1 . China has just officially opened its FAST radio telescope to international scientists. Scientists across the world can submit proposals for astronomical observations using the telescope.

FAST is short for Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (球面射电望远镜) and it is also believed to be the world's largest radio telescope and the most sensitive single-dish radio telescope. The receiving surface area of FAST is 250,000 square meters, about the size of 30 standard football fields. Its construction was completed in September 2016 and it officially began operating in January 2020.

The major scientific task of the telescope is the observation of pulsars (脉冲星) – the rotating neutron stars. The study of pulsars can help to confirm the existence of gravitational radiation and black holes, and help solve many other major questions in physics. Another scientific goal of FAST is to search for outer space civilization.

The telescope is located in a naturally deep and round karst depression in southwest China's Guizhou Province. The first advantage of the selected site is the altitude. The average altitude of Guizhou is about 1,100 meters, which maximizes the effectiveness of the observation equipment. Secondly, the radio telescope needs to have a “big pan” to receive better signal. The huge natural depression could reduce the amount of excavation (挖掘) and difficulty of construction. Moreover, the selected site in Guizhou is far away from cities, and has a small population, which reduces the interference (干扰) caused by wireless devices such as TVs, mobile phones and radios from human activities.

FAST has identified over 300 pulsars. Experts predict that the number could reach 1,000 in five years and that the telescope could locate and identify the first pulsar outside the galaxy. With the opening-up to international scientists, China's FAST is expected to make more contribution to astronomical research in the future.

2 . Think back to the last time you pooped. Was it hard or soft? Was it dark or light brown? You might find these questions uncomfortable. Yet the wastes our bodies shed can say a lot about our health. And it is hard to remember past poops and pees well enough to describe to doctors. There's something in those wastes not visible to the eye. But smart toilets can help.

Scientists hope that one day such toilets will be able to diagnose cancer and viruses. But that’s for the future. The smart toilet being developed at Stanford University can take pictures of your feces, track how often you go and measure how long each poop takes. It also can measure the number of white blood cells and types of protein in urine (尿), which could indicate an infection of the urinary tract or bladder. The data will move through the Internet to a secure computer. An artificial-intelligence program then will assess the data. If it finds a problem, the program can notify a patient's doctor.

But how will the toilet know who is on the seat? Seung-min Park, a biomedical engineer on the project, and his team use a scanner to image the butt. The user just sits down on the seat. An image of the butt will later be used to identify data obtained from that person’s toilet visit.

However, potential users may not want to have a camera underneath their butts, Park says. So on the next model, his team will replace the camera with an infrared or laser scanner.

Scanning one’s privates is hardly the only privacy issue with smart toilets. The data could be misused by insurance companies or others. And some toilets might one day be able to test your DNA, containing details you don't want to share with anyone.

Park appreciates such privacy concerns. However, he also thinks the benefits may outweigh the risks. “The more you expose your privacy,” he believes, “the better the health care.”

3 . Avi Loeb, a scientist, believes that we are not alone in the universe. The belief fits with Loeb’s alien (外星的) spaceship theory that at least one alien spaceship might be flying over the orbit (轨道) of Jupiter, which won the international attention last year.

Astronomers in Hawaii found the first known interstellar (星际的) object in late 2017. It was a bit of light moving so fast past the sun that it could only have come from another star. Almost every astronomer on the planet was trying to figure out how the object, called “Oumuamua” got to our far-away, part of the Milky way galaxy. “One possibility is that ‘Oumuamua’ is debris (碎片) from an advanced technological equipment,” Loeb said. “Technology comes from another solar system just showed up at our door.”

“‘Oumuamua’ is not an alien spaceship,” Paul Sutter, another scientist wrote. He suggested Loeb was seeking publicity. Most scientists think “Oumuamua” is some sort of rock. They think it could be an icy wandering comet.

Loeb says that “Oumuamua’s” behavior, means it can’t be a block of rock shaped like a long photo. He thinks it's more likely an object that’s very long and thin, perhaps like a long pancake or a ship’s sail. Loeb says that if someone shows him evidence that contradicts his beliefs, he will immediately give in.

Loeb believes himself a truth-teller and risk- taker in an age of very safe, too-quiet scientists. “The worst thing that can happen to me is that I would be relieved of my management duties, and that would give me even more time to focus on science,” Loeb says. He said he wouldn’t mind giving up all the titles he had and returning to the Israeli farming village where he grew up.

4 . Sirio Persichetti, seventeen years old, can not speak and feed himself. Sirio has spastic tetraplegia, a disease that affects movement in three of a person's four legs and arms. His mouth is permanently open, which prevents him from forming words correctly or swallowing. He is fed liquid nutrition through a tube in his stomach. And he has had a tracheotomy to help him breathe.

But he deals with his condition with such a love for life that his mother, Valentina, decided to create a website for him. He made accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to share his everyday life. He shares heart-warming videos of himself under the title Sirio and the Tetrabonds. The videos have touched the hearts of people all over the world. “I wanted to tell the story of disability in a different way, tell it for what it is and give people alike hope,” Sirio said.

The public’s reaction to young Sirio has been huge. Some of his videos have been watched more than130, 000 times. “In a short time, the response, especially from families living in similar situations, was powerful and exciting so we decided to keep going,” his mother said. Sirio’s followers respond with a countless number of “likes” and messages of support.

Sirio said he wanted to end the stigma —- or unfair beliefs— that often surrounds disability. I wanted to show that children with special needs can still have fun and lead a happy life. Valentina said she never expected her son to become famous on social media. “But we realized that is useful,” she added, “that it helps and is a necessary step to make the life of many people much more normal.”

5 . Instagram has launched (发布) a machine learning technology to its app that better identifies self-harm and suicide (自杀) content in the UK after tragic death of a 14-year-old schoolgirl Molly Russell, who viewed Instagram content connected to anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide before ending her own life in November 2017.

Molly’s family later found she had been viewing content on social media, particularly pictures on Instagram, linked to anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicide, which her father, Ian Russell, believed to “help to kill her.” Ian has demanded that web companies should take more responsibility for filtering (过滤) harmful content from the Internet, which may possibly contribute to more young people’s deaths.

Concerns have been raised about self-harm and suicide content online, especially how platforms deal with such content and its impact on certain users, young people in particular. Social media platforms are now increasingly being pressured to develop technology to help remove harmful content as quickly as possible, rather than waiting for users to report it.

Now, the new tool from Instagram automatically searches for suicide-related images and words on the platform. It then makes the content less visible (可见的) in the app or, in some cases, removes it completely after 24 hours if the machine learning decides it breaks the app’s safety rules.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said, “Our technology finds posts that may include suicide or self-harm content and sends them to human reviewers to make the final decision and take the right action.” Between April and June this year, around 90 percent of such kind of harmful content on Instagram was found by its own technology before any real user reported it to the platform. “But our goal is to get that number as close as we possibly can to 100 percent,” Mosseri added. “And I hope this could in some way help avoid tragic deaths like Molly Russell’s.”

8 . It’s time for bed, the lights are out, and yet you’re wide awake. You do eventually manage to fall asleep, but even then, it’s a very shallow, restless sort of sleep.

Now more research suggests you needn’t look further than outside your window and at the moon for the cause of this sleeplessness. However, in a surprising twist, the findings weren’t entirely what the researchers expected. While we know that humans are a species ruled by light, the “lunar phase effect” (月相效应) affects sleep even when artificial sources of light are accounted for.

Rather than people staying up later and sleeping less during the full moon, it was just before the full moon that sleep was shorter and lighter. “It turns out that the nights before the full moon are the ones that have most of the moonlight during the first half of the night,” said Horacio Iglesia, a professor of biology at the University of Washington in The Guardian. The opposite was true just before the new moon — people tended to sleep more and go to bed earlier.

Ninety-eight participants across three Indigenous communities in Argentina wore wrist monitors tracking sleep patterns over the course of one to two months. While one community had no access to electricity, the second community had limited access, and the third community was located in an urban setting with full access to electricity.

The study also found that this lunar phase effect on sleep also appeared to have greater impact on people who had more limited access to electricity. In every community, participants’ peak (高峰) sleepless period occurred in the three to five days leading up to the full moon night, while the opposite was true for the new moon, the study authors found.

Wanting further insight, the researchers compared their data to the results of a similar study of 464 Seattle-based students at the University of Washington. The findings proved consistent.

This research supports the view that try as we may, we can’t ever fully get away from some forces of nature.

10 . While going to the aquarium（水族馆）is a great way to learn about sea animals, some have raised concerns about the animals' quality of life. But Edge Innovations, a company in New Zealand, has a very special way to solve the problem.

Edge Innovations is working with American creators of some of Hollywood's most famous animals to develop robot dolphins that look like almost exactly the same as real-life animals.

The ocean park industry has had falling interests for over ten years because of ethical（道德的）concerns and the cost of live animals, yet people's hunger for learning about and experiencing these animals is still as strong as ever. Developers believe that it's time to make a change in this industry and that this method shows humans' mercy and brings more interests at the same time.

One robot dolphin could cost an aquarium at least $ 26.3 million. But the robot would be controlled by humans and be able to play with humans as a regular dolphin would. The price at the moment is very high, but Edge Innovations notes that since the robots last longer than a real animal, the returns will be worth the price.

The robot dolphin weighs just about 600 pounds but is amazingly life-like. According to The Guardian, a test audience was actually not able to tell it apart from a real dolphin. As for aquarium visitors, the developers forecast that they won't mind not seeing a "real" dolphin. "For people in New Zealand, for me, I prefer natural animals," said Li Wang, the business developer for Edge Innovations. "But when we think about the new generation who spend far more time than us playing electronic games online, we think the robot dolphins will be accepted.”

The development of robot animals may be the future of zoos and aquariums, making it easier for animal lovers to enjoy nature in a kind way.