For working parents with busy schedule, mornings are hell: preparing meals, ironing clothes, feeding the children, packing lunches, ensuring everyone has what they need for the day... But I'm pleased to say my perspective on mornings is sunnier than most parents, though being woken at 6 am by kids was hardly a welcome addition to the night owl like me.

The different views first arise partly from opinions on television. I don't see the harm in letting my kids watch a bit of television before school, so long as they still make time to get dressed, eat breakfast and brush their teeth. This balance took years to achieve: a routine steadily drilled into them via daily practice -pause the TV program with complaints and screams-to fulfil each everyday activity; but, now they've observed that the quicker they perform their essential tasks, the quicker their entertainment will restart.

With morning necessities completed with speed and proficiency, then comes the 15-minute walk to school. In our family, it's me and the dog who do the school run, and it's actually one of my favourite times of the day. This quarter of an hour provides me privileged access to my kids when they're at their freshest; rather than at the end of the day, when they're tired, hungry and annoyed. They ask stimulating questions, "How is ice cream made?" "How long would it take to drive to Mars?", but they usually can't hear my answers over the drowning noise of the traffic.

Best of all, there's the walk back: just me and the dog, enjoying the silence. A moment to recharge and reset, ahead of a day's work, and I am grateful for the joy of my family, and perhaps more grateful still that someone has just taken them off my hands for the day. Oh, what a beautiful morning!

City parks have long been a place for urban residents to get a small amount of green. As cities increasingly feel the impacts of rising seas and temperatures, people are rethinking the roles of urban parks.

All of the dark-gray asphalt (沥青) in cities collect heat. Dallas is one of the country's fastest-warming cities thanks in part to its extensive impervious (不透水的) surfaces, but with a new $312 million bond package, the city is hoping to change that. Using satellite data, the city is able to see what neighborhoods most need the cooling effect of green spaces.

Cities are increasingly flooding and city planners think parks can help with this issue too. A report published in February by The Nature Conservancy looked at the best ways to deal with flooding in Houston, a city with many neighborhoods built on floodplains and regularly flooded by rising waters. Offering affected homeowners buyouts and transforming homes into green spaces would save more money than installing infrastructure (基础设施) like pipes, they found.

Brendan Shane, a climate program director, says parks can create opportunities for people to exercise and play, in addition to cooling neighborhoods and absorbing floodwater. "The stronger the bonds are from neighbor to neighbor, the better they are able to react to a shock," he says.

"Not a single solution by itself will avoid the climate crisis. We see parks as an important part of it, but there isn't a silver bullet," says Diane Regas, CEO of The Trust for Public Land. "Parks are an example of what we in the environmental community need to do to reach solutions that address climate change at the same time and make people's lives better."

Standing out from the crowd isn't always a good thing.

Birds with uncommon traits like big beaks(喙), long tails and extended wings are more likely to be threatened and face extinction, new research finds. 

"We are fascinated by the diversity of the planet's bird species. At the same time, we are deeply concerned about the threats these birds face," lead author Jarome Ali, a PhD candidate at Princeton University, says. Ali completed the research at Imperial College London.

For their work, researchers analyzed measurement data collected from 9, 943 bird species, which are about 99% of all living bird species. The information came from both living birds as well as museum specimens(标本). The measurements included beak size and shape, as well as the length of legs, tails and wings. Researchers combined the information on physical traits with the birds' risk of extinction. Next, they ran simulations(模拟) about what would occur if the most threatened birds were to become extinct.

"All our simulations showed that extinction has worse effects on the diversity of bird shapes than we expected. This is deeply concerning, but not shocking given that we first found that threatened birds were more unique than non-threatened birds," Ali says.

The researchers weren't sure what could explain the link between unusual birds and their extinction risk. "Unique birds are likely to play specialized roles in the ecosystem. One possible explanation is that as habitats come under threat, these specialized roles are likely to be the first to be targeted," Ali says. "For example, if you were a hummingbird and specialized to feed on a small subset of plants, then damage to your habitat would be worse than if you were a less unique bird that eats a whole range of foods."

"The loss of these rare birds has an impact on the environment because their role in the ecosystem is lost," Ali says. "Our findings imply that we cannot simply hope that non-threatened species will come in and fill the role of the threatened species."