John is a barber, running a very successful business. He has a large group of regulars, some of whom enjoy a daily shave in his shop, while others just come for the occasional haircut. They keep coming because John loves to laugh, and 30 minutes spent in his shop is a medicine that cheers everyone up. His loud, booming laugh is a trademark around his town.

But John wasn’t always a barrel of laughs. In his teens and early adulthood, he suffered from depression. He often had a long face and found it hard to even smile. It was his neighbor, Mrs. Lee, who was a psychologist, that helped him out. She showed him funny videos or read light-hearted books for him, guided him to focus on things he was grateful for, rather than on things that had been bothering him. Following her advice, he forced himself to laugh as wild as possible, even if it felt fake (假的). To his surprise, after a while, he turned his life around, and real laughter came back into his life again.

Researchers say that we’re all born with the ability to laugh and that finding more ways to bring laughter into our lives does not have to be complicated. In fact, the best advice they offer is “Fake it till you make it.” If you focus on finding ways to laugh and enjoy life and try to smile and laugh even when not feeling like it, you can genuinely change your mood and laugh happily.

John also says we shouldn’t hold back our urge to laugh, even at silly things. Next time you see a funny advertisement on television, making you laugh inside, focus on letting out that laughter. Laughter can be contagious, so you may help others around you, too.

Technologies used for human purposes are now being applied to improve pets well-being. And the pet humanization trend (趋势) of recent years is shown in technology, with a great increase in demand for different kinds of wearable tech devices (设备) from pet parents around the world. Today, it’s not unusual to see dogs or cats with something tied to their body to monitor (监控) their activity or track their location.

“People don’t know the answer to questions about how much exercise or the amount of food their dog needs and that’s where wearable monitoring device comes in,” says CEO and co-founder of PitPat, Andrew Nowell. Between 2020 and 2021,this UK developer of a pet tracking device for dogs shipped 39% more of its products. At the same time the UK pet population increased by 10% to more than 9 million and a new type of pet owner appeared, the so-called Generation Y. They are the majority of customers that buy a wearable tech device, mainly wanting to know how far their pet has gone and what the dog is doing while they’re out.

The wearable tech field is mainly made up of small startup companies. But this may change in the near future. “All the big players are very interested. They will jump into the field in one way or another,” said Asaf Dagan, co-founder of the wearable tech device producer PetPace. Market research companies are predicting (预料) that the field will be worth between $2.4 billion and $3.5 billion in the coming years, with a yearly increase ranging between 13.5% and 25% by 2025.

Despite the potential (潜力), there are still some challenges that companies will soon have to face. Awareness is one of them. “The function of the GPS tracker is better known among pet parents, but there is still work to do to help them know about activity monitors. It is a matter of putting the message across. The value is there and the need is there. It’s about providing a connection and creating awareness,” commented Dagan.

Imagine that you could go into outer space, take your helmet off, and take a breath—without dying instantly, that is. Would the surrounding universe have a smell?

We think of space as a huge empty, pitch-dark and dead silent place without air. A place like that couldn’t possibly have a smell, right? As it turns out, space actually does have a clear smell. While we can’t smell anything in outer space because, as we mentioned, anyone attempting to do so would almost instantly die, what we can smell are the things that have come back from space.

Space suits, for instance, smell differently after they’ve returned from space than they did before launch. Astronauts returning from space say that their suits smell, in a word, burnt. The remaining scent of space reminds the astronauts of unpleasant burnt meat or metallic smoke.

What causes this rather unpleasant smell? Scientists believe that it could come from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a chemical compound (化合物). These things are basically high-powered materials released into space during the nuclear reactions that power stars and supernovae.

However, this smell is one of many scents that space could have. The universe is massive, after all, filled with many different elements and compounds. Scientists do have a pretty good idea of what a lot of “space stuff” is made of, giving them better ideas about what it might smell like. Most memorably, the dust cloud at the center of the Milky Way contains large amounts of ethyl formate (甲酸乙酯). This is the compound that, on Earth, gives raspberries (覆盆子) their scent. Yes, raspberries. What’s more, ethyl formate itself is created from a reaction between acid and a type of alcohol, which gives it a smell similar to a strong alcohol. (Ironically, alcohol is one of the foods that are banned from space.) The smell of space—or at least that part of space—doesn’t seem so bad anymore.