When Kyle Jauregui recently went to pick up his younger sister's birthday cake, he met with a bittersweet surprise.

On arriving at the baker's, he learnt that Madison's cake had already been paid for—by a complete stranger. It was a touching act of kindness, but, as it turned out, not a random one. The cake had been paid for by a lady known simply as “McKenna's mum” —as part of a gesture she had been making for a while, and for a heartbreaking reason.

While Madison was set to celebrate turning 11, McKenna Jodell Fox would have turned ten on the same day. McKenna was only nine months old in 2008, when she was crushed by a falling TV set as her family prepared to move house.

It's a painful occasion for her mum, but one she has transformed into something positive. The cake she bought was accompanied by a card which read as follows:

“Dear Birthday Girl Family,

In honour of my daughter's 10th birthday, I have chosen your birthday cake to pay for. Each year I do this random act of kindness because I am unable to buy my daughter a cake of her own. Today is her big double-digit birthday. Please enjoy your day. ”

By Kyle's own admission, the whole family was left speechless. “We just want to say thank you to McKenna's mom,” he wrote,“and wish McKenna a happy birthday. There's still good in this world. ”

How clever can a computer be? Maybe you can get the answer after reading the following passage about a newly-developed US computer program called Smarter Child.

If you ran into Smarter Child online, you would be surprised at this kid’s huge memory. It can remember many facts. For example, Smarter Child knows every baseball player in every team this season and the weather in every city across the US. He also knows every word in the dictionary. However, if you ask Smarter Child other private questions, you will get strange answers. A question about Smarter Child’s age returns, “I’ll be older than you after further study!”, and asking where he lives, you will get, “In a clean room in a high-tech building in California.”

Smarter Child uses the huge information on the World Wide Web as his memory bank. To answer questions about spelling, for example, Smarter Child goes to www.ahdictionary.com. For the weather, he visits www.intellicast.com. He turns to www.the-scientist.com for scientists and www.moviefone.com for a fantastic movie.

Some scientists believe that by joining many systems of the Internet, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the combined (结合的) knowledge of, say, Albert Einstein, Richard Nixon and Britney Spears could be born. However, Smarter Child has difficulty in discerning whether a behavior is right or wrong, which is obvious to any young child. If he wants to think and learn without any help from the programmers like boy-computer David in the movie Artificial Intelligence (AI), he must solve two problems.

The first is that computers find it difficult to read web pages because the files are sorted in different ways. That’s why programmers need to tell Smarter Child where to look for the weather. It would be a much more difficult task to let him find it by himself. Another problem is that while Smarter Child can deal with information more exactly and faster than any human, he needs programmers to make better systems that allow machines to solve problems of common sense, which is a huge challenge.

While Ellard Hunting and fellow researchers were out studying the weather at a field station in England, they noticed something unexpected on their instruments. Though there was no storm coming, the scientists’ electric field monitors recorded a strange increase in atmospheric electric charge(电荷) .

Nearby, honeybees that lived in on-site hives were swarming (蜂拥) as they tried to find a new home. When the team took a closer look at their data, they discovered that the swarming honeybees had created an atmospheric electric charge. The researchers shared more details about their findings in the journal Science.

“This is the first report of biology as a source of space charge.” says Hunting, a biophysicist at the University of Bristol in England. Scientists had known that individual bees carry a small charge while flying through the air, caused by the friction of their body parts against the air and each other. It’s similar to how rubbing a balloon on a piece of cloth creates static electricity (静电). Scientists believe a bee’s charge helps pollen (花粉) stick to it and signals to other bees which flowers have already been visited. But until now, researchers had never recorded such a high voltage (电压) among swarming honeybees.

In terms of electricity generation, a bees warm’s charge isn’t so impressive：It would take about 50 billion bees to power an LED light. But compared to the charges produced by common weather events, the bees’ charge density was six times greater than an electrified dust storm and eight times greater than a thunderstorm cloud.

Scientists hope to continue exploring how biology influences physics and are curious to know if something similar is happening with other wildlife, such as birds and bats.