【推荐1】Humans really do have a sixth sense that lets us detect magnetic fields (磁场), but we’re not aware we have it. It has long been known as ESP, Spider Sense, or the ability to see things before they happen. But now scientists have proved that humans really do have a sixth sense-that lets them detect magnetic fields. Tests have shown that mankind may have the same inborn sense of Earth’s magnetic field that has long been proved to exist in animals.

By putting a protein from the human retina (视网膜) into fruit flies, researchers noticed that the insect adjusted its flight path just as if its eye had not been changed. This suggests that the “sixth sense” does exist in humans but we might not be aware of it. Animals use such sight to navigate long distances during migration or, in the case of birds, to “see” where they are going. The complex tests involved examining the process by which light goes through a bird’s eye, which has interested the scientific community for more than 30 years. In the late 1970s, the physicist Klaus Schulten concluded that birds fly by relying on geomagnetically (地磁) sensitive biochemical reactions in their eyes.

Tests have shown that the special cells in the eye carry out this function using the protein cryptochrome (蛋白隐色素). Professor Reppert’s team used wild fruit flies, replacing their version of cryptochrome with the human equivalent (等价物), and then put them in a maze (迷宫) with each wing wrapped in a metal coil (金属圈). They then sent electricity through it so that the coil was magnetised in a way which is just like Earth’s electromagnetic field (电磁场). The flies responded in exactly the same way as if they had their own cryptochrome, by either avoiding the magnetic fields or moving towards them if the researchers had placed sugar nearby.

The new study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

【推荐2】You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans—between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, foreing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.

At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源)of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that's part of Von Wong's artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.

In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload's worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled "Truckload of Plastic" Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped(倾倒)from a truck all at once.

Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.

【推荐1】American real estate (房地产) tycoon Donald Trump, whose election as US president surprised many around the world, has been unsurprisingly named Time magazine’s “Peron of the Year” for 2016.

Trump said while responding to the news, “It means a lot, especially me growing up reading Time magazine. And it’s a very important magazine, and I’ve been lucky enough to be on the cover many times this year-and last year. But I consider this a very, very great honor.”

Trump has long been obsessed with having his face on the cover of magazines, something that happened more and more often as he won early polls, then Republican primaries, then the nomination (提名), then the presidency. Trump keeps piles of these magazines in his office and with this mindset, Time’s “Person of the Year” became Trumps long-cherished wish.

Although the magazine featured Trump several times on its cover, it passed on naming him “Person of the Year” for 2015. Instead, it selected German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whom the magazine credited with opening her nation’s border to hundreds of thousands of refugees (难民) and managing Europe’s debt crisis. Trump did not take that news well. “I told you @ TIME Magazine would never pick me as ‘Person of the Year’ in spite of being the big favorite. They picked the person who is ruining Germany,” he said on Twitter soon after the news was announced.

Time managing editor Nancy Gibbs said that the decision in 2016 was easy. This title goes to a newsmaker who has influenced events for better or for worse. “When have we ever seen a single individual who has so defied (违背) expectations...beaten not one but two political parties on the way to winning an election... I don’t think that we have ever seen one person, operating in such an unconventional way, have an impact on the events of the year quite like this,” Gibbs said.

【推荐2】Alibaba co-founder and chairman Jack Ma on Monday announced in an open letter that he would step down, with the company CEO Daniel Zhang taking over as the chairman of the board. Zhang, is known as a key architect of Alibaba’s “Singles Day”, the Nov. 11 event that has become the world’s largest online shopping event. In the letter entitled “Happy Teachers’ Day,” Ma said he would retire as the chairman of the board on Sept. 10, 2019. Ma said he would work closely with Zhang to ensure a smooth transition and stay on the Alibaba board of directors until the annual shareholders meeting in two years. After he steps down, he will continue to be part of the “Alibaba Partnership”, which has the ability to nominate the majority of directors on the company’s board. He also wants to return to education and charity, which gives him excitement and blessings.

“There’s only Bill Gates who has done the same. No other tech founder in the world has just resigned like that at the top,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, which publishes an annual influential list of China’s richest people. Hoogewerf added that in China, Ma was a figure like no other, with friends ranging from movie stars to billionaires, though he often outshone them all. “He’s the big one, he’s the one that brings them together.”

The company was founded at a time when the industry was still dominated by state-owned firms and entrepreneurship was seen as a risky career path. Alibaba, previously recognized as an on-line shopping company, also has investments in sports content, microchips and facial recognition technology and has been positioning itself as a serious player in cloud computing. Mr. Ma said in the letter, “The one thing I can promise everyone is this: Alibaba was never about Jack Ma, but Jack Ma will forever belong to Alibaba.”

【推荐3】Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted (收养). “My parents were very open with me about that,” he recalled. He had a clear memory of sitting in the yard of his house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. “Does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. “My whole world was falling apart,” according to Jobs. “I remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’ They were very serious and looked me straight in the eyes. They said, ‘We specially picked you out.’ Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they stressed every word in that sentence.”

Abandoned (被抛弃). Chosen. Special. These words became part of who Jobs was and how he thought of himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars (伤疤). “He wants to control everything because of his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,” said one longtime colleague (同事), Del Yocam.“He wants to control his environment, and he sees his product as a part of himself.” Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. “Steve talked to me a lot about being abandoned,” he said. “It caused great pains and made him independent. He was different from others because he was born into a different world.”

Later in life, Jobs became a father and abandoned one of his children. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the few who remained close to Jobs. “To understand Jobs, you have to know the reason why he can’t control himself and is sometimes cruel and harmful to others,” he said. “That goes back to being abandoned at birth. The real problem was the theme of abandonment in Steve’s life.”