【推荐1】Société Cartier designs, manufactures, distributes and sells jewellery and watches. Founded in Paris, France in 1847 by Louis-François Cartier, the company remained under family control until 1964. The company maintains its headquarters in Paris and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Compagnie Financière Richemont SA.

Cartier is well known for its jewellery and wrist watches, including the “Bestiary” (best illustrated by the Panthère brooch of the 1940s created for Wallis Simpson), the diamond necklace created for Bhupinder Singh the Maharaja of Patiala and the first practical wristwatch, the “Santos,” of 1904.

Cartier has a long history of sales to royalty and celebrities. King Edward VII of England referred to Cartier as “the jeweler of kings and the king of jewelers.” For his coronation in 1902, Edward VII ordered 27 tiaras and issued a royal warrant to Cartier in 1904. Similar warrants soon followed from the courts of Spain, Portugal, Russia, Siam, Greece, Serbia, Belgium, Romania, Egypt, Albania, Monaco, and the House of Orleans.

In 1986, the French Ministry for Culture appointed Perrin head of the “Mission sur le mecenatd’ entreprise” (a commission to study business patronage of the arts). Two years later, Cartier acquired a majority holding in Piaget and Baume & Mercier. In 1990 the Musee du Petit Palais staged the first major exhibition of the Cartier collection, “l’Art de Cartier”.

Perrin founded an international committee in 1991, Comite International de la Haute Horlogerie, to organise its first salon, held on 15 April 1991. This has become an annual meeting place in Geneva for professionals. The next year, the second great exhibition of “l’Art de Cartier” was held at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. In 1993, the “Vendome Luxury Group” was formed as an umbrella company to combine Cartier, Alfred Dunhill, Montblanc, Piaget, Baume & Mercier, Karl Lagerfeld, Chloé, Sulka, Hackett, Seeger.

In 1995, a major exhibition of the Cartier Antique Collection was held in Asia. The next year, the Lausanne Hermitage Foundation in Switzerland hosted the exhibition “Splendours of the Jewellery”, presenting a hundred and fifty years of products by Cartier. As of 2012, Cartier is owned, through Richemont, by the South African Rupert family and 24-year-old who is the granddaughter of Pierre Cartier, Elle Pagels.

【推荐3】The TV dramas concerning the unique Empress of China are always hot among audiences. Actresses who play the role of Empress Wu Zetian, are indeed all beauties. What did Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor, look like in real life? Let’s explore the possibilities.

The famous Chinese scholar Guo Moruo researched this, and he thought that an empress in a painting by Tang Dynasty painter Zhang Xuan is Wu Zetian. Zhang left many famous paintings, such as Paintings of Lady of Guoguo on a Spring Outing of the Tang Dynasty, Court Ladies Preparing Newly-Woven Silk and Lady of Wei. It is guessed that Zhang Xuan was a court painter and had met Wu Zetian before, so the portrait by him is quite reliable.

Another frequently seen image of Wu Zetian is the block-painted edition of Images of Ancient People in History, created in 1498, during the government of Emperor Hongzhi in the Ming Dynasty. However, as the painting was recreated by Ming people, it is not very reliable and possibly a portrait born out of imagination.

There are also many stone statues of Empress Wu Zetian, and the most ancient one is now at her birthplace, Guangyuan in Sichuan province. The statue is said to be very close to the real appearance of Wu Zetian. When Empress Wu Zetian came into power, she built many temples and Buddha statues. Many Buddha statues in the Longmen Grottoes in today’s Luoyang in Henan province were constructed during her reign. Among them, a large Vairocana Buddha in Fengxian Temple is considered to be a “portrait” of Wu Zetian at 44 years old. The Buddha has characteristics of an oriental beauty’s face and is honored as the most beautiful Buddha in the world. At 17.14 meters high, the face of the Buddha looks pretty and has a mysterious smile. Wu Zetian funded the statue’s construction and took part in the consecration(神圣)ceremony when it was completed. Ancient people assumed that the statue was a vivid portrait of Empress Wu Zetian.

【推荐2】Mars may seem like a dry, desolate place, but the red planet transforms into an otherworldly wonderland in winter, according to a new video shared by NASA.

It’s late winter in Mars’ Northern Hemisphere, where the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter are exploring an ancient river delta (三角洲) that once fed into Jezero Crater billions of years ago.

As the planet’s main feature, dust drives Martian weather, but the planet is no stranger to snow, ice and frost. There are two types of snow on Mars. One is the kind we experience on Earth made of frozen water. The thin Martian air and sub-zero temperatures means that traditional snow changes from a solid directly to a gas, before touching the ground on Mars.

The other type of Martian snow is carbon dioxide based, or dry ice, and it can land on the surface. A few feet of snow tends to fall on Mars in its flat regions near the poles. “Enough falls that you could snowshoe (穿雪鞋走路) across it.” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement.

So far, no orbiters(轨道飞行器) or rovers have been able to see snow fall on the red planet because the weather phenomenon only occurs at the poles beneath cloud cover at night. The cameras on the orbiters can’t peer through the clouds, and no robotic explorers have been developed that could survive the freezing temperatures at the poles, which can be as low as minus 120 degrees Celsius.

However, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can detect light that’s invisible to the human eye. It has made detections of carbon dioxide snow falling at the Martian poles. The Phoenix lander, which arrived on Mars in 2008, also used one of its laser instruments to detect water-ice snow from its spot about 1,600 kilometers away from the Martian north pole.

Thanks to photographers, we know snowflakes on Earth are unique and six sided. Beneath a microscope, Martian snowflakes would likely look a little different. “Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry (对称) of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped (立方体的), ” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”

Ice and carbon dioxide-based frosts also form on Mars, and they can occur farther away from the poles. The Odyssey orbiter (which entered Mars orbit in 2001) has watched frost forming and turning to a gas in the sunlight, while the Viking landers spotted icy frost on Mars when they arrived in the 1970s.

【推荐3】A team of researchers recently proposed that countries should aim to keep extinctions to “well below” 20 known species every year worldwide. And the idea is gaining concern.

A target for limiting extinctions is not a new idea, and deserves serious consideration. Its feasibility（可行性）and consequences should be carefully assessed. There are many questions for researchers working in biodiversity to explore. For example, how does a target of 20 extinctions per year fit with *IPBES’s own assessment of biodiversity, which says that some one million species are at risk of extinction? Twenty extinctions per year—out of almost two million known species—is 10 times higher than the background extinction rate of two per year that existed before humans made a great contribution to extinctions. But it is considerably lower than today's estimates of species extinctions, which are over 1,000 times the background rate.

Other questions include how to choose which species to conserve, and who should make such choices. Would a single number give equal weight to all threatened species, or should those species that are more important to livelihoods and to ecosystem function be given priority for protection? And at what point would an extinction be declared, given that there is often a time lag（时滞）between a species going extinct and its being recorded as extinct in the Red List maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature?

Given that IPBES’s lower estimate for as-yet unidentified plant and animal species is 8.1 million, what are the influences on species that have not yet been described? If policymakers focus resources on conserving known species, what risks might there be to species in parts of the world--such as the marine environment—where knowledge of biodiversity is weak, and which face continued unsustainable development?

Any proposal to consider a single numerical target for biodiversity needs to be similarly assessed. IPBES—working with the UN biodiversity convention’s own scientific advisers—should be called on to advise. For this to happen, a small group of governments need to make a formal request for scientific advice to the UN convention, and they should do so without delay.

*（IPBES）The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services