【推荐1】Fabrizio Fidati, who lost his right hand in an accident 25 years ago, had not experienced the feeling of temperature in his missing fingers until trials for a technology unlocked the cool of iced water and heat of a stove burner for him.

Eventually, the researchers hope it could lead to a more natural feeling of loved ones when he is wearing his prosthetic (义肢). With thermal electrodes( 热电极) placed on the skin of their remaining arm, amputees such as Fidati reported feeling hot or cold in their phantom(幻象) hand and fingers, as well as directly on the arm, according to the trials by the Swiss university EPFL.

The 59-year old Italian is among 27 amputees who took part in the trials, with 17 of them reporting a successful test. Those tested have also been able to differentiate between plastic, glass and copper，pointing to where they feel the feelings on images of a hand.

“By stimulating (刺激) specific parts of the remaining arm of the amputees, we could induce the sense of touch in the missing phantom hands,“ said Dr. Solaiman Shokur, a senior scientist at EPFL who co-led the study. “What they feel in this phantom hand is similar to what they feel on their undamaged hand.”

The technology, which has been tested for more than two years, does not need to be implanted. It can be worn on the skin and combined with a regular prosthetic.

Dr. Silvestro Micera, who co-led the study with Dr. Shokur, said they now wanted to test the device on a larger scale before combining it with other technologies to improve sense of touch in amputees. “We think that we could give people a better sense of embodiment of their hands and maybe even give them the possibility to feel their loved ones in a much more natural way,” Dr. Shokur added.

【推荐2】Scientists have developed a blood test to diagnose (诊断) Alzheimer’s disease without the need for expensive brain imaging or a painful lumbar puncture (腰椎穿刺), where a sample of CSF (脑脊椎液) is drawn from the lower back. If effective, the test could enable faster diagnosis of the disease, meaning treatments could be done earlier.

Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia (痴呆), but diagnosis remains challenging — particularly during the earlier stages of the disease.

Current guidelines recommend detection of three distinct symptoms: abnormal accumulations of amyloid and tau proteins proteins, as well as neurodegeneration — the slow and progressive loss of neuronal cells in specified regions of the brain. This can be done through a combination of brain imaging and CSF analysis. However, a lumbar puncture can be painful and people may experience headaches or back pain after the procedure, while brain imaging is expensive and takes a long time to schedule.

Prof. Thomas Karikari at the University of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania, US, who was involved in the study, said: “A lot of patients, even in the US, don’t have access to MRI and PET scanners. Accessibility is a major issue.”

The development of a reliable blood test would be an important step forwards. “A blood test is cheaper, safer and easier to administer, and it can improve clinical confidence in diagnosing Alzheimer’s and selecting participants for clinical trial and disease monitoring,” Karikari said.

The next step will be to confirm the test in a broader range of patients, including those from varied racial and ethnic backgrounds, and those suffering from different stages of memory loss or other potential dementia symptoms.

Karikari also hopes that monitoring levels of brain-derived tau in the blood could improve the design of clinical trials for Alzheimer’s treatments.

【推荐3】More than 30 year and S10 billion later, the James Webb Space Telescope finally left Earth. The observatory was lifted skyward by an Ariane rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. Is flight to orbit lasted just under half an hour, with a signal confirming a successful outcome picked p by a ground antenna(天线)at Malindi in Kenya.

Webb, named after one of the architects of the Apollo Moon landings, is the successor to the Hubble telescope. Engineers working with the US, European and Canadian space agencies have built the new observatory to be 100 times more powerful.

Webb’s launch is only the start of what will be a complex series of initial activities over the next six months. The telescope is being put on a path to an observing station some 1.5 million km beyond the Earth. In the course of travelling to this location, webb will have to unpack itself from the folded shape it adopted at launch.

This won’t be easy, said NASA administrator Bill Nelson: “We have to realize there are still countless things that have to work and they have to work perfectly. But we know that in great reward, there is great risk. And that’s what this business is all about. And that’s why we dare to explore.”

At the core of the new facility’s capabilities is its 6.5 m-wide golden mirror. This is almost three times wider than the primary reflector on Hubble. The enlarged optics(光学器件), combined with   four super-sensitive instruments, should enable astronomers to look deeper into space—and thus further back in time—than ever before.

A key target of Webb will be the pioneer stars that ended the darkness theorized to have dominated the whole universe shortly after the Big Bang more than 13.5 billion years ago. It was the nuclear reactions in these objects that would have created the first heavy atoms(原子)essential for life. Another goal for Webb will be to explore the atmospheres of distant planets. This will help researchers work out whether these worlds are in any way habitable.

【推荐3】When researching New Year’s resolutions in the 1980s, the psychologist John Norcross found over 50% of Americans made resolution. After 6 months, only 40% had stuck with it. Two years later, the number had dropped to 19%. Still, we keep telling ourselves we can lose weight, save money, and go to the gym.

It turns out that timing is important in determining whether we succeed. In May, 2012, the behavioral economist Katherine Milkman, at a social science gathering, found herself in a discussion about “turning points”. She said, “I had a strong instinct that turning points are effective moments that feel like a new beginning.”

So she teamed up with two colleagues, Jason Riis and Hengchen Dai, to see if the “turning points” idea held any merit. In follow-up studies, they found fresh starts do push us to change our behavior. With those, researchers suspect, comes a sense of optimism, the promise of “a new me,” as Milkman put it. To test that theory, her team looked at daily Google searches for the term “diet” over 9 years, finding a predictable cycle: they topped at the start of any given week, month, or year, then gradually declined. The largest increase — 82% above the baseline — occurred immediately after New Year’s.

The college gym attendance is no exception: shooting up in January and decreasing in the following months. Smaller spikes occurred at the beginning of each week, each month, and each term.

Finally, the researchers investigated commitments on the website stick, which allows you to set a goal and contractually determine the consequences for failing to attain it. Tracking 43,000 people over 2.5 years, they found the greatest number of contracts were signed at the start of the new year. Throughout the year, each week and each month had a mini-cycle of its own, with the beginning of the week corresponding to a 63% increase. “Every week brings a new opportunity,” Riis says. “And people take advantage of that whether or not they know it.”