【推荐3】The MacArthur Foundation late last month announced its latest crop of “genius grants”, and once again you thought maybe, just maybe, this was your year.

And why not? These days, we’re all geniuses. We might be “marketing geniuses” or “cooking geniuses” or “TV geniuses”. We have so weakened “genius” that it’s fast joining the company of “natural” and “mindful” (留心), words left inactive through overuse and misuse.

Admittedly, the word is tough to nail down. Sometimes we assume genius equivalent to raw intelligence. But many of humanity’s greatest breakthroughs were achieved by those with only modest IQs.

Sometimes we think of the genius as someone extremely knowledgeable, but that definition also falls short. During Albert Einstein’s time, other scientists knew more physics than Einstein did, but history doesn’t remember them. That’s because they didn’t make use of that knowledge the way Einstein did. They weren’t able to, as he put it, “regard old questions from a new angle”.

The genius is not a know-it-all but a see-it-all, someone who, working with the material available to all of us, is able to make surprising and useful connections. True genius involves not merely an extra advance, but a conceptual leap. As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it: Talent hits the target no one else can hit; genius hits the target no one else can see.

We’ve lost sight of this truth, and too often grant the title of genius on talented people hitting visible targets. A good example is the much-boasted announcement earlier this year that scientists had, for the first time, recorded the sound of two black holes bumping, a billion light-years away. It was a remarkable discovery, no doubt, but it did not represent a dramatic shift in how we understand the universe. It merely confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

As Plato observed, “What is honored in a country is cultivated there.” What do we honor? Digital technology, and the convenience it represents, so naturally we get a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg as our “geniuses”, which, in point of fact, they aren’t.

The iPhone and Facebook are wonderful inventions. In many ways, they make our lives a bit easier, a bit more convenient. If anything, though, a true genius makes our lives more difficult, more unsettled. William Shakespeare’s words provide more anxiety than relief, and the world felt a bit more secure before Charles Darwin came along. Zuckerberg and Jobs may have changed our world, but they haven’t yet changed our worldview.

We need to recover genius, and a good place to start is by putting the brakes on Genius Flooding.

【推荐1】200,000 miles from Earth, the crew (机组成员) of the third manned mission (飞行任务) to the Moon faced an astronaut’s worst nightmare: an explosion on the spacecraft. It’s what happened in the Oscar-winning film Apollo 13, but it’s also a true story.

The lift-off of Apollo 13 took place on 11th April 1970. Two days into the mission, the three-man crew were in big trouble. They had been carrying out routine checks when there was a loud bang. Warning lights were starting to flash. Looking out into space, they could see a trail of gas — the spacecraft was leaking (漏) oxygen. They sent out a short message to the scientists back on Earth: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” At first, they thought that a meteor (流星) had hit them, but they later found out that a short circuit (短路) had caused an oxygen container to explode. Whatever the cause, they knew there was no time to lose. Their electricity supply in the command module (指令舱) depended on that oxygen and pretty soon they would run out of both.

The only solution was to move into the lunar module — the section of the spacecraft that would have landed on the Moon. Now though, they were using it as a kind of lifeboat. With its own power supply, oxygen and water, the three men could survive in the lunar module and return to Earth. There was another problem though. In an enclosed space like a lunar module, the carbon dioxide the crew was breathing out was dangerous. The equipment to clear the air of carbon dioxide was only built for two people. Now it had to deal with three. Amazingly, the crew managed to build an adapter out of materials onboard to reduce the carbon dioxide to a safe level.

There was one final obstacle. The lunar module wasn’t strong enough to reenter Earth’s atmosphere so the crew had to go back into the damaged command module. To everyone’s relief, the crew of Apollo 13 arrived safely in the South Pacific Ocean on April 17th. Although the crew didn’t land on the Moon, NASA still considered the mission a success.

【推荐2】An analysis of 5.4 grammes of stones and dust that a Japanese Hayabusa-2 spacecraft gathered from Ryugu, an asteroid (小行星) near Earth, has discovered a surprising component: a drop of water. The discovery offers new support for the theory that life on Earth may have originated from outer space.

Hayabusa-2 was launched in 2014 on its mission to Ryugu, and returned to Earth’s orbit two years ago to drop off a capsule containing the sample. The sample has been divided among different scientific teams to maximize the chance of new discoveries. The precious cargo has already produced several results, including organic materials that showed some of the building blocks of life on Earth, amino acids, may have been formed in space.

The lead scientist, Tomoki Nakamura of Tohoku University and his team, which is made up of about 150 researchers from the US, Britain, France, Italy and China, also analyzed the sample from Ryugu. The team’s latest discovery was a drop of water containing salt and organic matter. “This drop of water has great meaning. Many researchers believe that water was brought from outer space, but we actually discovered water in Ryugu for the first time,” Nakamura said.

That bolsters the theory that asteroids such as Ryugu, or its larger parent asteroid, could have provided water, which contains salt and organic matter in collisions(碰撞) with Earth. “Such discovery may have been directly linked to the origin of the oceans or organic matter on Earth,”   Nakamura said.

Kensei Kobayashi, a scientist who is not part of the research group, applauded the discovery. “The fact that water was discovered in the sample itself is surprising, given the chances of it being destroyed in outer space. It does suggest that the asteroid contained water, in the form of fluid and not just ice, and organic matter may have been generated in that water,” Kobayashi said.