It’s picking season at Christian Nachtwey’s organic orchard (果园) in western Germany and laborers are loading their vehicles with ripe apples. But Nachtwey’s farm is also obtaining a second harvest: Many of the apple trees grow beneath solar panels that have been producing electricity, while providing the fruit below with much-needed shade.

“The idea is simple,” said Nachtwey. “To protect the orchard, without reducing the available growing surface and in particular maintaining production. On top of that, there’s the solar electricity being generated on the same land.” Large-scale solar installations on farmland are becoming increasingly popular, as farmers seek to make the most of their land and establish a second source of revenue (收益).

Getting the right mix of crop and solar is hard, because modern fruit varieties are finely used to particular growing conditions. Any change can tip the balance, costing farmers revenue if their fruit is damaged, the wrong color or not as sweet as consumers like. That’s why Nachtwey is cooperating with researchers to test which apple varieties thrive under the solar roofs, and which types of solar roofs are best suited for the orchard. To compare the results, some trees are covered with a conventional net normally used to protect sensitive crops from hail (冰雹).

Juergen Zimmer, an expert with the agricultural services department of Rhineland-Palatinate state, said the apples grown under the solar roofs were slightly less sweet this year than those under the hail nets. But hardly any of the solar-shaded apples got damaged in the intense sunlight that hit the region on July 24 this year, while up to 18% of the uncovered fruit suffered sunburn that day, he said. “We need at least two to three full years to record all the weather conditions that might occur, and look at the output and color that the different varieties of tree produce,” said Zimmer.

Researchers hope the tests will show that tree fruit crops thrive under solar panels. This could help prevent renewable energy production from competing for precious land with agriculture — a growing concern for those seeking to tackle climate change and rising food prices.

Catherine Gallo, 20, couldn’t believe it when a fellow student at Hofstra University told her she had gotten a stylish jacket for free from a new on-campus shop in Hempstead.

Gallo and her friend got their clothes from Hofstra’s Career Closet shop, where the professional clothing makes donated new and gently used professional clothing available free for its students, who can “shop” by appointment for clothing for job interviews and career fairs. Operated by the Center for Career Design and Development, the Career Closet is in the Campus Living and Wellness Center. So far, it has provided more than 1,500 students with items for their own closets.

Career Closets aim to address the need for students on limited budgets to have professional clothing, and they’re springing up at colleges nationwide including University of Washington and Boston College. Fashions such as suits, ties, shoes, handbags and more are raised from Hofstra employees and the Center for Career Design and Development’s corporate partners, including accounting and consulting firms such as Baker Tilly and Crowe

“It’s a great way to build up my closet,” says Margaret Sykes, 19, a new college student from University of Massachusetts majoring in filmmaking. “I’m glad Hofstra is providing this service because clothing is expensive now and a lot of people don’t have money to get business clothing.” She adds, “I have mostly jeans and T-shirts, so I got a few business suits. I need something that looks professional when I go out on a shoot to interview an important figure such as the president of Hofstra University.”

Career center director Michelle Kyriakides says the shop’s concept is something she had in mind for many years as a “personal goal”, even before she heard of it becoming a trend at other schools. “So much of an employer’s decision about career readiness depends on how the applicants present themselves, so we want to help our students feel confident,” Kyriakides says.

Hundreds of people die at sea every year due to ship and airplane accidents. Emergency teams have little time to rescue those in the water because the probability of finding a person alive falls dramatically after six hours. Beyond tides and challenging weather conditions, unsteady coastal currents often make search and rescue operations extremely difficult.

New insight into coastal flows gained by an international research team led by George Haller, Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at ETH Zurich, promises to enhance the search and rescue techniques currently in use. Using tools from dynamical systems theory and ocean data, the team has developed an algorithm (算法) to predict where objects and people floating in water will go. “Our work has a clear potential to save lives,” says Mattia Serra, the first author of a study recently published in Nature Communications.

In today’s rescue operations at sea, complicated models of ocean dynamics and weather forecasting are used to predict the path of floating objects. For fast-changing coastal waters, however, such predictions are often inaccurate due to uncertain boundaries and missing data. As a result, a search may be launched in the wrong location, causing a loss of precious time.

Haller’s research team obtained mathematical results predicting that objects floating on the ocean’s surface should gather along a few special curves (曲线) which they call TRansient Attracting Profiles (TRAPs). These curves can’t be seen with our eyes but can be tracked from instant ocean surface current data using recent mathematical methods developed by the ETH team. This enables quick and precise planning of search paths that are less sensitive to uncertainties in the time and place of the accident.

In cooperation with a team from MIT, the ETH team tested their new, TRAP-based search algorithm in two separate ocean experiments near Martha’s Vineyard, which is on the northeastern coast of the United States. Working from the same real-time data available to the Coast Guard, the team successfully identified TRAPs in the region in real-time. They found that buoys and manikins (浮标和人体模型) thrown in the water indeed quickly gathered along these emerging curves. “Of several competing approaches tested in this project, this was the only algorithm that consistently found the right location”, says Haller.

“Our results are rapidly obtained, easy to interpret, and cheap to perform,” points out Serra. Haller stresses: “Our hope is that this method will become a standard part of the tool kit of coast guards everywhere.”