Born to an adventure-loving mom and a National Geographic’s photographer dad, Alison Teal was already exploring the world as a baby. The family traveled the globe staying not at five-star hotels but in a six-foot-wide tent. From cold mountaintops to hot jungles, they completely involved themselves in local nature and culture.

Between journeys, they would return home to a quiet and faraway part of the Big Island of Hawaii, where they built a solar-powered oceanfront rest center. The front yard was the ocean, and Alison’s friends were dolphins. She would dive into the water and release seaweed. A dolphin would catch it on its nose or fin and throw it to the next player. Over the years, the dolphins grew to trust Alison. They looked for her and came close to her in the water.

After graduating from university, she continued her world travels. Her adventurous childhood and life skills landed her a spot in the reality show Naked and Afraid, in which she and her partner had to live on an unwelcoming island for 21 days. Alison’s deep knowledge of how to live in a wilderness saved the pair, but what shocked her was the amount of trash washed upon the shore.

“After that, I couldn’t ignore our plastic problem. I shifted my focus and started to protect our greatest resource, the ocean,” says Alison. Swimming in familiar waters back home, she also found her dolphin friends were no longer tossing (抛) seaweed to each other, but plastic. “That was distressing,” she says.

Her book, Alison’s Adventures: Your Passport to the World, is fled with travel tales and environmental lessons. She also offers free adventure films to go along with each chapter on her YouTube and TikTok. Alison believes all of us can make changes to protect the Earth and, in turn, those we love. “Whether you’re a lawyer, a gardener, an artist, a teacher or a surfer, we can all help in our own ways,” she says.

That banana peel from your lunch, turned into graphene(石墨烯), a valuable material in electronics and many other fields, could bring a massive reduction of the enironmental effect of concrete(混凝土) and other building materials.

A new process introduced by the Rice University lab of chemist James Tour can turn large quantities of almost any carbon source into valuable graphene. Tour said the “flash graphene” technique can transform a ton of coal, food waste or plastic into graphene for a tiny amount of the cost used by other graphene-producing methods.

The world throws out 30% to 40% of all food every year and plastic waste is of worldwide concern. Tour’s team has already proven that any solid carbon-based matter, including mixed plastic waste and rubber tires, can be turned into graphene.

As reported in Nature , a concentration of as little as 0.1% of flash graphene in the cement(水泥) used to bind concrete could lessen its massive environmental effect by a third. Production of cement reportedly gives off as much as 8% human-made carbon dioxide every year. “By adding graphene to concrete, we could use less concrete for buildings,” Tour said.

The flash graphene process gets its name from the spark of bright light created when the chemical reaction occurs. Most of the energy is not turning into heat, but instead goes into a type of thermal electromagnetic radiation (热电磁辐射). That radiation breaks every carbon-carbon bond and any extra energy leftover is released in the form of the bright flash of light. Flash graphene is made in just 10 milliseconds this way.

The problem with the flash process at the current stage is: The researchers could only make about a picogram of graphene, an extremely small amount of graphene that might be suitable for electronics. Tour hopes to produce a kilogram a day of flash graphene within two years, starting with a project recently funded by the Department of Energy to change U.S.-sourced coal. “This could provide an outlet for coal on a large scale by changing it inexpensively into a much-higher-value building material,” he said.

Earth Hour started in Sydney on March 31^st, 2007. It calls on families and buildings to turn off the lights from 20:30 to 21:30 on the last Saturday night of March. 【小题1】 A year later, on March 29, Earth Hour 2008 became a global activity and was supported by 50 million people from thirty-five countries. On March 28, 2010 over 2100 cities in another eight countries took part in it. 【小题2】

In 2012 in China, there were many cities taking part in this activity, especially some large cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai.... Many citizens consciously (有意识的) turned off lights in the hour. 【小题3】 In colleges some students held some activities to make all the students leave their dormitories.

It was 20:30, Beijing time. 【小题4】 In Shanghai some people were taking a walk with their families or friends. And in Ningbo some young people were holding a party in a park, singing and dancing. 【小题5】

Earth Hour has a variety of activities, but the final goal is the same, that is focusing on (聚焦) climate change and protecting the environment for individuals.