【推荐1】With only about 1,800 pandas left in the world, China is desperately trying to clone the animal and save the endangered species (物种). That’s a move similar to what a Texas A&M University researcher has been undertaking for the past five years in a project called “Noah’s Ark”. Noah’s Ark is aimed at collecting eggs, embryos (胚胎), semen and DNA of endangered animals and storing them in liquid nitrogen. If certain species should become extinct, Dr. Duane Kraemer, a professor in Texas A&M University Medicine, says there would be enough of the basic building blocks to reintroduce the species in the future.

It is estimated that as many as 2,000 species of mammals, birds and reptiles will become extinct in over 100 years. The panda, native only to China, is in danger of becoming extinct in the next 25 years. This week, Chinese scientists said they grew an embryo by introducing cells from a dead female panda into the egg cells of a Japanese white rabbit. They are now trying to implant the embryo into a host animal.

The entire procedure could take three to five years to complete.

“The nuclear transfer of one species to another is not easy, and the lack of available panda eggs could be a major problem,” Kraemer, who is one of the leaders of the Project at Texas A&M, the first­ever attempt at cloning a dog, believes. “They will probably have to do several hundred transfers to result in one pregnancy (怀孕). It takes a long time and it’s difficult, but this could be groundbreaking science if it works. They are certainly not putting any live pandas at risk, so it is worth the effort,” adds Kraemer.

“They are trying to do something that’s never been done, and this is very similar to our work in Noah’s Ark. We’re both trying to save animals that face extinction. I certainly appreciate their effort and there’s a lot we can learn from what they are attempting to do. It’s a research that is very much needed.”

ART & TECHNOLOGY

Think “art”. What comes to your mind? Is it Greek or Roman sculptures in the Louvre, or Chinese paintings in the Palace Museum? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a dancing pattern of lights?

The artworks by American artist Janet Echelman look like colourful floating clouds when they are lit up at night. Visitors to one of her artworks in Vancouver could not only enjoy looking at it, they could also interact with it—literally. They did this by using their phones to change its colours and patterns. Exhibits such as these are certainly new and exciting, but are they really art?

Whatever your opinion, people have been expressing their thoughs and ideas through art for thousands of years. To do this，they have used a variety of tools and technologies. Yet Michelangelo and others have been labelled as “artists” rather than “technicians”. This means that art and technology have always been seen as two very separate things.

Today, however, technological advances have led to a combination of art and technology. As a result, the art world is changing greatly. Now art is more accessible to us than ever before. Take for example one of China’s most famous paintings from the Song Dynasty, Along the River During the Qingming Festival. As this artwork is rarely on display, people have sometimes queued up to six hours for a chance to see it. Once in front of the painting, they only have limited time to spend taking in its five metres of scenes along the Bian River in Bianjing. Thanks to technology however, millions more people have been able to experience a digital version of this painting. Three­dimensional(3D) animation means that viewers can see the characters move around and interact with their surroundings. They can also watch as the different scenes change from daylight into nighttime.

The art-tech combination is also changing our concepts of “art” and the “artist”. Not only can we interact with art, but also take part in its creation. With new technological tools at our fingertips, more and more people are exploring their creative sides. The result has been exciting new art forms, such as digital paintings and videos.

However, the increase in the amount and variety of art produced has also raised questions^⑰ over its overall quality.Can a video of someone slicing a tomato played in slow motion really be called “art”?

Similarly, such developments are making the line between art and technology less distinct. Can someone unfamiliar with traditional artists’ tools really call themselves an “artist”? And is the artist the creator of the art itself, or the maker of the technology behind it? A recent project used technology and data in the same way that Rembrandt used his paints and brushes. The end result, printed in 3D, was a new “Rembrandt painting” created 347 years after the artist’s death. These advances are perhaps bringing us closer to a time when computers rather than humans create art.

Where technology will take art next is anyone’s guess. But one thing is for sure—with so many artists exploring new possibilities, we can definitely expect the unexpected.

【推荐3】ChatGPT maker OpenAI from the United States stepped up the global artificial intelligence race in mid-February when it released its text-to-video generation tool Sora. That made me wonder — how long before China develops its own Sora? And, will AI become China’s critical new productive force?

According to OpenAI’s explainer, Sora is capable of generating complex scenes with a very high degree of accuracy, including multiple characters, specific types of movements, themes and backgrounds. It understands not only what the user requests, but also how these things exist in the physical world.

On Feb 16, Zhou Hongyi, founder of cybersecurity firm 360 Security Technology, said Sora may bring a huge disruption to the advertising industry, movie trailers and the short-video industry; what’s more, the realization of generative AI may be shortened from 10 years to one or two years.

“Although the development level of large-scale models in China seems to be close to GPT-3. 5, there is still an 18-month gap compared to GPT-4. 0. OpenAI should still have an ace or two up its sleeve, whether it is GPT-5. 0 or machine self-learning to generate content,” Zhou said, adding that it is worth paying attention.

According to a report by the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission, China had developed at least 254 AI large language models by October last year. Currently, most domestic large models still have a huge gap with GPT-4. 0.

But the country could make use of such frontier AI technologies in more industry-specific fields. Or, to put it simply, China needs to apply such technologies to real use, to develop them into productive forces and narrow the gap between itself and the US.

Though China still has a gap with the US in such a large model, Chinese AI startup ModelBest Inc launched last month its latest lightweight large model, an emerging less expensive AI technology that aims at more targeted commercialized fields.

【推荐1】An author who surveyed 600 millionaires has claimed that she found the secrets of getting rich. Sarah Stanley Fallaw, the author of The Next Millionaire Next Door: Enduring Strategies for Building Wealth, got her findings after she surveyed American millionaires in 2015 and 2016. The book is a follow-up to her father’s research in the 1998 bestseller The Millionaire Next Door, which Thomas J. Stanley wrote with William D. Danko.

Stanley Fallaw argues that resilience（抗逆力）in the face of refusal and strict goal setting are important to building wealth. “To build wealth, to build one’s own business, to ignore critics and media and neighbors, you must have the ambition to keep pursuing your goals past refusal and pain,” wrote Stanley Fallaw in the new book, according to Business Insider. She added, “Millionaires and other economically successful Americans who decide to climb the corporate ladder（企业晋升制度）, or struggle to create a financial independence lifestyle early do so by pushing on without stop.”

Stanley Fallaw stresses the importance of setting goals and sticking to them, especially for budgeting. She says that living modestly even as your income grows will allow you to devote a greater percentage of your income towards savings and building wealth. “Most millionaires we interviewed stressed the great freedom that comes from spending below their means,” Stanley Fallaw writes.

The author says that the temptation（诱惑）to keep up with the spending habits of the people around can be highly harmful to building wealth. Particularly in the age of social media, when lavish（浪费的）vacations and new purchases are broadcast for the world to see, the perseverance（坚持）to live thriftily（节俭地）is important, Stanley Fallaw argues.

【推荐2】It was December 25, 1914, only 5 months into World War Ⅰ. German, British, and French soldiers already sick and tired of the senseless killing, disobeyed their superiors and fraternized (打得火热) with “the enemy” along two-thirds of the Western Front. German troops held Christmas trees up out of the trenches (战壕) with signs, “Merry Christmas.”

“You no shoot, we no shoot.” Thousands of troops streamed across a no-man’s land filled with dead bodies. They sang Christmas carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared rations, played football, and even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced (拥抱) men they had been trying to kill a few short hours before. They agreed to warn each other if the Generals (将军) forced them to fire their weapons, and to aim high.

It shocked the high command on either side. Here was disaster in the making: soldiers declaring their brotherhood with each other and refusing to fight. Generals on both sides declared this peacemaking to be wrong. Fifteen million would be killed.

Not many people have heard the story of the Christmas Truce. On Christmas Day, 1988, a story in the Boston Globe mentioned that a local FM radio host played “Christmas in the Trenches” several times and was surprised by the effect. The song became the most requested recording during the holidays in Boston on several FM stations. “Some callers even telephone the host deeply moved, sometimes in tears, asking, ‘What the hell did I just hear?’”

You can probably guess why the callers were in tears. The Christmas Truce story goes against most of what we have been taught about people. It gives us a glimpse of the world as we wish it could be and says, “This really happened once.” It reminds us of those thoughts we keep hidden away, ou of range of the TV and newspaper stories that tell us how trivial (微不足道的) and mean human life is. It is like hearing that our deepest wishes really are true: the world really could be different.

【推荐3】The old saying “Use it or lose it” doesn’t seem to be true when it comes to someone’s ability to preserve and use a foreign language, a new study has showed.

The research team tasked almost 500 British people who had taken French GCSE or A-level between the 1970s and 2020 with completing a French vocabulary and grammar test. They included a survey of whether participants had used their French knowledge over the years since their exams, and excluded (排除) anyone who had studied a language later on in life.

They found that participants who had taken their exam 50 years ago and not used French ever since performed as well as as recent school leavers and those who occasionally used French.

Lead researcher Monika Schmid said: “The knowledge of language is surprisingly stable over long periods of time, compared to other subjects such as maths, history or science. This is likely because of the way language is stored in memory. Vocabulary is memorized in the same way that facts, dates and names are, while this memory may become weaker over time, and grammar is learned in a similar way to riding a bike, a kind of muscle memory, which is much more stable. Vocabulary knowledge on the other hand, exists in a highly connected network, which means that we need only be reminded of a word that sounds similar to a foreign language word for our brain to recall it.”

“Many people are not willing to revisit languages they once learnt as they fear they will be forced to relive some of the more ‘boring’ elements of the courses, such as grammar, but our work suggests that this would not be necessary. We hope that it might encourage more people to pick foreign languages back up if they know it would only take a short amount of time in refresher lessons to go back to their original level,” Schmid added.