The Smithsonian National Zoo has confirmed that its six-week old giant panda is a male. The finding was announced on a zoo video earlier this week. Panda-keepers showed a painting in blue made by the baby’s father Tian Tian.

The giant panda was born on August 21. Male and female giant pandas look very similar when young, so the zoo did a genetic (基因的) test to learn whether the newborn is male or not. The panda does not yet have a name. The zoo usually waits until giant pandas are 100 days old to give them a name. At the time, the zoo said the newborn was about the size of a stick of butter-about 12 centimeters long and weighing 110 grams. Now, black accounts for (占…比例) two-thirds of his color. And he has grown quickly. He measures about 35 centimeters long and weighs about 1. 6 kilograms.

His mother Mei Xiang is much bigger, weighing about 105 kilograms. The birth was welcomed as rare and happy news during the COVID- 19 health crisis, which forced the zoo to close for several months. After Mei Xiang’s pregnancy (怀孕) was announced in August, Internet traffic on the zoo’s popular Panda live video feed increased by 1200 percent, zoo officials said. When the baby was born about a week later, traffic went so high that the video connection broke for many watchers. Zoo officials had to add bandwidth (网络带宽) as a result.

“Something like this is kind of a wonder for us,” National Zoo Director Steve Monfort said at the time, “I lifts the spirits of my team and the whole world.” For now the Panda-Camera is still the only way the public can see the pandas.

In April 2018, a group of Canadian scientists flying in a helicopter (直升飞机) discovered something they didn't expect to see — a huge, unknown cave with an opening the size of a football field.

The cave was discovered in the northern part of Wells Gray Provincial Park, in a wild, faraway area of Canada's Cariboo Mountains. The area is hard to get to and even harder to travel through. It is covered with snow for much of the year.   

The group told Catherine Hickson, a scientist who studies rocks, about the cave. Dr. Hickson got a team of researchers together to study it. In September, they went for a closer look after most of the snow melted (融化). The cave is one of the largest in Canada. Not only is the opening to the cave larger than a football field, the cave is also deep. The team couldn't measure (测量) all the way to the bottom, but they think it may be more than 180 meters deep. The cave is tens of thousands of years old. But the rock in the cave is made of used to be at the bottom of an ocean (海洋). It is hundreds of millions of years old.

A small, but fast river of melting snow leads into the cave on one side, creating a waterfall near the top and a river at the bottom. The water comes out again a long way away. The exit (出口) is about 2.1 kilometers away and about l/2 kilometer lower down.

The cave will have to wait to get an official name. For now, the cave is being called "Sarlacc's Pit "because it looks similar to the home of the Sarlacc, a person in the Star Wars movie Return of the Jedi.

For Dr. Hickson, there's a lesson to be learned from the cave. "It shows you that you don't know everything, "she says." There are things yet to be discovered."

Wealthy nations need to give as much as ten times current levels of funding to help developing countries adapt to climate change, the United Nations said in a report.

If developing nations can’t adjust to climate change, rich countries will also feel the consequences, says Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which prepared the report. “The idea that you can have a wall around your state and somehow protect yourself is simply unrealistic,” Andersen says. The report comes as world leaders prepare to gather for a climate conference. Organizers hope to make people realize the growing gap between current levels of aid for climate adaptation and what they say is required as climate shocks get worse.

Climate adaptation refers to steps to better protect people against the consequences of climate change— for example, moving communities away from coastlines and other areas. But much of the climate focus from rich countries’ leaders has been on limiting global warming by encouraging countries to burn less coal, oil and gas to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

At the United Nations climate meeting in Glasgow, countries promised to double the amount of funding available for adaptation to developing countries by 2025. But even if nations succeed in that, it’d still be insufficient for the need. Besides, it’s often spent in ways that aren’t likely to be effective over time, the report said. Adaptation efforts tend to be narrow, focus on short-term needs and fail to take future risks into account, it said.

The risk is that countries will soon experience climate shocks to which they simply can’t adapt, Andersen says. Relocation (搬迁), arguably the most extreme and expensive form of adaptation, will soon become vital, according to Andersen. “In most low-lying coastal areas, planned relocation is the last strategy,” Andersen says. “The longer wealthy countries kick this can down the road, the higher the price in human lives.”