【推荐1】As with other organs like the heart, lungs, or liver, human life depends on healthy kidneys (肾脏). One way to help a patient with kidney trouble is to replace their kidneys with healthy kidneys, which is called a “transplant”. For years, scientists have tried to figure out how to transplant organs from other animals into humans. This is hard because the human body almost always rejects something that isn’t its own.

Scientists have tried transplanting organs from chimpanzees (黑猩猩) or baboons (狒狒), but this didn’t work very well. More recently, scientists have focused on transplants from pigs. In many ways, pigs’ bodies are similar to humans. It’s fairly easy to raise pigs, and they grow quickly. It’s now common for doctors to transplant pig heart valves (瓣膜) to repair damaged human hearts. Heart valves open and close to help the heart pump blood.

But human bodies normally reject other pig organs because they contain a special chemical called “alpha-gal”. This time, to prevent the body from rejecting the pig kidney, scientists changed the pig’s DNA slightly so that it wouldn’t produce alpha-gal.

Last month, a medical team at New York University Langone Health, led by Dr. Robert Montgomery, attached this special pig kidney to a brain-dead human patient, who had wished to donate her organs, for the first time ever. The kidney functioned normally for the hours it was attached. “There didn’t seem to be any kind of sign between the pig kidney and the human that would make it not work,” said Montgomery. “It was beyond our expectation. It didn’t have the immediate rejection that we had worried about.”

Though the kidney wasn’t placed inside the patient’s body, it was connected to the patient for over two days. During that time, the kidney worked as kidneys are supposed to work. Most importantly, there were no signs that the kidney was being rejected. However, there are still many questions to be answered. It’s not known what would happen once this kind of kidney is actually transplanted into a human. Would it be rejected after a while?

【推荐2】With artificial intelligence (AI) seemingly working its way into every technology out there, one area where it’s considered particularly promising is in helping doctors. And already, AI is entering some doctors’ offices.

Dr. Michael Mansour of Massachusetts General Hospital is an early user who’s helped by a form of AI that could someday change the way doctors get information. When a patient comes in with unknown infection (感染), Mansour turns to a computer program called UpToDate. It’s a common tool, with more than 2 million users at 44,000 health care organizations in over 190 countries. Basically, it’s Google for doctors — searching a huge database (数据库) of articles written by experts in the field, who are all getting information from the latest research.

Wolters Kluwer Health, the company that makes UpToDate, is trying to incorporate (整合) AI so that doctors can have more of a conversation with the database.

Some doctors hope to use AI to comb through a patient’s medical history before an appointment (预约). In some cases, Dr. June-Ho Kim, who directs a program on primary care at Ariadne Labs, says AI technology may also help primary care doctors look after patients without the help of specialists. “It will free up specialists’ time to focus on more difficult cases that they need to really home in on, rather than the ones that could be answered through a few questions,” he says.

Dr. Marc Succi, who was a co-worker of Kim, says, “AI will finally prove to be a trusted medical tool. AI won’t replace doctors, but doctors who use AI will replace doctors who do not. It will become very common just like designing a PPT on a computer. It’s that level of leap.”

【推荐3】With a history of 2000 to 3000 years, traditional Chinese medicine has formed a unique system to diagnose and cure illness. Traditional Chinese medicine is a complete healthcare system that is capable of providing both specialized and primary healthcare. It also gives us guidelines on how to prevent illnesses. Acupuncture is a branch of traditional Chinese medicine.

The word “acupuncture” literally means “pricking with a needle”. It involves the insertion and manipulation   of needles into acupuncture points on the body for restoring health and wellbeing. This framework of medical practice begins with the belief that our body is a balance of two opposite yet inseparable forces—the yin and yang. Another cornerstone of traditional Chinese medicine is the concept of chi. Chi is the life force of the universe. In the body, it is chi that creates and animates life. We are all born with a certain amount of chi and continually acquire it throughout our lives through food, air, water and sunlight. Chi is believed to move through our body in channels called meridians. The quantity and quality of chi in our body depends on the state of our mental and physical balance. In fact, imbalances of the yin and yang in the body block the channels through which chi travels in our body. The practice of acupuncture unblocks these chi pathways, thus ensuring the constant and free flow of energy through our body for mental and physical wellbeing.

The method may seem alien to many of us but it has been practiced in China for thousands of years. Acupuncture originated in China more than 2000 years ago—making it one of the oldest and most commonly practiced medical procedures in China. Research into acupuncture is still ongoing and practices and theories are being constantly updated. In essence, acupuncture is aimed at promoting well-being and relieving pain.

In more recent times, acupuncture has spread internationally and won growing global acceptance, and this wisdom of the Chinese tradition will continue to thrive, to bring health and happiness to friends here and afar.

【推荐2】This is Scientific America's 60-Second Science. I am Christopher Intagliata.

The Apollo missions brought back 842 pounds of rock and soil from the moon, that's nearly 2200 different samples. But the most interesting one, according to a scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa, is a sample named "Apollo 1-0-0-8-5 collected by Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11.

“He was about to step back into the lunar module(登月舱) when he turned around and saw there were little spaces in the rock box. He knew that geologists on earth would be just so excited to study these materials, so he just scooped up nine scoops(勺) of soil and put it into the box." Wadhwa explained.

It was one of the most well studied samples of the Apollo missions. And a geologist named John Wood noticed white flecks(微粒) of rock in the soil, which inspired him to dig deeper into the moon's ancient past.

“This was quite a leap of imagination — he proposed that the whole of the moon had been almost covered with a magma(岩浆) ocean nearly 4.5 billion years ago. This was a revolutionary idea at the time, because people had thought the moon had formed cold, so it completely changed our idea how the moon formed.”

But Wadhwa has a more personal reason to appreciate this sample. She met her husband Scott Parazynski also because of this rock sample. Scott, a mountaineer at that time, wanted to climb Mount Everest with a moon rock while Wadhwa was the chairman of the NASA committee that gives access to the samples for scientific purposes.

Neil Armstrong's last-minute scoop of moon dust brought two people together here on Earth and upturned our understanding of how the moon — and the Earth itself-got here.

Thank you for listening for Scientific American's 60-Second Science.

【推荐2】Initial conversations can have a huge impact on how relationships develop over time. People are often stuck in the impressions they think they might have made the minute they finish speaking with someone for the first time: “Did they like me or were they just being polite?” “Were they deep in thought or deeply bored?”

To find out whether these worries are necessary, we have conducted nearly 10 years of research. In our studies, participants in the UK talked with someone they had never met before. Afterward, they were asked how much they liked their conversation partner and how much they believed that their conversation partner liked them. This allowed us to compare how much people believed they were liked to how much they were actually liked.

Time and time again, we found that people left their conversations with negative feelings about the impression they made. That is, people systematically underestimate how much their conversation partners like them and enjoy their company — a false belief we call the “liking gap”.

This bias (偏见) may seem like something that would occur only in initial interactions, but its effects extend far beyond a first impression. Surprisingly, the liking gap can constantly affect a variety of relationships, including interactions with coworkers, long after the initial conversations have taken place. Having a larger liking gap is associated with being less willing to ask workmates for help, less willing to provide workmates with open and honest feedback, and less willing to work on another project together.

There are numerous strategies to minimize your biased feelings. One place to start is shifting your focus of attention. Try to direct your attention to your conversation partner, be genuinely curious about them, ask them more questions, and really listen to their answers. The more you’re zeroed in on the other person, and the less you’re focused on yourself, the better your conversation will be and the less your mind will turn to all the things you think you didn’t do well.

【推荐3】About two years ago, several lunar missions showed that some lunar soil contains minute amounts of water molecules. But where did water on the moon come from? Answering that question can help us understand the moon’s history and evolution, but also allow future engineers to potentially tap into this resource when building a sustainable moon base.

Chinese scientists have discovered that minerals in lunar soil might have got that substance   (物质) critical for life from solar wind bombarding (轰炸) the moon’s surface with hydrogen ions (氢离子), according to a study published in the journal Nature Communication on Saturday.

In a previous study, published in June, Chinese scientists concluded that most water found on the moon may have originated in its interior. That study, like the new one, was conducted on lunar samples from China’s Chang’e-5 mission in 2020.

The study in June found that lunar soil had around 30 parts per million of water content in the form of hydroxyl (羟基), a close chemical relative of water. However, lunar minerals may contain water content of up to 179 ppm. One ppm of water would yield (产生) around 1 gram of water per metric ton (公吨) of soil.

The latest study essentially confirmed the estimates from the previous research, and those lunar minerals could contain even more water. Moreover, the new study identified solar wind as a key mechanism for the existence of water on the moon’s surface.

The study found that the solar wind resulted at least 170 ppm of water content in lunar samples gathered by the Chang’e-5 mission. Lunar minerals such as pyroxene, plagioclase, and olivine are likely the main reservoirs (水库) of solar wind-derived water.

“This study has important implications for understanding the evolution of water on the lunar surface and evaluating the contribution of solar wind protons (质子) to the water reservoirs of the lunar surface, ”the researchers said.

Lunar samples collected during the Chang’e-5 mission may hold the keys to answering these questions, since they are much younger than the ones collected by US and Soviet moon missions. So, the water content in the Chinese samples has had less time to be influenced by other factors, making these samples ideal for studying the moon’s water.