On a summer afternoon, Ciara Whelan, a teacher at a New York, City elementary school, visits one of her students in the Bronx, Sapphira, who fell behind in her reading.

This home visit is the beginning of a reading program called Springboard Collaborative. Springboard runs after-school and summer programs with struggling readers. Once each week, a family member — mom, dad, grandma, an old sibling (兄弟姐妹) — attends an hour-long workshop to help learn and practice the approaches students are learning in class. “Parent engagement (参与) is the beating heart of our programs,” says founder Alejandro Gibes de Gac. “It’s the spirit in the cocktail.”

Sapphira’s Springboard program is held in a classroom at a charter school in Manhattan. In the classroom, Sapphira’s dad, sits with his daughter, helping her mark her place in the book. After a few minutes of reading together, Whelan tells parents to ask students to summarize what is happening every few pages, to check comprehension.

In the past seven years, Springboard has collected a great amount of data to prove its effectiveness. For example: In just five weeks, on average, 3 out of 4 students get to the next reading level or even further. The program also gives books to each child. Backpacks full of school supplies and tablets are offered as encouragement for completing the whole program.

Springboard plans to increase the size by spreading its model, with a goal of reaching 100,000 children in the next four years. Currently it’s running tests in different cities to see which parts of the program are necessary and important and which could be cut if a particular school lacks money for them. For example, the free tablet and backpack, it has found, don’t seem to make much difference in the program’s success. The key instead is the promise that parents make to their children.

Yellowstone National Park is boiling. The Wyoming park is filled with hot springs and geysers—all fueled by a bubbling (沸腾的) supervolcano.

Scientists agree the Yellow stone supervolcano is unlikely to blow anytime soon. Should it erupt, it would be a disaster. The eruption would shoot out enough rock and ash to cover most of the United States.

So in 2017, NASA scientists ran a thought experiment to see if they could stop a future super-eruption. The study was led by Brian Wilcox. His team came up with the idea of drilling a series of wells around the edge of the park and pumping cold water down into the hot rock. This would cool the boiling rock and prevent a disaster. As a bonus, the system would provide enough geothermal energy to power the entire country. The idea, however, has reached a standstill. Yellowstone and other national parks have long been protected from commercial energy development to ensure that these regions remain untouched.

Nowhere has geothermal energy had a greater effect on the environment than in New Zealand. Much like Yellowstone, the Wairakei Basin of the country’s north island was once a bubbling scene where 70 geysers periodically fired jets of water into the air. That is, until1958, when a geothermal power plant was developed nearby. Today, Wairakei does not host a single geyser. The power plant destroyed all 70 of them, along with 240 hot springs.

Should a project like this take place at the edges of Yellowstone National Park, it could easily leave the surface features untouched and still drill deep enough to generate geothermal power. Indeed, that was NASA’s supposed solution.

But Richards does not like the idea. Even if a geothermal power plant did not destroy the region’s features—from geysers and hot springs to mudpots—the plant would not go unnoticed in such an untouched area.