skin cancer. Now, his findings have earned him the title of America's Top Young Scientist.

Bekele remembers he always saw people who were constantly hit by the glaring sun as a child. As he grew up and began to realize the risks like skin cancer were associated with sun exposure, the boy decided to come up with solutions.

While similar treatments are available, Bekele hoped to work on a more affordable alternative, especially for those in developing countries. "I wanted to make my idea something that not only was great in terms of science but also could benefit as many people as possible," Bekele says. It is often the simple solutions that are the most effective because soap is a daily routine for most people.

With the guidance of Deborah Isabelle, a product engineering specialist, Bekele made his soap by mixing regular soap with compounds (化合物) that slowly reactivate dendritic (枝状的) cells. When the soap is applied, it releases toll-like receptors into our skin. These receptors attach onto dendritic cells which reactivate them. The reactivated dendritic cells then join with TN io12 cells to fight cancer cells. Rather than a cure, Bekele's soap aims to help people's immune cells stay active while fighting skin cancer.

For now, the young scientist hopes to improve his invention and create a non-profit to distribute the soap among those who need it most. "I believe that young minds can make a positive impact on the world," Bekele said. "I have a strong desire to know how the physical world works and how to improve the lives of its inhabitants, and this challenge gives me the perfect platform to showcase my ideas."

Keeping plants at home is a healthy and comfortable way of life. The following houseplants can create a most beautiful piece of green for your home.

Bird's Nest Fern (蕨)

The bird's nest fern is a good choice for anyone with a house that wouldn't support sun-loving species. It's a hardy fern variety adapting to living on forest floors, where the air tends to be cool and damp. It likes to be misted as well, but this doesn't always mean you need a misting bottle—spraying (喷洒) it in the sink or hanging it near a shower often works as well.

Chinese Money Plant

This is a flowering species that might be most appropriate for experienced plant gardeners looking for a new challenge. It prefers a moderate amount of indirect light, and tends to dry out slightly between watering sessions. It produces new plants easily without any input, directly from its root system. These can coexist in the same pot for a time.

Resurrection Plant

This native of the Mexican desert has adapted to surviving in extreme drought by curling (蜷缩) into a ball and remaining in seemingly lifeless state for years, if necessary. In this form, it can be transported by the wind across the dry landscape to areas with water. It will revive within hours in a shallow bowl of water, unfolding and transforming into a fresh and green moss (苔藓).

Snake Plant

This is a striking houseplant that can be an especially good option for new plant owners who you might not trust to keep a plant alive. It grows happily in almost any condition. While it prefers bright light, it doesn't mind shade or even artificial light. Plus, thanks to its thick, fleshy leaves, it stores water with remarkable efficiency, which makes it survive without water in the earth.

California's Water Resources Control Board recently approved new regulations in a unanimous (一致同意的) vote—toilet or shower wastewater will be recycled and pumped into the public drinking water system.

In 2023, more than 97% of California has been in moderate to severe drought, while water suppliers are struggling to keep up. A 2022 water supply and demand report indicated that around 18% of water suppliers were at risk of facing potential shortages. "The reality is that anyone out there on Mississippi River and on Colorado River, and anyone out there taking drinking water downstream is already drinking ‘toilet to tap'," said Esquivel, a director of the Board.

Early in the 1990s, the state was struggling to overcome the distaste its residents had toward drinking recycled water. Their efforts fizzled out when the phrase "toilet to tap" caught on and met with fierce resistance. The idea became too unpopular to be implemented. Despite the negative name, the regulations are the key to ensuring the supply of drinking water.

California's new regulations would let water agencies to treat wastewater, and then put it back into the drinking water system. It has taken officials more than 10 years to develop these regulations, a process that included several studies by independent groups of scientists. To put the scheme into effect and build huge water recycling plants, however, water agencies say they will need to prove to people that recycled water is not only safe to drink but also under monitoring.

The new regulations require the wastewater be treated for all bacteria and viruses. In fact, the treatment is so intense that it removes all of the minerals that make fresh drinking water taste good. That means the minerals need to be added back at the end of the process. "What we have here are standards, science, and importantly monitoring that allow us to have safe pure water, and probably better in many instances," said Esquivel. He added that it takes time and money to build these treatment centers. So, they will only be available for bigger cities at first.