On November 18, 2021, the world's first self-driving, electric container ship made its first trip to Oslo, Norway. The ship's owners aim to cut pollution by moving large amounts of products by water on the southern coast of Norway instead of by truck.

The ship called Yara Birkeland is owned by Yara，a company that makes fertilizer (肥料). The company wanted to develop a zero-emissions (零排放) ship that was completely autonomous though it might cause financial troubles. Yara worked with a ship-building company called Vard and the technology company Kongsberg to develop the ship. Yara Birkeland is a container ship that can carry 120 large containers like those pulled by trucks. But the ship is fully electric and is powered by batteries.

Now, with Yara Birkeland moving huge amounts of fertilizer by water, the company expects to cut out 40,000 yearly trips by diesel (柴油)-powered trucks, which will prevent about 1 million kilograms of carbon emissions every year.

In the future, Yara Birkeland is expected to operate completely automatically. Yara plans to spend the next two years training and testing the ship. But, as with many autonomous cars, the ship will continue to have humans watching out from a base on land even once the ship is driving fully by itself, says Svein Tore Holsether, Yara's president.

Many predicaments are waiting for Yara Birkeland. It'll be moving in a narrow waterway called a fjord. It'll have to learn to handle the changing movements of water. It'll need to pass under two bridges and avoid all the other traffic on the busy fjord. Finally, it'll have to stop safely at the port in Brevik, one of the busiest ports in Norway. The company hopes that all of these will be settled in the near future.

21-year-old Jasmine Harrison completed the 2020 Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge in 70 days, 3 hours and 48 minutes — a new world record for the youngest female to row alone across the Atlantic.

Harrison, who's from North Yorkshire, England, didn't have loads of experience in rowing long distance. In her childhood, she could not even dream of such an ambition. She'd only gotten the idea three years earlier when she happened to be in Antigua, teaching swimming, and saw the end of the 2017 Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge. "Talking to a family member of a young man that had just completed it, I got to know just how amazing a thing it was. I didn't say ‘not a chance I would do that', but it was more a fact of why not do it?" she said.

Every day, Harrison would row for about 12 hours, pushing her 550-pound boat she bought with some money across the ocean, covering roughly 90 kilometers. The journey left her with much time all by herself, which she said she enjoyed. But things got a little harder after her speaker fell in the water and she could no longer listen to her music.

She had other company along the way. She saw lots of sea life, including several whales. One even rose out of the ocean right next to her boat. "I'm in their environment," she said. "It's just amazing."

Twice, her boat was turned over in the night by large waves. The second time, she hurt her arm quite badly. Another time, she nearly ran into a ship. When her food ran out, she lived on cookies and chocolate. In the face of great hardship and loneliness, she kept going.

On February 20, 2021, she reached the island of Antigua—the end of the journey. She celebrated her arrival with a burger and fries.

Crossing paths with a wild boar (野猪) can pose fear and joy in equal measure. Despite 700years of extinction in Britain, the species' own tenacity and illegal releases from the 1980s have now led to several populations emerging. However, with impacts on both people and the countryside, their right to exist in Britain is heavily debated.

However, the boar's habitat-regenerating actions that benefit other wildlife, even if they are unloved by many. The few boar in England are threatened again by poaching and culling. Why is more not being done to prevent their re-extinction?

Naturalist, writer and science communicator Chantal Lyons addresses all these complex issues and explains what it might take for us to coexist with wild boar in her new book, Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain's Wild Boar. In this extract, she explains the history of the wild boar in Britain.

Most of the last millennium was not kind to the wild boar of Europe. But they endured when so many other large animals did not, and their star is ascendant once more. Their population status is rated as "Least Concern" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which reports that the species now has one of the vastest geographical distributions of all land animals, partly thanks to humans.

And so, with hindsight, the return of wild boar to Britain was inevitable. If not intentional. There'd been mutterings among environmentalists for decades that the species should be reintroduced. The market got a taste for them.

More farms sprung up, buying in animals from the Continent, where they had never been extinct and the farming of them was already long established. By the early 1990s there were 40 registered breeders in the UK.

Despite thousands of years of trying, one of the qualities that has proven most challenging to breed out of the farmed pig is escapology. Life, as a certain fictional mathematician once said, finds a way. Our woodlands had been waiting for nearly 700 years. Answering whatever call was sounding in their brains, wild boar began to escape from the farms. Or, in some cases, seem to have been variously helped out by storm damage, animal rights activists, hard-up owners and shooters. Each freed individual was a spark. Something new, something hot and bright with potential. Not all those sparks took. But enough did.