Dreamers change the world. Donnel Baird, a person who inspires, protects and restores dreams and closes equity gaps, was named the "Dreamer of the Year" for the first time. And no one dreams bigger than Donnel Baird, the CEO and founder of BlocPower.

As a child, Baird grew up in Brooklyn without having a working heating system, so on cold days in winter, people would use their ovens to heat up their apartments. They often opened up the window to release poisonous chemicals, so they wouldn't breathe them in all night. So early on, he was exposed to neglected energy systems and the kind of health and environmental impact that they could have. Baird's early life undeniably fueled his drive for innovation.

"I started BlocPower several years ago with the vision of bringing clean energy to the low income communities where I'd grown up and where I'd been a community organizer," Baird said. America's home-energy industry is dire. Around one-third of the American households struggle to pay their energy bills, and nearly 30% of the US greenhouse gasses come from heating and cooling. BlocPower renovates buildings with solar panels, electric heat pumps, and other green tech to lower energy bills and reduce planet-warming emissions.

And the results are apparent. Since its founding in 2014, BlocPower has worked with over 5,000 American families to green their homes, saving them about 30% on their energy bills each year. BlocPower holds the belief that the solution to the global climate crisis will come from the people who have been most ignored and most devalued. They go into those communities and build up a human and green infrastructure(基础设施) that shows the rest of American society how to resolve the climate crisis.

"My name is Donnel Baird. I am the CEO of BlocPower and I dream fearlessly every day. And we're going to do that in time to resolve the climate crisis so that our children and grand-children can have a shot at enjoying their life," said Baird in the press.

"I like pigs," Winston Churchill supposedly once said. "Dogs look up at us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals. "Whether Churchill's contemporary George Orwell also liked pigs is less clear. But he, too, surely saw something in them that was lacking in other domestic beasts, for it was they who ended up running the show in novel Animal Farm. Pigs, then, are intelligent social creatures.

And, like all animals, they sometimes fight. A study just published in Animal Cognition by Ivan Norscia, a biological anthropologist at the University of Turin, in Italy, and his colleagues, looked at how a group of 104 domestic pigs went about resolving such incidents. In total, Dr. Norscia and his team studied the details of 216 pig conflicts over the course of six months.

Some pigs tend to be attackers; others tend to be victims. Who is what depends largely on weight, for, among pigs pounds mean power. The attacker might bite, kick, bump or lift the victim (or string together a sequence of those actions). Most conflicts ended in seconds, but some lasted a minute or two.

In most animal species that would be that. However, many of the pig conflicts Dr. Norscia observed had interested parties beyond the protagonists (主角). He therefore wanted to understand the role of these bystanders in resolving fights-and what this says about pigs' cognitive (认知) abilities.

Since there was usually not enough time for a bystander pig to intervene during the heat of a conflict (though this did occur), he and his colleagues looked at what happened in the three minutes directly following an aggressive interaction. Sometimes, they found, the protagonists made up on their own—for instance, by touching noses.

On other occasions, though, a third pig stepped in. Sometimes this bystander acted as a peacemaker, engaging with the attacker and reducing the number of subsequent attacks compared with what might otherwise have been expected. Sometimes, by contrast, the bystander engaged with the victim. This appeared to calm the victim down, for it reduced anxiety-related behavior such as shaking and scratching.

Our clothes do a lot for us. They keep us warm in the winter or cool while we're working out. They let us dress to impress or comfortably veg out on the couch with the TV on. But some researchers think our clothes could be doing even more. Those scientists and engineers are dreaming up new ways to make clothes safer, more comfortable or just more convenient.

Some ideas for new clothes aim to protect people from harm. One new shoe design, for example, features pop-out spikes（鞋钉）on the sole that grip the ground. This could help people keep their footing on slippery or uneven ground. A new fabric coating, meanwhile, could absorb and neutralize (中和) some chemical weapons. That coating is made from a metal-organic framework that breaks down harmful compounds. It could offer protection to people in war-tom countries.

Not all advanced clothing is designed to save lives. Some could just make clothes more comfortable. One day, for instance, you may not need to layer up to stay warm. Fabric filled with nanowires could reflect your body heat back onto your skin. Electric current humming through those metal threads could provide warmth, too. This may be especially useful for hikers, soldiers or others working in super cold conditions.

Some researchers have dreamt up wholly new uses for clothing—like turning wearers into walking power outlets. Flexible solar panels sewn into fabric could absorb the sun to recharge phones or other devices on the go. Another team threaded fabric with magnetized (磁化的) copper and silver to write data into fabrics. Such data-packed fabric could be used as a hands-free key or form of ID.

Many of these ideas have not yet left the lab—and they're still pretty far from hitting retail (零售) shelves. But inventors hope these and other innovations could someday let you get more from your clothes.

Women are still underrepresented in top academic positions. One of the possible explanations for this is the increasing importance of obtaining research funding. Women are often less successful in this than men. Psychology researchers Dr. Romy van der Lee and professor Naomi Ellemers investigated whether this difference also occurs at the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and examined potential explanations.

The researchers were assigned by NWO to carry out this study as part of the broader evaluation of NWO's procedures and its gender diversity policy. The aim was to gain more insight into the causes of the differences in awarding rates for male and female applicants for research funding. The analysis addressed an important "talent programme" of NWO, the Veni grant. "Whoever receives this grant has a greater chance of obtaining an important appointment at a university, " says Naomi Ellemers.

Van der Lee and Ellemers investigated all the applications submitted by male and female researchers over a period of three years: a total of 2823 applications. Under the direction of NWO these applications were assessed by scientific committees consisting of men and women. The results demonstrate that the awarding rates for female applicants (14.9%) are systematically lower than those for male applicants (17.7%). "If we compare the proportion of women among the applicants with the proportion of women among those awarded funding, we see a loss of 4%," said Ellemers.

The study reveals that women are less positively evaluated for their qualities as researcher than men are, "Interestingly the research proposals of women and men are evaluated equally positively. In other words, the reviewers see no difference in the quality of the proposals that men and women submit," says Romy van der Lee.

In search for a possible cause for the differences in awarding rates and evaluations, the researchers also investigated the language use in the instructions and forms used to assess the quality of applications. This clearly revealed the occurrence of gendered language. The words that are used to indicate quality are frequently words that were established in previous research as referring mainly to the male gender stereotype (such as challenging and excellent). Romy van der Lee explains: "As a result, it appears that men more easily satisfy the assessment criteria, because these better fit the characteristics stereoty-pically associated with men."

In response to the results of this research, NWO will devote more attention to the gender awareness of reviewers in its methods and procedures. It will also be investigated which changes to the assessment procedures and criteria can most strongly contribute to more equal chances for men and women to obtain research funding. This will include an examination of the language used by NWO. NWO chair Jos Engelens said, "The research has yielded valuable results and insights. Based on the recommendations made by the researchers we will therefore focus in the coming period on the development of evidence-based measures to reduce the difference in awarding rates."

Solar farms offer one way to meet the world's decarbonization targets, but they could also be used to deal with another of the planet's big problems: loss of biodiversity. The approach is starting to take off. Residents of Barnsdale, for example, will soon play host to a new solar farm lined with grass field of wildflowers and native grasses, which Banks Group, the developer, says will promote pollinating insects.

The idea comes from the combination of two long-term trends: declining numbers of pollinating insects and the growing amount of land distributed to solar farms. According to the Center for Biological Diversity in Arizona, more than 40 percent of insect pollinators globally are listed as "highly threatened"—an issue that could seriously threaten food security. Meanwhile, solar-energy competence has been increasing. Matthew O'Neal, a scientist at Iowa State University, would like to see more solar developers seize this opportunity.

The benefits of such projects don't stop at the insects. Research from Yale's Center for Business and the Environment indicates that pollinator-friendly solar farms can raise crop output on nearby farmland, increase the recharging of groundwater and reduce soil erosion. In 2018, a US Department of Energy study found that if all existing and planned solar facilities near soybean and cranberry crops included pollinator home and increased output by just one percent, annual crop values could rise by US $1.75 million, US $4 million and US $233,000, respectively.

"Farmers could identify unprofitable areas, such as poor, highly erodible lands, as candidates for a pollinator-friendly solar farm. There's the potential to increase their net income with pollinator motivation projects," says O'Neal.

With enough forward thinking, these studies show, clean energy can provide new environmental opportunities. "We're at a turning point with energy production and we're seeing more opportunities to provide extra benefits that wouldn't have been considered with older methods of energy generation," says O'Neal. "You never heard of a coal mine planning pollinator conservation."

Imagine the busy streets of New York City, an enormous place with millions of people. Every day, the streets are crowded with people going about their daily lives. Now imagine a small robot in the middle of all of those people. Most people would not even notice the ten-inch smiling robot, called a Tweenbot, rolling along the busy sidewalk. This strange machine may interest some people, while others would ignore it completely. A researcher interested in studying how helpful people really are uses such robots in her experiments.

The Tweenbots experiment is the idea and creation of Kacie Kinzer, which was to make a robot that could navigate the city and reach its destination only if it was aided by pedestrians. Tweenbots rely on the kindness of warm-hearted strangers. Made simply of cardboard, wheels, and a device to turn the wheels, the Tweenbots face many dangers on the city streets. They could be run over by cars or smashed by careless kids. Each of Kinzer's robots is fitted with a flag that displays instructions for the robot's destination. The only way these robots will reach their final point is if someone lends them a hand. Tweenbots are essentially a social experiment aimed at providing people a chance to show how caring they are.

On a daily basis, people in New York City are often in a hurry to get around. However, the Tweenbots, through their inability to look after themselves, took people out of their normal routines. The people who noticed the helpless little robots were actually interested in helping the Tweenbots find their way home. Tweenbots move at a constant speed and can only go in a straight line. If one was to get stuck, or was going in the wrong direction, it would be up to strangers to free it or turn it in the right direction. Surprisingly, no Tweenbot was lost or damaged, and each one arrived at its target in good condition. In fact, most people treated the robot in a gentle manner, and some even treated it as though it were a small living being.

The latest in cat research reveals that the lovely animal seems to have a basic grasp on both the laws of physics and the ins and outs of cause and effect.

According to a newly published study, cats seem to be able to predict the location of hiding prey (猎物) using both their ears and an inborn (天生的) understanding of how the physical world works.

In a recent experiment, Japanese researchers taped 30 domestic cats reacting to a container that a team member shook. Some containers rattled (发出响声); others did not. When the container was tipped over, sometimes an object fell out and sometimes it didn't.

It turns out that the cats were remarkably smart about what would happen when a container was tipped over. When an object did not drop out of the bottom of a rattling container, they looked at it for a longer time than they did when the container behaved as expected.

"Cats use a causal-logical understanding of noise or sounds to predict the appearance of invisible objects," lead researcher Saho Takagi says in a press release. The researchers conclude that cats' hunting style may have developed based on their common-sense abilities to infer where prey is, using their hearing.

Scientists have explored this idea with other lovely creatures: babies. Like cats, babies appear to engage in what's called "preferential looking"—looking longer at things that are interesting or unusual than things they perceive as normal.

When babies' expectations are not met in experiments like the ones performed with the cats, they react much like their animal friends. Psychologists have shown that babies apparently expect their world to obey the laws of physics and cause and effect as early as two months of age.

Does the study mean that cats will soon grasp the ins and outs of cause and effect? Maybe, Okay, so cats may not be the next physics faculty members at America's most important research universities. But by demonstrating their common sense, they've shown that the divide between cats and humans may not be that great after all.

Are you aware of how you are breathing? A study by the Federal University Sergipe in Brazil showed a higher occurrence of learning disabilities among mouth breathers, concluding that mouth breathers are more likely to have learning difficulties than nasal (鼻的) breathers.

While smell is a very important sense, the nose has other important responsibilities. When someone breathes through the mouth, they are ignoring several important functions of the nose. To name a few, the nose warms and wets the air you breathe to make it more suitable for your lungs. Nasal breathing also increases levels of nitric oxide (一氧化氮), a key molecule (分子) used throughout the body. Another very important function of the nose is that it controls airflow and helps prevent over-breathing. So how can you over breathe? Breathing in and out more air than necessary results in a state of reduced carbon dioxide (二氧化碳) in the blood. Brain function will be damaged when you breathe too much. The loss of carbon dioxide from improper breathing isn't serious enough to be easily noticeable. But over time the habit can take its toll on the brain and body.

Patrick McKeown, author of the Oxygen Advantage explains that if we breathe a relatively small amount of air by breathing slowly through the nose, we increase the amount of carbon dioxide inside us and can deliver more oxygen to our muscles and organs, including the heart and the brain. Scott Jurek, one of the famous marathon runners in the world, says that for runners，one of the most important things to learn is to practice nasal breathing. Anthropologist (古人类学家) Wade Davis has studied and lived with fifteen different groups of native people. Davis was most impressed by the fact that these hunters never opened their mouths to breathe during the hunt.

In the animal world, mouth breathing is rarely seen unless it is falling ill. In humans, chronic (长期的) mouth breathing can lead to cavities (龋洞), gum disease, lowered immune function, digestive disturbances, poor sleep quality, and can result in crooked teeth and even poorly developed facial structure.

For the past five years, researchers in Hawaii and Australia have been engineering corals (珊瑚) inside a lab to see if they could better resist the effects of climate change.

The scientists say climate change linked to human causes has led to warming oceans that can harm sea life. The team tested three methods for making corals that would be strong and healthy in nature. One was selective breeding. It involves scientists choosing parents with desirable characteristics for reproductive purposes. The goal is to produce babies with the same desirable characteristics. A second method subjected the corals to increasing temperatures to condition them to be able to survive in warm ocean environments. The third involved making changes to the algae (藻类) that provides corals with necessary nutrients.

The leader of the project, University of Hawaii researcher Kira Hughes, said all the methods proved successful in the lab. She told The Associated Press that some scientists might worry such methods go against the natural processes of nature. But with the planet continuing to warm, she does not see any better options."We have to intervene in order to make a change for coral reefs to survive into the future," Hughes said.

When ocean temperatures rise, corals release algae that supplies nutrients and gives them color. This causes them to turn white, a process called bleaching. When his happens, corals can quickly become sick and die. But for years, scientists have been observing corals that have survived bleaching, even when others have died on the same reef. They are now centering on those healthy survivors and hoping to further increase their resistance to heat. Those corals were used as the parents for the newly created kinds.

"Corals are threatened worldwide by a lot of stressors but increasing temperature are probably the most severe." said Crawford Drury, chier scientist al Hawaii's Coral Resilience Lab

Rather than editing genes or creating anything unnatural, the researchers are just attempting to begin what could already happen in the ocean, Madeleine van Oppen added. In this way, she said, the team can center on a small area to keep and "enhance" what is already there.

It's an attractive idea: By playing online problem-solving, matching and other games for a few minutes a day, people can improve such mental abilities as reasoning, verbal skills and memory. But whether these brain training games deliver on those promises is up for debate.

A research team gathered more than eight thousand volunteers globally after collecting their submission of an online questionnaire about their training habits and which, if any, programs they used. Some one thousand participants reported using brain training programs for about eight months, on average, though durations ranged from two weeks to more than five years. Next, the volunteers completed 12 cognitive (认知) tests assessing their mental abilities. They faced specially designed memory exercises, such as mentally rotating objects, pattern-finding puzzles and strategy challenges.

When looking at the results, researchers saw that brain trainers on average had no mental edge. Even among the most dedicated, who had used training programs for at least 18 months, brain training didn't boost thinking abilities above the level of people who didn't use the programs. Participants who had trained for less than a month, also performed on par with people who didn't train at all.

"No matter how we sliced the data, we were unable to find any evidence that brain training games were connected with cognitive abilities," says leader of the team. That held true whether the team analyzed participants by age, program used, education or socioeconomic status – all were cognitively similar to the group who didn't use the programs, suggesting that brain training games don't live up to its name. Accordingly, the study advocates no more time sitting at a computer and doing little tasks.