Homes are usually warmed with radiators (暖气片). Some homes are warmed by floor heating. Now, a new way of heating is being developed by using the “wallpaper” on your walls. This wallpaper is not decorative. It actually goes under and not over the wall-electrically heats a room. And this type of heating technology heats objects, even people, instead of the air and this helps you feel warmer.

The electric heating panels (嵌板) which are hidden in the wall are connected to the main electrical panels of your home. Each room can be heated independently through an app, so you do not have to heat unused rooms. It takes around 20 minutes to heat a room.

With rising prices for home heating, the panels seen like the right way to go. “It makes me happy that I don’t depend on gas,” Kris Bilski, an early user, said. About 23 million homes in the UK are connected to the gas grid (网) but the government wants to phase out gas-fired pots by 2035. Home heating is responsible for 17 percent of greenhouse gas materials, so removing fossil fuel-based heating will help the environment.

The new electric heating systems are easy to get for private homes and the company is currently testing the new technology in public housing in some cities. The types being tested can be fitted while people are still living in the apartment so it makes installation a lot easier.

Heating your home with this type of technology does not heat your water, so an additional heating system is required, but an energy efficient heater can be used.

While the wallpaper is greener, electricity in the UK is very costly so it is not an economic way to heat homes unless there is a renewable energy source like solar panels used. Still, reducing the dependence on fossil fuels will go a long way to green the UK and help the country meet its climate targets.

Steven Strauss was skeptical when he first heard about a poplar tree (杨树) bio-engineered to suck more carbon dioxide out of the air. So when two entrepreneur — Maddie Hall and Patrick Mellor — asked him to help test out the idea, Strauss was interested but hesitant. “If it works, it would be a wonderful thing”, he said, “But typically in research on agriculture or forestry, it works in the lab or the greenhouse, but tells you nothing.”

Four years later, these two entrepreneurs have raised $30 million for Living Carbon, a company that aims to plant between 4 million and 5 million poplar trees by the spring of 2024, using photo-synthesis enhanced seeds. Eventually, the company hopes to enter the carbon offset market, selling credits to companies that need to reach net-zero emission goals to help fight global warming.

One of the field trials will be conducted in a forest at Oregon State University, where Strauss is a distinguished professor of forest biotechnology. Other locations are throughout the United States, including the site of an abandoned mine in Pennsylvania with degraded soils.

Co-founders Hall and Mellor hope the trials will prove that the taller poplar trees can store as much as 27 percent more CO₂ than ordinary trees. The company’s next step will be to show that the CO₂ can be stored in wood, outlasting the poplar’s lifespan, which can reach up to 200 years.

The Department of Energy, which provided Living Carbon with a $500,000 grant in 2021, predicted that the company’s approach could remove billions of tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere if successfully scaled up. Investors have since lined up, including Toyota Ventures and Singapore’s state-owned Temasek.

Hall, the CEO of Living Carbon, has described high hopes for the project. “Today Earth no longer has the ability to avoid carbon as quickly,” she wrote in a blog post,“And now it’s time for the big suck.”

Carol-Anne O’Callaghan, a former teacher from Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, has fought hard to protect ancient oaks near her home, which she says are home to rare bats.

In February 2021, O’Callaghan was walking her dogs when she spotted yellow dots stuck on some of the 99 oak trees in a narrow country lane close to her home. The dots indicated trees marked for destruction. After she learned the trees would be felled as part of the HS2 high-speed railway works, she called the HS2 helpline and was told there was nothing that could be done as an over-road would be built. She gets choked up remembering the moment she realized many of them were to be cut down.

O’Callaghan loves that ancient line of oaks. They were planted in the 19th century. “My family and I would picnic under them,” she says, “climb them, have rope swings on them. The trees are amazing and beautiful and meant so much.” One of the last photos of her mother, taken shortly before she died, was of her sitting in a swing in their branches.

She noticed that on the other side of the lane, to the north, there were no ancient oaks. So she began campaigning to save the trees. With the help of her daughter, Blaize, she started a petition(请愿书), which went on to get nearly 43,000 signatures. “I saw someone passionate about giving a voice to those who don’t have one, someone not afraid of asking questions and calling out large, daunting businesses for doing the wrong thing,” says her neighbour Victoria.

Buckinghamshire Council has got involved, and the felling is paused. A final decision has yet to be made about the proposed over-road. “We’re optimistic that they’ll hear our argument and take the ecology of the lane into account,” says O’Callaghan. “We want them to put in a green crossing in the gaps between trees, for the bats, and we’d like the place to become a conservation area. For the trees and the bats—this is what we are fighting for!”