【推荐3】Are you the only child in your family? If so, do you enjoy it or do you want more siblings（兄弟姐妹）?

On May 31, a key meeting of the Communist Party of China unveiled a policy that would allow all couples to have up to three children.

The move is expected to maximize the population's role in driving economic and social growth, since this is a critical time for China to transform the world's most populous country into a powerhouse（强国）with a quality workforce, according to the National Health Commission.

The three-child policy is also expected to prevent the decline in the nation's birthrate and address the challenge of a rapidly aging population, China Daily reported.

China's annual number of newborns has fallen for four years in a row. The country's total birthrate—the average number of children born to each woman—stood at 1.3 in 2020. The number is below the rate of 2.1 that would maintain a stable population, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The declining birthrate has also brought a sharp increase in the proportion of the population aged 60 or above, rising from 10.3 percent to 18.7 percent in the past decade. An increasingly elderly population will increase the cost of labor and the pressure on the social security net. It also means there will be a lack of young labor force. Therefore, it's not good for economic growth, according to Chen Youhua, a professor at Nanjing University.

In fact, the new birth policy is a step to further relax the family planning policy. The one-child policy was introduced in the 1970s and aimed to control the fast-growing population. Then in 2013, China allowed couples to have a second child if either parent was an only child, and in 2016, all couples were allowed to have two children.

However, not all people have shown their support for this latest policy. Many couples complained about the rising costs of raising a child. A netizen named Qinfeng commented, "High cost of education and both the physical and mental exhaustion stopped me from having more than one child." Also, many women are reluctant（不情愿的）to give birth because that could mean sacrificing their career prospects, according to Mu Guangzong, a professor at Peking University.

In that case, Mu noted that it is better to implement supporting measures with the three-child policy, such as more preferential（优惠的）policies for couples that would ease their parental burden.

【推荐1】On Dec 4, 2022, Chinese astronauts Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe touched down at the Dongfeng landing site in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, according to the China Manned Space Agency.

The astronauts were in orbit for 183 days, during which they oversaw the completion of China’s Tiangong space station and several life sciences experiments. They returned with the world’s first rice seeds produced in orbit, a feat that allows scientists to examine the effects of microgravity on rice growth so as to find a sustainable food source for long-term space explorations.

One such experiment involved reproducing the entire life cycle of rice for the first time in space. It began with selecting rice seeds carefully, which were then nurtured and monitored as they hatched into seedlings. The astronauts diligently tended to these delicate young plants, which grew into mature plants producing new seeds. It began on July 29, and after 120 days in orbit they successfully produced new space grains.

The new seeds, along with other bio-samples, have been delivered to the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. They will also be transferred to labs in Shanghai for further research. The institute said researchers would conduct microbiology and cellular analysis to better understand how microgravity affects these plants on a molecular (分子的) level. This would provide key insights on creating new crops that are more adaptive to the space environment.

Zheng Huiqiong, a researcher at the Center for Excellence in Molecular Plant Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said seeds are crucial for growing new crops and supporting humanity’s long-term survival in space.

While more research is in the pipeline, Zheng said scientists have already noticed several interesting differences between rice grown on Earth and that grown in space. For instance, the flowering period for the space rice begins slightly earlier than rice planted on Earth. Flowering is a crucial stage for plant reproductive development. “The stems for the space rice are also looser, with the dwarf rice variety becoming shorter while the tall shoot rice variety experiencing no change in height,” she added.

【推荐2】Four months ago, OpenAI, a small San Francisco company, became the talk of the technology industry when it introduced a new online chatbot that could answer complex questions, write poetry and copy human emotions. Now the company is back with a new version (型号) of the technology, called GPT-4.

GPT-4, which learns its skills by analyzing large data from the Internet, improves on what powered the original ChatGPT in several ways. It can immediately know someone’s tax duties and provide detailed descriptions of images. However, though the new technology can do better on tests and offer precise medical advice to doctors, it can mess up basic arithmetic (算术).

On Tuesday, OpenAI started selling access to GPT-4 so that businesses and other software developers could build their own applications on top of it. A few companies are already working with GPT-4. Morgan Stanley Wealth Management is building a system that’ll immediately retrieve (检索) information from company documents, and serve it up to financial advisers in the form of conversations.

OpenAI got the new technology enhanced. As people tested ChatGPT, they rated the chatbot’s responses, separating those that were useful and truthful from those that weren’t. Then, using an advanced skill, the system spent months analyzing those ratings and gaining a better understanding of what it should and shouldn’t do.

Given a long article and asked to summarize it, GPT-4 will give a precise summary nearly every time. Moreover, given a photograph, chart or diagram, the technology can provide a detailed, paragraphs-long description of the image and answer questions about its contents.

OpenAI leaders said the company wasn’t immediately releasing the image description part of the technology because they were unsure how it could be applied for improper purposes. However, “We can take all these general-purpose knowledge skills and spread them across all sorts of different areas,” said Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president. “This takes the technology into a whole new field.”