Most farms are located in rural areas and are irrigated by freshwater. Now, a startup in Scotland is farming near the coast and using seawater to grow crops. Using the water of the ocean for irrigation can be a game changer for a hungry world.

Food production needs to increase by 70 percent in the next 30 years to keep up with population increases. Freshwater only makes up two percent of all the water of the planet, and it is growing scarcer in many places like Scotland due to climate change.

Now, Seawater Solutions, a Glasgow-based non-governmental organization founded in 2017, is using saltwater instead of freshwater to grow crops. Co-founder and CEO Yanik Nyberg lived and worked in areas of Africa and Asia that have been negatively impacted by water scarcity and global warming. Seawater Solutions was created to address the issues of coastal communities that face the urgent concern of land salinization (盐渍化), according to the organization’s website.

In an interview, Nyberg told The Nation that he came up with the idea of redeveloping degraded farmland and turning it into artificial wetland ecosystems that use seawater and grow plants that can tolerate the salt, “It’s a relatively simple concept,” he said. “Seawater is introduced to coastal farmland, where naturally salt-tolerant crops are grown. These crops store massive amounts of carbon and are extremely nutritious, being called ‘superfoods’ across the world.”

The new farmland consists of artificial saltwater marshes (沼泽) that have seawater pumped over them. Then the ecosystem will be used for saline plants, which can be used for food, biofuels, sea-plant animal foods, and as raw materials for cosmetics.

Downhill Farm in Ayrshire, Scotland uses water from the Atlantic Ocean to grow crops. Seawater Solutions also has projects in Ghana, Malawi, Namibia and Spain, with more in the planning stage. While growing crops in seawater is a hard sell, it is an environmentally sound way to meet the food demands of a growing world population.

When was the last time you sat on a park bench(凳子)? Did you stay for long? A new kind of park benches will limit the amount of time you can sit there. If you don’t get up in time, it could be very painful: there are many sharp spikes (钉子) on the part that you sit on!

Visitors who want a rest on the bench need to put a coin in a machine next to it. Once the money was accepted, the spikes disappear into the bench. Then visitors can sit down comfortably, but only for half an hour. When the time’s up, the spikes slowly start moving up again. It doesn’t hurt at first, but after a minute, they start coming up even more quickly. They aren’t long enough to cause serious hurt, but they do cause pain, as tests have shown. But why have they been installed (安装)?

“Our public park is very popular in summer,” a spokesperson for the park explained. “But with all the thousands of people who visit the park, there aren’t enough benches for everyone. We want to make sure that the benches are shared by more visitors, and to stop people taking a bench and staying there all day. Installing spikes seems to be the fairest way of stopping people doing this.”

17-year-old Arul Mathur has developed a new fire extinguisher（灭火器）to help put out wildfires near houses. The fire extinguisher is called the Fire Activated Canister Extinguisher（FACE）.

Over the past three years, there have been almost 7,500,000 acres of wildfires in California alone, which demolish nearly 50,000 buildings. This has caused many local people to become homeless. Arul grew up in New Jersey where wildfires were hardly heard of. After moving to California in 2012, he began to hear about wildfires. In the summer of 2019, a wildfire threatened his family to leave their home. Upon questioning himself on the reason behind the spread of wildfires, Arul realized the fact. By the time firefighters get the notice of a wildfire, the wildfire has already grown out of control.

FACE can help stop wildfires before they burn houses. It puts out wildfires by itself after sensing extreme heat without humans. It can stand the extreme condition which is a high-temperature environment. Moreover, it has a bracket（支架）that allows it to be placed in a variety of high-risk areas. Unlike traditional fire extinguishers, FACE has a mixture of water and an environmentally-friendly fire retardant（阻燃剂）within it.

Arul said, "I think that by owning FACE, people no longer have to rely on the fire department to save their houses." Firefighters could focus on controlling the fire, while people could protect their homes. He is now running a pilot test with some of his friends from the media platform Kickstarter. He said, "In general, FACE has been very well-received through the media platform."

Arul has great interest in fire safety and prevention and actively searches for ways to spread awareness. He loves to explore advances in technology and he is happy to give communities some advice on fire prevention. Arul is now planning to develop larger units for specific use in forest applications. He said, "Humans have seen great progress in technology. Now, we need to use present technology to develop more environmentally-friendly solutions for fire prevention.”