2 . During the first COVID-19 outbreak, Dr. Kirby White struggled to get enough disposable gowns (一次性罩衣), so she and her colleague Dr. Nicole Lowe decided to act. In March2020, they developed a gown that could be laundered and reused, allowing them to keep seeing patients at their Bendigo’s clinic.

“The second COVID-19 wave made it impossible for anyone to purchase disposable gowns, says Kirby, who explains one reusable gown lasts as long as 130 single-use gowns. “It was important to have a reusable gown. We didn’t know how long the pandemic would last so we needed a sustainable solution.”

Two weeks later, Gowns for Doctors was created. Taking to social media, Kirby, 36, shared the initiative (新方案) in a local Facebook group. Overnight, hundreds of volunteers put up their hands to sew (缝), donate fabric and distribute the gowns. She was blown away by the unbelievable response. “We had400 emails overnight! “Kirby says. “It’s the spirit that allowed us to send out so many gowns to people in need. Months later, Gowns for Doctors still has a lot of gowns if medical staff are in need of them. We are continuing to help those who need them.”

The success of the initiative has now gone global, after a company contacted Kirby to create a Barbie doll (芭比娃娃) in her image, celebrating all the healthcare heroes globally. “Seeing my one-of-a-kind Barbie doll for the first time was a heart-skip moment. There were tears of joy. She looks just like me! ”

After hand-packing every order, Dr. White loves seeing happy healthcare workers wearing their donated gowns. “We’ve been sent photos of medical staff wearing their gowns with big smiles,” she says. “Everyone has been so appreciative; we are inundated with thank-you cards. It’s so nice to see them.”

3 . When robots appear to engage with people and display human-like emotions, people may think of them as capable of “thinking”, or acting on their own beliefs and desires rather than their programs, according to the research published by the American Psychological Association.

“The relationship between human-like shape, human-like behavior and the tendency to attribute (把……归因于) independent thought and intentional behavior to robots is yet to be understood,” said study author Agnieszka Wykowska, PhD, a principal investigator at the Italian Institute of Technology. “As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes a part of our lives, it is important to understand how interacting with a robot that displays human-like behaviors might cause higher likelihood of attribution of intentional agency to the robot.”

Across three experiments involving 119 participants, researchers examined how individuals would see a human-like robot, the iCub, after socializing with it and watching videos together. Before and after interacting with the robot, participants completed a questionnaire that showed them pictures of the robot in different situations and asked then to choose whether the robot’s motivation in each situation was mechanical or intentional.

The researchers found that participants who watched videos with the human-like robot were more likely to rate the robot’s actions as intentional, rather than programmed, while those who only interacted with the machine-like robot were not. This shows that mere exposure to a human-like robot is not enough to make people believe it is capable of thoughts and emotions. It is human-like behavior that might be crucial for being deemed as an intentional agent.

According to Wykowska, these findings show that people might be more likely to believe artificial intelligence is capable of independent thought when it creates the impression that it can behave just like humans. “This could inform the design of social robots of the future,” she said.

7 . In early November of 1942, my geology (地质学) class was supposed to go on a field trip to see the mica mine (云母矿). Although it rained, everyone showed up on time. I was the only girl in the class. We all fit into two cars.

Near Deary, Mr. Tier, our teacher, went into a store to ask about the direction, while townsmen looked at us with curiosity. On the store owner’s advice, we drove out into the hills for a few miles. Then we left the cars. We were afraid they would get stuck in the mud.

Eventually, we located the mine near the top of the mountain. There was a very small hole, running about two or three hundred feet into the mountainside. The passage (通道) was so narrow that we could touch both sides with our hands, and not tall enough to allow us to stand up straight. The first boy held the torch; we took hold of the backs of each other’s coats, in a line, and followed him in, ducking our heads. After getting in, we were disappointed because it was not the mine our teacher was looking for.

The rain was coming down hard as we started back to the cars to go home. Back at Deary, we went into a drugstore and stood around its big heating stove to dry out. The clerk was a middle­aged lady. Seeing our entirely wet hair and clothes, she handed each of us a cup of hot water immediately and asked if there was anything wrong with any of us.

Hiking eight miles in the rain had not reduced our interest at all. We all felt we had a wonderful time, even if we didn’t find the mine.

8 . If you grew up watching the kid’s television channel Nickelodeon, you will probably understand that there is nothing greater than enjoying its special bright green slime (水晶泥). The week of May 11, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) joined the slime.

Nickelodeon sent two kilos of its green slime into space in the summer of 2019. The Slime in Space project’s idea was to create an educational trip for teachers to use in class. The green slime was also used to guide astronauts through a series of experiments that were designed to learn more about how slime acts in microgravity (微重力，失重).

Researchers from Portland State University (PSU) were excited to design the experiments for the project. Mark Weislogel and his partner designed eight shows for NASA astronauts and European Space Agency astronaut aboard to perform.

If you’re wondering what we could hope to learn from sending slime into space, the answer lies in its very name. Slime is slimy. This is because it is a liquid that is thicker than liquids like water. This makes slime act in unexpected ways in the microgravity of the ISS. Improving our understanding of how thicker liquids act in space may help us improve the design of systems that something was designed with Earth’s gravity in mind.

“Interestingly, we consider liquid on Earth 25 that takes the shape of its container,” Koch tells CNN. “Water just turns into a ball in microgravity, so we’ve had to have a new understanding of different kinds of matter in space. This experiment shows how microgravity can help us understand things on Earth, especially the things we take for granted.”

10 . Jane Cooke Wright was born in New York City in 1919. Her father, Louis Tompkins Wright, had been one of the first African-Americans to graduate with flying colors from Harvard Medical School, and the first black doctor to work in a municipal New York hospital. By the time Jane was four, he had set up a nursing school at Harlem Hospital, admitting black students.

Jane was educated at Fieldston Upper School, and studied ant at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She went on to the New York Medical College in 1942, where she graduated before starting work at Bellevue Hospital in New York.

In 1947-48, very little was known about chemotherapy, the treatment of disease using chemicals. Louis Wright had just set up the Cancer Research Foundation at Harlem Hospital, and Jane joined him there in 1949. The pair began testing new chemicals on patients with leukaemia (白血病). They studied people who suffered mustard gas (芥子气) attacks from the Second World War. Louis Wright himself had suffered lung damage in such an attack. It was found that gas survivors had reduced white blood cell counts. In leukemia, however, there is an increased level of bad white blood cells, and the Wrights thought some of the chemicals found in mustard gas might be used as effective treatments.

When her father died in 1952, Jane became the foundation’s director. Three years later, she became director for cancer chemotherapy research at the New York University Medical Center. For the next 40 years she kept doing chemotherapy research, testing medicines and developing new ways to deliver chemotherapy.

At the start there was only one medicine, mechlorethamine, which had been shown to be effective. But Jane and her workmates studied a wide range of chemicals for their effect on cancerous cells, and their successes included mithramycin, used to treat brain tumours (瘤) that could not be removed by operations (手术).

In 1964 Wright was appointed to the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke. She returned to New York Medical College in 1967 as head of the cancer research laboratory. Her research and teaching work continued until her retirement in 1987.