【推荐1】With the help of new devices on mice, scientists are using light to switch nerve cells on and off in mice’s brains to explore the animals’ social behavior, a new study shows.

The new devices rely on optogenetics(光遗传学), a technique in which researchers use bursts of light to stimulate or control the brain nerve cells, often using tailored viruses to genetically correct cells so they respond to light. Scientists have applied optogenetics to explore neural(神经的) circuits in mice and other lab animals to come to a conclusion on how they might work in humans. Optogenetic devices often feed light to neurons via fiber-optic cables, but such things can influence natural behaviors and social interactions. While scientists recently developed implantable(可植入的) wireless optogenetic devices, these depend on relatively simple remote controls or limited sets of preprogrammed instructions.

These new fully implantable optogenetic devices can enable more complex research. Specifically, the researchers can adjust each device’s programming during the course of experiment. “So you can target what an animal does in a much more complex way,” says Genia Kozorovitskiy, a researcher at Northwestern University.

These devices are battery-free, wirelessly powered by the same high-frequency radio waves used to remotely control the intensity, duration and timing of the light pulses. The devices also allow scientists to control four different neural circuits in an animal simultaneously, thanks to LEDs that give out four colors——blue, green, yellow and red——instead of just one.

The widely available wireless technology used in this work, the same now used in contactless payment with credit cards, could allow broad adoption across the neuroscience community “without extensive specialized hardware”, says Philipp Gutruf at the University of Arizona. “That means that we might see these devices in many labs in the near future, enabling new discoveries.”

【推荐1】Scientists from the University of Tsukuba designed a text message mediation (调节) robot that can help users control their anger when receiving upsetting news. This device may help improve social interactions as we move towards a world with increasingly digital communications.

While a quick text message apology is a fast and easy way for friends to let us know they are going to be late for a planned meeting, it is often missing the human factor that will accompany an explanation face-to-face, or even over the phone. It is likely to be more upsetting when we are not able to notice the emotional weight behind our friends’ regret at making us wait.

Now, researchers at the University of Tsukuba have built a robot that they called OMOY, which was equipped with a movable weight driven by mechanical parts inside its body. By shifting the internal weight, the robot could express simulated emotions (模拟情绪). The robot was designed as a mediator for reading text messages. A text with unwelcome or frustrating news could be followed by a suggestion by OMOY to not get upset, or even sympathy for the user.

“With the medium of written digital communication, the lack of social feedback shift focus from the sender and onto the content of the message itself, ” author Professor Fumihide Tanaka says. The mediator robot was designed so that it can control the user's anger and other negative motivations.

The researchers tested 94 people with a message like “I’m sorry, I am late. The appointment slipped my mind. Can you wait another hour?” The team found that OMOY was able to reduce negative emotions. “The mediation robot can relay (播放) a frustrating message followed by giving its own opinion. When this speech is accompanied by the appropriate weight shifts, we saw that the user would feel the ‘intention’ of the robot to help them calm down,” Professor Tanaka says.

【推荐3】LANZHOU-When an international olive oil competition announced its winners in Greece in late June, excitement spread across the village of Daoqi in Northwest China.

“The award-winning olive oil was made from our fruit,” said Ru Ciming, 50, an olive planter from the village under the city of Longnan, Gansu province. The variety of olive trees in Ru’s orchard (果园) was introduced from Spain. In the eyes of locals, the foreign trees have not only pulled the city, once among the least-developed regions in China, out of poverty, but they have also brought them international fame.

Olives originated in the Mediterranean (地中海地区) and their oil, often called liquid gold, is used widely in food, cosmetics and medicine. In the 1960s, the Albanian government gifted China more than 10,000 olive saplings (树苗), which were then planted in many parts of the country on nationwide trials. Longnan began to plant olive trees in the early 1970s and experts concluded that the region was ideal for the resettlement of the olive trees due to its climate and soil condition. After years of experiments and promotion, it is now the largest olive cultivation (栽培) base in China.

In recent years, the local olive oil industry has continued to expand as Longnan has improved cooperation with Mediterranean countries that have a long history of olive planting, including Italy, Greece and Spain. The improved cooperation aims to introduce better varieties and initiate technical exchanges.

Pedro J. Rodriguez Sanchez, a Spanish olive seedling expert, was one of the early contributors to olive exchanges. He arrived in Longnan in 2009, when only half of the local olive tree seedlings had survived. His technical guidance helped raise the survival rate to over 90 percent.

Zhao Haiyun, an official in charge of promoting the olive industry in Longnan’s Wudu District, said that many more European experts have arrived since Sanchez. They have visited orchards to offer guidance to farmers, and helped companies improve their processing and storage procedures.

They have helped the district, as well as the city of Longnan, to jump on the bandwagon of China’s rising demand for high-quality olive oil, especially among well-off urban families, said Zhao.

【推荐1】After traveling through space for seven months, China’s Tianwen-1 has reached Mars and successfully entered the planet’s orbit on Wednesday—bringing it one step closer to landing on the surface.

Tianwen-1, which got its name from an antient Chinese poem, is made up of an orbiter, lander and a six-wheeled rover (巡视器) carrying scientific instruments, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

The CNSA said the probe is expected to land on the planet’s surface in May or June, and the rover is expected to stay for three months, with the hope that it can gather important information about Mars’ geological structure, atmosphere, environment and soil, and search for any signs of water.

Tianwen-1 was launched last July, and its arrival in the Mars’s orbit makes China the sixth country in history to reach Mars. So far, the United States and the former Soviet Union are the only two countries to land a spacecraft on the surface of Mars. But the European Space Agency and India have already sent spacecraft to enter the planet’s orbit—and on Tuesday, the UAE joined their ranks, with its Hope Probe successfully entering orbit.

With Tianwen-1, China is the first nation to attempt sending both an orbiter and a rover on its first Mars mission on its own. According to the scientific team behind the mission, the probe will “orbit, land and release a rover all on the very first try, and carry out experiments with an orbiter”. By contrast, NASA sent multiple orbiters to Mars before ever attempting a landing, since pulling off the landing is a far more difficult task.

China’s first attempt to reach Mars was actually in 2011 with the Yinghuo-1 probe, which was supposed to orbit the red planet and study its environmental structure. It was launched from Kazakhstan together with the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission in November that year.

【推荐2】Frequent goodbyes to her family come hand-in-hand with Wang Yaping’s intensive training. This time, however, her goodbye has sparked joy in her 5-year-old daughter’s eyes as she is “shooting for the stars.”

Known for broadcasting a 40-minute live lesson during her first space trip, she is very likely to draw global attention again during her second space mission.

Wang was born in 1980 to a rural family in Shandong Province. “When I was young, my world was small,” Wang recalled. “My dream was much more simple: to go beyond the village and to pay back all that my parents had given me.”

Her space dream started in 2003 when China sent Yang Liwei into space. “I watched the bright rocket flame on TV, and an idea flashed through my mind: China now has a male taikonaut, when will there be a female one?” Wang said. After racking up safe flights for 1,600 hours over nine years, Wang became a strong candidate (候选人) for China’s first flight by a female taikonaut. However, she did not pass her final tests. Wang did not lose heart but pushed forward even harder. She always ran three laps more than others in physical courses; she volunteered to be held to the same standards as her male partners during desert survival training, and she asked to train in the pressure chamber for an extra 30 minutes each time. “You can’t catch a break simply for being a woman,” she said.

Her efforts were not in vain. Wang became a crew member of the Shenzhou-10 space mission in 2013. And more notably, she earned the title of China’s first space teacher after giving a lecture to students from an orbit more than 300 km above the Earth’s surface.

Liu Cixin, China’s famous sci-fi writer and Hugo Award winner, said Wang’s lesson was like a “brush,” which painted a space world for children that is different from Earth.