【推荐2】Being kind to other people can improve well-being of the one who receives it. Acts as simple as buying a cup of coffee for someone can boost his mood, for example. Everyday life affords many opportunities for such actions. However, people do not always take advantage of them.

A behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business examined a possible explanation: people who perform random acts of kindness undervalue the impact of their behavior on recipients (接受者).

Across multiple experiments involving about 1, 000 participants, people performed a random act of kindness—that is, an action done with the primary intention of making someone else feelgood. Those who perform such actions expect nothing in return. Then both the person performing a kind act and the one receiving it were asked to fill out questionnaires, where they had to rate how “big” the act seemed. In all cases, the performer’s expectations of the recipient’s mood were compared with the recipient’s actual experience.

The research revealed that people may underestimate their action’s impact: recipients felt significantly better than the kind actors expected. For example, when people received cupcakes through a random act of kindness, the cupcake givers underestimated how positive their recipients would feel. Recipients of these unexpected actions tend to focus more on warmth than performers do.

Missing the importance of warmth may stand in the way of being kinder in daily life. People know that cupcakes can make others feel good, to be sure, but it turns out that cupcakes given in kindness can make their recipients feel surprisingly good. If people undervalue this effect, they might not bother to carry out these warm, prosocial behavior.

These findings suggest that what might seem small when we are deciding whether or not to do something nice for someone else could matter a great deal to the person we do it for. Given that these warm gestures can enhance our own mood and brighten the day of another person, why not choose kindness when we can?

【推荐3】Play therapy is a kind of treatment which uses play to deal with psychological problems.     1     But it's most commonly used in children between the ages of 3 and 11.

    2     Here are just a few advantages. Children will have fewer behavior problems and have better school performance. According to some studies, play therapy allows kids to deal with their bad feelings such as sadness, nervousness and anger. What's more, the parent-child relationship may be closer.

A typical course of play therapy is that the therapist meets with the child's parents to discuss the child's problems. The parents may be concerned with behavioral problems like shyness, acting out in class or bed-wetting.     3     And the child is taken to a play area which has toys.

When a child starts to go through the toys, the therapist takes note of which toys the child plays with, and how the child plays with them.     4    That's because the therapist wants to see the child's natural psychological state. As the class moves on, the therapist will help the child use play to solve psychological problems.

Working with children can be challenging, as a child may make progress one day, and not the next. Therapy requires patience and devotion to long-term treatment. When the child's problems have been dealt with, the therapist will prepare the child for leaving.     5    

【推荐1】It is the eighth time this summer that Guo Xiunan has failed to grow vegetables without chemical pesticides (杀虫剂). After trying various homemade bug sprays (喷剂), such as plant ash, mixtures of pepper, vinegar, alcohol and water, there are still lots of holes in the leaves chewed by beetles .

“I will not give up trying and I will go on with my experiments,” the 29-year-old engineer-turned-farmer says.

Covering 0.67 hectares (公顷) of farmland and 1.33 hectares of woodland and wetland, his farm is located in the suburbs of Hefei, East China’s Anhui province. He is trying to turn it into an organic farm, growing fruits and vegetables with the same flavor of those from his childhood memories. “Growing tasty and healthy food has been my dream since I was a teenager. I know how difficult it can be, but if you take the soil seriously, I believe it will pay off,” Guo says.

He adds that farming is not a business that can make money in a short time, but for him, it became an urgent issue when his father suffered stomach cancer last year, ringing an alarm bell over food safety. Recalling spending time on the farm with his parents as a child, Guo believes the overuse of chemicals in farming is not only damaging the soil, but also people’s health.

After investing more than 100,000 yuan ($13,700) since he rented the farmland last year, and reading many books on agriculture, Guo is in the early stages of fighting the various challenges through trial and error. Meanwhile, he has to develop marketing channels for his products. In March, he uploaded his first post on short-video platform Douyin to introduce his business. His account now has nearly 6,000 followers, which is way above his expectations.

“Maybe it is because I’ve realized their dream life, one that they dare not pursue,” Guo says.

【推荐2】There are two ways to forget about troubles in life: music and cats.

At the Hey Cat Cafe in Wuhan, Hubei Province, you can have both. About 30 furry creatures, each wearing a red burp cloth with its name on it, welcome and “serve” the guests. The “employees” are all stray (流浪的) black cats, most of whom were rescued by caring people after being abandoned by their owners.

Opened in September 2021, the cafe is one of the first nonprofit cat cafes in China. Manager Du Fan told China Daily that all the profits are used to help homeless animals.

The 41-year-old said he opened the black cat cafe to dispel (消除) the myth that such cats are “inauspicious”, as described in some movies and TV dramas. Over the past 17 years, a lot of people have come to Du to adopt cats, but many said they didn’t want black cats. “Actually, in traditional Chinese culture, black cats can drive away evil spirits and bring luck. They should be mascots (吉祥物),” he said. So are black cats as reserved and mysterious as folk tales suggest? Well, perhaps not.

Hearing two young women open the door, six or so passionate “cafe workers” waited and greeted them. When the visitors sat down, one cat rubbed against the bottom of one woman’s pants, while another climbed onto her knee. Some of the cats simply fell asleep against the guests’ legs.

While these cats are rescued, they also help people with developmental or social anxiety disorders learn to open their hearts. “Cats possess certain qualities that humans don’t have,” Du added. “Many people with psychological problems can find comfort in cats.”

【推荐1】China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft, in orbit around Mars’ has dropped its lander and rover (巡视器), named Zhurong after a Chinese god of fire, completing the most dangerous stage of its ten-month mission.

This is China’s first mission to Mars, and makes the country only the third nation to have landed a spacecraft there. It included an orbiter, a lander and a rover—making it the first to send all three elements to the planet.

“The mission is a big leap for China because they are doing in a single go what NASA took decades to do,” says Roberto Orosei, a planetary scientist at the Institute of Radio Astronomy of Bologna in Italy.

At a speed of 4.8 kilometers per second, the spacecraft departed Earth in July 2020 and arrived at Mars in February 2021, but the landing was the biggest test yet of China’s rising outer space exploration capabilities.

Landing on Mars is extremely difficult, because engineers back on Earth have no control over it in real time, and must leave pre-programmed instructions to carry on. Many missions have been lost, or have crashed on arrival.

Utopia Planitia, where Zhurong now sits, is a wide, flat area in a vast basin that formed when a smaller object crashed into Mars billions of years ago, “If the researchers are really fortunate, they might find some very ancient rocks, which could offer a window into our own planet’s history,” says Joseph Michalski, a planetary scientist at the University of Hong Kong, “Most of the similar evidence here on Earth has been destroyed by plate tectonics (板块运动).”

Zhurong will also be the first rover equipped with an instrument to measure the magnetic field (磁场) nearby. The instrument could provide insights into how Mars lost its strong magnetic field, an event that transformed the planet into a cold, dry place, uninviting to life.

A successful Mars landing could motivate more-advanced Chinese missions—including a sample-return one, which is planned to take place by 2030.

【推荐2】NASA’s Opportunity rover has reached the end of its life. Initially designed to last 90 days, and to travel only 1,000 meters, Opportunity in fact spent almost 15 years exploring the surface of Mars. During that time, it traveled more than 45 kilometers beyond expectation.

The last signal from Opportunity was on June 10th, 2018, when a severe global dust storm enveloped Mars. Since then, NASA has spent eight months trying to regain communication with the rover, but had no result. On Tuesday February 12th, 2019, NASA made one final attempt to wake Opportunity up, but it was unsuccessful.

Before Opportunity was sent into space the Mars Global Surveyor spotted what looked like sedimentary rocks(沉积岩)from orbit in 2000. An Opportunity team member said, "On the earth, sedimentary rocks preserve the history of the surface of our planet, and within that history, the fossil record of life exists. It is reasonable to look for evidence of past life on Mars.

While the rover didn't find any actual fossils, Opportunity did provide evidence that the environment on Mars was once much better and warmer. This answered what was the major goal of the Opportunity rover. Opportunity identified sedimentary rocks which basically meant the presence of water. But not everything went smoothly for Opportunity to achieve the goal of exploration. At one point in 2005, all its six wheels were stuck in soft sand, and it took five weeks of hard work to get the rover out.

Opportunity was one of the most successful rovers ever. During its journey on Mars, Opportunity discovered “Heat Shield Rock”, a basketball-sized- meteorite which is made mostly of iron and nickel. It also gave us a massive amount of photos of Mars with which people have done some amazing things. Bodrov, a photographer, took images from Opportunity to create a 360-degree view of Victoria crater on Mars.

Although Opportunity has reached the end, the legacy that the rover produced for us will last a long time. With the technological development, perhaps the day is not so far off when brave astronauts walk on the surface of Mars.

【推荐3】Is there life elsewhere in the universe? This is a question that has confused mankind. A new discovery may have brought us one step closer to the truth.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) probe (探测器) “Hayabusa 2” discovered “amino acids (氨基酸)” in sand samples brought back to Earth from the Ryugu asteroid (小行星), Japanese financial newspaper The Nikkei reported, marking the first time that amino acids have been discovered outside Earth.

As amino acids combine to form proteins, the discovery could hold the clues to understanding the origins of life.

Scientists have been analyzing 5.4 grams of rocky grains (颗粒) from Ryugu ever since the samples were returned to Earth in December 2020. Experts previously said the samples “are the most original material in the solar system we have ever studied”, according to the Daily Mail.

The unprecedented discovery of multiple types of amino acids on an extraterrestrial (地球外的) body could even hint (暗示) at the existence of life outside of Earth, Kensei Kobayashi, told Kyodo News.

It also means amino acids can likely be found on other planets and natural satellites, hinting that “life could have been born in more places in the universe than previously thought”, Kobayashi added.

The Ryugu probe aims to illustrate the mysteries of the origin of life in the solar system and life. Amino acids are necessary for life. Although it is not known how the amino acids got to ancient Earth, one theory is that they came by meteorite (陨石), according to Japan Today. The latest discovery will likely reinforce this theory.

But it might not be a big deal. “Simply having the basic ingredients for dough (面团) doesn’t mean it can lead to the creation of pizza. Similarly, discovering amino acids in space doesn’t necessarily prove the existence of life beyond our home planet,” China Daily reporter Zhang Zhihao commented on Twitter.

NASA has a similar mission to asteroid Bennu. Its OSIRIS-REx probe has already collected samples and is expected to return to Earth with them sometime next year.

By comparing the results of Ryugu’s sample material with samples collected from the asteroid Bennu, scientists will better understand the various chemical mixtures in the universe and how life began, according to Science and Technology Daily.