You probably know who Marie Curie was, but you may not have heard of Rachel Carson. Of the outstanding ladies listed below, who do you think was the most important woman of the past 100 years?

Jane Addams (1860－1935)

Anyone who has ever been helped by a social worker has Jane Addams to thank. Addams helped the poor and worked for peace. She encouraged a sense of community (社区) by creating shelters and promoting education and services for people in need. In 1931, Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Rachel Carson (1907－1964)

If it weren’t for Rachel Carson, the environmental movement might not exist today. Her popular 1962 book SilentSpring raised awareness of the danger of pollution and the harmful effects of chemicals on humans and on the world's lakes and oceans.

Sandra Day O’Connor (1930－present)

When Sandra Day O'Connor finished third in her class at Stanford Law School, in 1952, she could not find work at a law firm because she was a woman. She became an Arizona state senator (参议员) and in 1981, the first woman to join the US Supreme Court. O'Connor gave the deciding vote in many important cases during her 24 years on the top court.

Rosa Parks (1913－2005)

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks would not give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Her simple act landed Parks in prison. But it also set off the Montgomery bus boycott. It lasted for more than a year, and kicked off the civil - rights movement. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” said Parks.

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a book titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved.

On a rainy Saturday, she picked up the book. As she sped through the pages, she became fascinated by the drama, which encouraged her to explore nature's wonders. Even though her high school teacher told her that girls didn't become scientists, she decided she would.

She worked with a biologist, Charpentier, to turn a curiosity of nature into an invention—an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as Crispr, the tool will transform the human race. James Watson, the author of The Double Helix, later told her it was the most important biological advance: since he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA.

For this achievement, Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. Until now, only five women, beginning with Marie Curie in 1911, had won or shared the Nobel for Chemistry out of 184 award winners. When this year's prize was announced, Dr. Charpentier said it would provide a message specifically to young girls who would like to follow the path of science and to show them that women can also be awarded prizes.

A few decades from now, if it becomes possible and sate to edit DNA, should we allow parents to improve the IQ and physical strength of their kids? Should we let them decide eye color? Skin color? Height? After helping to discover Crispr, Dr. Doudna has become a leader in considering these moral issues. That's the main message we should take from this Nobel: New technologies can be a huge benefit to the human race, but in order to make sure they are used wisely, it's important for people to understand them.

Studying how people move to music is a powerful tool for researchers looking to understand how and why music affects us the way it does. Over the last few years, researchers at the Center for Interdisciplinary Music Research in Finland have used motion capture (运动捕捉) technology to learn that your dance moves say a lot about you, such as what mood you happen to be in, and even how much you understand other people's feelings. Recently, however, they discovered something amazing.

In fact, we weren't looking for this result, as we set out to study something completely different, explains Dr. Emily Carlson, the first author of the study. “Our original idea was to see if we could use machines to identify which category of music our participants were dancing to, based on their movements.”

The 73 participants in the study were motion captured dancing to eight different categories. The only instruction they received was to listen to the music and move any way they felt natural. The researchers then analyzed their movements using machine learning, trying to distinguish between the different kinds of music. Unfortunately, their computer algorithm (算法) was able to identify the correct kind less than 30% of the time. They were shocked to discover, however, that the computer could correctly identify which of the 73 individuals was dancing 94% of the time. Left to chance (that is, if the computer had simply guessed without any information to go on), the expected accuracy would be less than 2%.

“It seems as though a personas dance movements are a kind of fingerprint,” says Dr. Pasi Saari, co-author of the study and data analyst, “Each person has a unique movement signature that stays the same no matter what kind of music is playing.” Some kinds, however, had more effect on individual dance movements than others. The computer was less accurate in identifying individuals when they were dancing to Metal music.

As a CEO of a startup, you get used to hearing"no".You also face an endless continuation of what feels like shocking crises, like nearly running out of cash, losing a key customer,discovering a widespread product failure, or having to shut down operations because of a global pandemic. But it turns out that these disasters can actually be good for you. In fact,I'm not sure whether you can innovate without them. Here's what all our crises have taught me.

It's good to be uncomfortable. We once had a key customer request-a battery capability that we'd never developed before. The customer made it clear that if we couldn't develop this capability, they'd be less confident in our product. We wrestled with the risks, not least of which was the potential embarrassment if we couldn't meet the customer's needs. We knew we'd face many technical problems if we tried to go into operation. Yet we decided to try to satisfy the customer, even if it wasn't obvious at first how we could get it done. A few weeks later we delivered something beyond what the customer had asked for, and we've since grown this capability into a powerful sales tool and potential revenue stream-not to mention it strengthened our relationship with the customer.

Short-term failure is good. A few years ago, our company began to expand our manufacturing output in response to a customer's need. In the process we discovered something unusual we hadn't seen during smaller-scale production. Our team dived into failure analysis, and we finally put the problem down to a single material within the battery. We'd used this material for years, but now we needed a replacement. Once we made that change,the battery quality and reliability greatly improved.

It's okay to show weakness. One of my hardest days as CEO was the day when I found out I was pregnant.We were in the middle of raising a funding round, and I had been traveling nonstop for a year. Until that day, I had assumed that my role as CEO was to display strength and confidence. With the mounting pressure I was harder on myself than I needed to be, and now I had the added stress of being pregnant.I decided to acknowledge to my team that I was breaking down. They united together and found ways to operate more smoothly and communicate more effectively, supporting me to focus my time on most pressing goals. This gave me not only the space to plan for the company’s future,but also to prepare for my own new normal: leading while becoming a first-time mother.