【推荐1】The city of Quanzhou in East China's Fujian province, one of the most important Chinese ports along the historic maritime(海运的)Silk Road, reported new findings about archaeological(考古的)efforts from 2019 to 2020, experts said at a meeting held in Quanzhou from Friday to Saturday.

"The latest research results on iron-making remains in Quanzhou's Anxi county showed that it used to make lots of iron and steel, important goods of trade along the historic maritime Silk Road, mainly during the Song Dynasty and Yuan Dynasty," says Shen Ruiwen, a famous archaeologist.

Two other sites were discovered and identified as remains of regulatory bodies(监管机构)that existed within the two dynasties. One of them managed affairs related to the emperors' relatives, and the other served similar functions as today's customs. Shen said, "The two ancient organizations showed that Quanzhou once provided effective support for ocean trade."

Another finding exposed was the development of china-making technology from the Song Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty in Dehua county, as is evidenced in the thousands of relics(遗迹)that were dug out.

"Quanzhou is a city of in historical significance because it preserved the continuous track of urban planning and construction from the late Tang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty," says Shen. Experts say the city will continue with research on some of the sites included in the project and carry out long-term plans.

【推荐3】Rome wasn't built in a day. And neither was the Roman subway system. Underground work is slow going, because construction workers often meet with frescoes(壁画) and other valuable stone foundations thousands of years ago. And a few years ago, they found the wooden foundations of a luxurious porch from a Roman building.

So local archaeologists called in Mauro Bernabei of the National Research Council of Italy. He's a dendrochronologist: someone who analyzes tree rings, which give age and environmental information.

"We have to study wood because it's full, really full, of information!" Bernabei and his team found that the wooden planks were oak(橡木). But the wood's origin was harder to determine. So they compared the tree rings in the oak floor to those available in libraries of tree rings that contain timber from all over Europe. And they found a match for the Roman wood—from the Jura region of eastern France, more than 600 miles away.

The researchers also determined that it was used in about 40 to 60 B.C. And some came from trees already up to 300 years old when they were cut down. The details are in the journal PLOS ONE.

The discovery is the first clear evidence of oak from north of the Alps being used to build ancient Rome. And it's a reminder that the Romans had a complex trading network. These trees, for example, likely floated down two rivers, across the Mediterranean and up another river to Rome.

Bernabei says Roman archaeologists usually destroy ancient wood—it's not as valuable as jewelry and vases and frescos. But he's hoping this study might change their minds."Save the wood, yes! And call me,if you don't want to save—please, call me!"He says.

【推荐3】Hold your smartphone, smile at the front camera, and click! You get a selfie. There is no doubt that this photo is yours. But if a monkey takes a selfie, does the camera owner have the right to decide how to use it?

Recently, this question has caused a problem between Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, and British wildlife photographer David J. Slater.

In 2011, Slater was visiting a park in Indonesia when a macaque(猕猴) got hold of one of his cameras. “They were quite naughty, jumping all over my equipment,” Slater told The Telegraph, “and it looked like they were already posing for the   camera when one hit the button.” The result was hundreds of monkey selfies. The best of images was a female macaque grinning toothily into the lens.

This week, the grinning monkey selfie returned to the news when Wikimedia refused Slater’s request to take the photos down from Wikimedia Commons, a website that is run by the organization and offers free images.     5

According to Wikimedia, anyone who downloads the monkey selfie, or any of the millions of images on the site, can “copy and use any works here freely as long as they follow what the author says.” The question that arose here was whether Slater, who had not held the camera, set up the shot, or pressed the shutter(快门) button, could be considered the photographer of the monkey selfie. Wikimedia’s position on this was clear: as the work of a non-human animal, this photo has no human author who owns the copyright.”

Only authors of creative works, like a piece of writing or a song, own copyrights. In terms of photos, US copyright law says whoever pushes the button on the camera owns the copyright to the image produced, which means that if tourists ask you to take a photo of them, and you happen to hit the shutter button at the exact moment that Justin Bieber, a Canadian singer, made faces behind them. You, as the photographer, would have the photo’s copyright and sell it. The tourists, who own the camera on which the photo was taken and asked you to take the photo don’t get the right to use it without you allowing them to. All this has been complicated by the appearance of surveillance cameras(监控摄像头), smart phones, and large-scale photography projects for which assistants often press the shutter button to produce works whose copyrights belong to their boss.

Slater seems to be thinking along these lines. He says that buying the cameras, spending thousands of pounds to transport himself to Indonesia, and allowing the monkeys to “steal” his cameras makes him the author of the image, regardless of who pushed the button. “In law, if I have an assistant then I still own the copyright,” he told the “Today” Show. “I believe in this case, the monkey was my assistant.”

If that seems unfair, think about this. If a person left her laptop in a café, and a poet picked it up, opened up a word-processing program, and typed out a poem which turned out to be the best poem of this generation, could she ask for much more than her laptop back?