Recently, I experienced a wonderful lesson in how little things still mean a lot. My brother, mother and I live in Hawaii. Our farm is at least a dozen miles from even the most basic of services. Therefore, I take weekly trips to the shop to get supplies. About a month ago, I finished loading up the car and was about to leave, when a piece of paper on the ground caught my eye. I picked it up and read it carefully.

It was a receipt from the State Motor Vehicle Division, recording the owners payment of her Vehicles Registration fees. At first I thought that I could find the owner. So I waited there for about an hour. Although the receipt had been borne on the wind, where in the busy, crowded parking lot would I find the owner? I looked over the receipt for contact or any personal data, perhaps a license tag or telephone number. I checked the date, the fees paid, noted the name of the owner and pocketed the paper. I concluded that the best and easiest step to take was to put the receipt in an envelope and send it to the owner first the next morning.

By the end of the week, I received a beautiful "thank you " letter from a very grateful and happy woman containing a handwritten message and a gift card. In the letter, the woman explained how the wind snatched (夺去) her receipt from a pocket in her car’s passenger door. She had searched everywhere for quite some time before giving up.

It felt great to know I had helped someone avoid a loss by doing something that at first glance(一瞥) seemed little and unimportant.

It was two in the morning. A koala(考拉)was caught in barbed(带刺的)wire on a fence. A phone rang in the home of Megan Aitken in a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. She ran a volunteer organization devoted to rescuing wild koalas. Before she was even told the location, she had thrown her clothes on over her nightdress.

When Aitken arrived on the scene, Jane Davies and Sandra Peachey, two other volunteers were already there. The koala was holding on tightly to a chain-link fence. Its fur was caught in barbed wire Standing in the bright light of car headlights, Aitken put on heavy leather gloves. Despite their cute appearance, koalas can be fierce if they feel threatened. They will fight and bite，and Aitken has the scars to prove it. Next，she placed a cage on the ground near the animal and opened up a thick blanket. Then the three rescuers rapidly got to work. Davies threw the blanket over the animal. Peachey opened the cage, while Aitken firmly grasped the koala through the blanket, freed it from the fence, and dropped it into the cage. “Well done, ladies!” Aitken shouted.

Looking down at the koala they had just rescued, Aitken checked the animal's physical condition. In an event that the koala was sick or injured, it must be taken to an animal hospital nearby. However provided it was healthy, like this one in most cases, it would be released somewhere near the place it was found. This was because koalas lived within such a small area and fed in the same trees over and over. However, this was a highly populated suburb with few areas with trees, so finding a suitable area was not easy. The women studied a map with flashlights.

“This is the whole problem,” Aitken said, “There are so few places left for the koala,” In the end, they took the animal to a small park nearby. Standing back, they opened the cage, and the koala dashed up a tree. “Good luck, little one,” prayed Aitken.

William Happer, a physics professor and outspoken critics of mainstream climate science, has joined the White House as a top adviser.

Happer, 79, told E&E News in email that he began serving yesterday on the National Security Council as the senior director for emerging technologies. NSC officials confirmed Happer’s new role but declined to provide further detail about the appointment, which VNN first reported.

When asked about his new NSC role, Happer said he would do his best to ensure that federal policy decisions “are based on sound science and technology”.

A retired physics professor at Princeton University and a former Energy Department official under former President George H. W. Bush’s administration in the 1990s, Happer is well-known for his public criticism of mainstream climate modeling and his ties to the Trump administration.

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Happer told The scientist that the significance of climate changes has been “tremendously exaggerated” and has “become sort of a cult(邪教) movement in the last five or ten years.”Happer also said Presidents Trump, who has referred to climate change as a trick, agreed with his assessment.

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Happer, who is not a climate scientist by training, is known in physics for his development in the 1980s of the sodium guide star(钠导星) that was initially used for missile defense technology and has now gained broader application in astronomy. According to his Princeton biography, he’s credited as one of the pioneers in the field of optically polarized(光学极化的) atoms.

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Happer has accused both NOAA and NASA of controlling temperature records and claimed that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would emphasize plant life, citing satellite data showing a greening of the planet.

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“The public, in general, doesn’t realize that from the point of view of geological history, we are in a CO2 famine,” he told E&E News during the interview in January.

Many researchers say other impacts of climate change, such as rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, have a negative impact on plant life and that higher CO2 levels may not be a benefit to all plants, even in the short term.

Happer told E&E News in January that he supported Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord but said he wished the president had focused on how the agreement “did not make scientific sense”. Trump had cast the agreement as harmful to the US economy.