1 . For more than a century, student journalists at the Daily Tar Heel (DTH) have written about life at UNC-Chapel Hill, US and raised questions on the issues of free expression, education, and big-time athletics.

The independent student newspaper recently celebrated its 125th anniversary(周年). To mark the special day, student reporters asked the question: What’s the future of the DTH? The proud newspaper has been searching for the answer, and so have college newspapers across the US.

Student newspapers are facing a dark reality. As they are free to read, they are making less money than ever, meaning that such newspapers are finding it hard to survive.

Most college papers have reduced their print editions (版本). Last year, the DTH printed a paper four days a week. This year, it prints a paper every three days. And while it used to produce around 22,000 newspapers each time, it only makes around 10,000 now, said Erica Perel, general manager.

Increasingly, student journalists have turned their focus to digital versions of their newspapers, and the new ways that social media allows them to tell stories. They’ve adapted (使适应) their skills to mirror what’s going on in the professional journalism world.

“I think we’re adapting very well … in moving away from that print mentality (心态). But it’s challenging,” said Jonathan Carter, a student at North Carolina State University.

So what should student newspapers do? LoMonte said the best solution would be for universities to financially(经济上) support student journalism.

University leaders like to talk about producing civically (公民地) responsible students, he said, and journalism is a part of that. “Colleges and universities have to recognize independent media coverage as a civic good and step up to the plate,” he said.

In the meantime, campus newspapers are figuring out their financial models as they go along.

Bruce dePyssler, adviser to North Carolina Central Universit’s Campus Echo newspaper, said his students post one story a day online. The best stories are put together for a once-a-semester(学期) print edition.

And even if student journalists don’t go into media jobs, Perel said, they’ve still had a great education.

“The number one thing that we teach is critical(批判性) thinking and how to be a lifelong learner,” she said. “ The ones who are living through this transition (过渡) are the ones that are going to be a lot stronger for it in the end.”

3 . After Scott Kelly spent a year in space, his genetic expression changed, according to a NASA study that compared the bodily changes between the astronaut and his identical twin, who stayed on Earth while Kelly was aboard the International Space Station. About 7 percent of Kelly’s gene activity has yet to “return to normal” — almost two years after his yearlong spaceflight mission came to an end. Kelly has since retired from NASA.

The Twins Study，as it’s been called，looked at what happened to Kelly — both physiologically and psychologically :— before，during and after his trip in space，and then compared that data to Kelly’s twin brother，Mark Kelly，also a retired NASA astronaut.

Unlike his brother who spent months at a time in space，Mark’s missions were on the shorter side. His last — and longest — mission，which took place in 2011，lasted 15 days.

“By measuring large numbers of the brother’s metabolites，cytokines (代谢物、细胞活素）and proteins，researchers learned that spaceflight is associated with oxygen deprivation (匮乏）stress， increased inflammation (炎症），and nutrient changes that affect gene expression，” NASA said.

Although most of the biological changes Kelly experienced in space disappeared in the hours and days (and in some cases? weeks) after his return to Earthy, NASA said some changes appear to have continued. While 93 percent of his genetic expression has returned to normal, several hundred “space genes” still have changed activity levels，the data suggests， which, NASA said, could indicate “longer-term changes” in genetic expression caused by the stresses of spaceflight.

NASA said the research could provide important knowledge of the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body, and that it will influence its planning for a mission to Mars, which would see astronauts spending some three years in space.

Reacting to the news of the study results, Kelly expressed amazement at his body’s changes， and also used the opportunity to make fun of his brother. “This could be good news,” he joked on Twitter. “I no longer have to call Mark my identical twin brother anymore.”

4 . Do you know what “zero” means? Have you ever even stopped to think much about this concept (概念)? It’s an easy one to take for granted. Of course, everyone can understand the concept of nothing, or having nothing.

But did you know that some animals can understand zero as well? Experiments with monkeys and birds have proven that they can master this concept. But now, the understanding of zero has been found in a most unlikely candidate (候选人): bees.

According to a recently published study in the journal Science, Australian and French researchers worked together to conduct experiments to prove that bees are the first insects to “understand that zero belongs at the lower end of a sequence (序列) of numbers”, according to a report by Science Daily.

Scarlett Howard, a researcher at RMIT University in Melbourne, trained bees to choose from several cards with different numbers of shapes printed on them. Correctly choosing the card with the fewest shapes earned them a reward of sugar water. For example, the bees learned to choose three elements when presented with three VS four; or two elements when presented with two VS three. And then these bees were presented a challenge – a card that was entirely blank and that they had never seen before. But 64 percent of the time, they chose to fly toward the blank card instead of the card that had shapes on it. This suggests that the insects understand that zero stands for something less than two or three, according to Science magazine.

Associate Professor Adrian Dyer, also from RMIT University, said the number zero was the basis of modern mathematical and technological progress.

He told Science Daily that the findings have opened a door to new understandings of how different brains understand zero. “If bees can understand zero with a brain of less than a million neurons (神经元) [compared with the 86,000 million neurons of a human brain], it suggests there are simple and efficient (有效的) ways to teach artificial (人工的) intelligence new tricks .”

7 . Patients often come into my office and ask, “How can I look younger?” While I always suggest healthy living — a balanced diet and regular exercise — in order to look and feel younger, I have never thought of facial exercises as part of that plan. That is, until a recent study, published in JAMA Dermatology (皮肤学), showed promising results that routine facial exercise may slow the merciless tide of time.

The theory behind the study originates from the fact that a major part of facial aging is due to the loss of fat and soft tissue, which leads to the growth and spread of wrinkles. If we can lift weights at the gym and enlarge muscles in arms, why couldn’t the same be done for muscles in our faces, therefore to create a more youthful face?

The concept of facial exercise is not a new one. A simple Internet search will produce a lot of blog posts and books on the subject, as well as various programmes that promise to be the next fountain of youth. What the JAMA Dermatology researchers did in their study, which was the first of its kind, was to examine this question from a more strict scientific aspect. They enrolled 27 women between the ages of 40 and 65 to perform daily, 30-minute exercises for eight weeks, and then continue every other day for a total of 20 weeks.

Dermatologists who did not know the participants were asked to rate their photographs before and after the exercise. The dermatologists found an improvement in cheek fullness and estimated the age of the participants at 51 years of age at the start of the programme and 48 at the end of the 20-week study. Furthermore, all the participants felt improvement in their own facial appearance at the end of the study.

While these results seem exalting, the study has some obvious limitations. Of the 27 patients involved, 11 gave up before completing the study. One reason may be that the programme was to time-consuming, clocking in at 30 minutes a day. The overall small size of the study also limits its generalizability to the larger population. In addition, there was also no control group, which would have helped reduce the possibility that this improvement happened by chance.

It’s also hard to draw conclusions about the longevity of these results. Probably the exercises must be continued to keep their effects. But for how long? And how frequently? Which exercises are most effective? Most studies are need to answer these questions.

8 . Last year, 138,000 San Francisco residents used Airbnb, a popular app designed to connect home renters and travelers. It’s a striking number for a city with a population of about 850,000, and it was enough for Airbnb to win a major victory in local elections, as San Francisco voters struck down a debatable rule that would have placed time restrictions and other regulations on short-term rental services.

The company fiercely opposed the measure, Proposition F, with a nearly $10 million advertising campaign. It also contacted its San Franciscan users with messages urging them to vote against Proposition F.

Most people think of Airbnb as a kind of couch-surfing app. The service works for one-night stays on road trips and longer stays in cities, and it often has more competitive pricing than hotels. It’s a textbook example of the “sharing economy”, but not everyone is a fan.

The app has had unintended consequences in San Francisco. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported last year, a significant amount of renting on Airbnb is not in line with the company’s image: middle-class families putting up a spare room to help make ends meet. Some users have taken advantage of the service, using it to turn their multiple properties into vacation rentals or even full-time rentals. Backers of Proposition F argued that this trend takes spaces off the conventional, better-regulated housing market and contributes to rising costs.

“The fact is, widespread abuse of short-term rentals is taking much needed housing off the market and harming our neighborhoods,” said ShareBetter SF, a group that supported Proposition F. Hotel unions have protested the company’s practices in San Francisco and other cities, saying that it creates an illegal hotel system.

San Francisco is in the middle of a long-term, deeply rooted housing crisis that has seen the cost of living explode. Actually, explode is a generous term. The average monthly rent for an apartment is around $4, 000. Located on a narrow outcropping of land overlooking the bay, San Francisco simply doesn’t have enough space to accommodate the massive inflow of young, high-salaried tech employees flocking to Silicon Valley.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, some San Francisco residents supported the measure simply because it seemed like a way to check a big corporation. Opponents of Proposition F countered that the housing crisis runs much deeper, and that passing the rule would have discouraged a popular service while doing little to solve the city’s existing problems.

10 . A robot with a sense of touch may one day feel “pain”, both its own physical pain and sympathy for the pain of its human companions. Such touchy-feely robots are still far off, but advances in robotic touch-sensing are bringing that possibility closer to reality.

Sensors set in soft, artificial skin that can detect both a gentle touch and a painful strike have been hooked up to a robot that can then signal emotions, Asada reported February 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This artificial “pain nervous system,” as Asada calls it, may be a small building block for a machine that could ultimately experience pain. Such a feeling might also allow a robot to “sympathize” with a human companion’s suffering.

Asada, an engineer at Osaka University, and his colleagues have designed touch sensors that reliably pick up a range of touches. In a robot system named Affetto, a realistic looking child’s head, these touch and pain signals can be converted to emotional facial expressions.

A touch-sensitive, soft material, as opposed to a rigid metal surface, allows richer interactions between a machine and the world, says neuroscientist Kingson Man of the University of Southern California. Artificial skin “allows the possibility of engagement in truly intelligent ways”.

Such a system, Asada says, might ultimately lead to robots that can recognize the pain of others, a valuable skill for robots designed to help care for people in need, the elderly, for instance.

But there is an important distinction between a robot that responds in a predictable way to a painful strike and a robot that’s able to compute an internal feeling accurately, says Damasio, a neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California. A robot with sensors that can detect touch and pain is “along the lines of having a robot, for example, that smiles when you talk to it,” Damasio says. ‘It’s a device for communication of the machine to a human.” While that’s an interesting development, “it’s not the same thing” as a robot designed to compute some sort of internal experience, he says.