1 . Cats don't avoid people who upset their owners, proving they're just as disloyal as we always suspected, a new study confirms. The study will be a blow to enthusiastic cat lovers across the country, as their kitty friends appear to have lived up to their reputation of being aloof and uncaring. But dog owners can cheer that man's best friend still has their back.

Having previously showed that dogs avoided a person who behaved negatively towards their owner, researchers tried the same experiment with cats to see how they reacted. For the study, cats watched as their owner tried unsuccessfully to open a transparent container to take out an object, and then requested help from a person sitting nearby. Some people helped the pet owner and others didn't, before they all offered food to the animals.

In the dog experiment, most dogs preferred not to take food from people who didn't help their owners. But cats weren't phased and showed no preference between helpers and passive bystanders, eating food from whoever offered it.

The study's 'lead author Hitomi Chijiiwa wrote: “One possible reason for domestic cats showing no sign of a negativity bias(偏见) might be that cooperation is not typical of this species. Whereas dogs are known to cooperate with humans and conspecifics(同类) in various real and experimental contexts， the same is not true of cats. Domestic cats originated from a less sociable ancestor than did dogs, and they have not been subjected to artificial selection for cooperation with humans. However,group hunting did not evolve in small cats, because the size of their typical prey items remained unchanged even as cat communities grew bigger."

“Thus,cats can be considered as at least potentially 'social' and 'flexible' in terms of social structure, but not 'cooperative'. The ability to evaluate others based on indirect experiences might be restricted to more cooperative species.”

2 . A New Jersey couple and a homeless man have been accused of making up a feel﹣good story that raised more than ＄400,000 through GoFundMe.

The couple, Kate McClure and Mark D'Amico, and the man, Johnny Bobbitt Jr., face a charge of second-degree theft, Burlington County Prosecutor Scott Coffina said Thursday.

The couple said they met Bobbitt when he gave his last ＄20 to McClure, who was stranded on Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, so she could put gas in her car，then started the GoFundMe campaign as a way to thank him.

The paying-it-forward story that drove this fundraiser might seem too good to be true, Coffina said at a press conference.

Unfortunately, it was. The entire campaign was based on a lie.

After fees, the money of the campaign netted about ＄367, 000, all deposited into McClure's accounts, Coffina said. Bobbitt received ＄75,000, and within months McClure and D'Amico had wasted their share on buying a car, high-end handbags and trips, Coffina said. They also used it at casinos(赌场), he said.

Coffina stressed that while Bobbitt, a veteran (老兵), deserves thanks for his service to the country and sympathy for his situation; he was fully involved in the crime, using media to help "promote the dishonest campaign".

According to Coffina, McClure and D'Amico first met Bobbitt at an off-ramp（驶出匝道）near a casino they regularly went, at least a month before the GoFundMe campaign went live.

They went back to the spot a month later, Coffina said. D'Amico took a picture of McClure and Bobbitt that became the face of the GoFundMe campaign that they started hours later, Coffina said.

3 . Since time immemorial, people have been searching for the fountain of youth. Surprisingly, the dream of human immortality is, according to some scientists, not so far out of reach.

Professor Brian Cox, Google's Ray Kurzweil, and Tesla head Elon Musk all agree on not only the possibility of human immortality but also that it is not too far away. The solution, they say, is something called the “technological singularity”.

The singularity is a combination of humankind with computers, namely uploading the contents of one's brain onto a hard drive. In that way, a person's consciousness can stay alive after a physical body gets worse. This is based on the idea that a human brain is simply a machine, and there is, according to Professor Cox, “no reason at all why we cannot simulate (模拟) human intelligence,” using a computer.

Although Professor Cox did not say when the singularity would occur, Google's Ray Kurzweil predicts that the singularity will happen as early as 2045. By 2100, he says, human body parts will be replaceable by machine parts. Further, by uploading our brains onto a computer, we will be able to toy with it, and become “able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion fold. ”

Elon Musk agreed with the asessments of the other scientists, even going so far as saying that the chances that we are not in a computer simulation right now are “one in billions” .

Google is preparing for a future where you can download personalities onto robots. For example, you might be able to download onto your robot a celebrity personality, or of the personality of your deceased grandmother.

The search engine giant filed a patent for this download process recently. So they definitely believe that the singularity is just around the corner. All you have to do is hold on until 2045, and soon you can effectively live in the cloud.

4 . This year's hottest destination is Mars. On 23 July, China launched the Tianwen-1 mission to the Red Planet — one of three spacecrafts' planning to head there in 2020. This is China's second interplanetary mission, but the first that the nation has launched on its own. The other, Phobos-Grunt, was a cooperation with Russia that didn't make it out of Earth's orbit after blasting off in 2011.

The new mission, called Tianwen, translated as "questions to heaven" — consists of an orbiter, a lander and a rover, the last of which will be named via a public competition. "It's very ambitious because it's a four-part mission: there's the launch, getting into orbit, the landing and the rover, and every single step has to go right, says space consultant Laura Forczyk. All those steps must work on the first try, an achievement no other space program me has accomplished on a Mars mission because of the difficulty of landing there.

If all goes well, Tianwen-1 will arrive at Mars in February 2021 and the lander and rover will touch down two or three months later. They will take pictures from the surface, measure the soil composition, make radar observations of the planet's underground structure and observe Mars's magnetic field. Due to the harsh environment on Mars, the rover is expected to last about 90 Martian days. It weighs around 240 kilograms, about the same as China's Yutu-2 rover, which is currently roaming the moon. "The Chinese mission to the far side of the moon has been hugely successful, so they are building on that success now," says Forczyk.

The orbiter, which will relay data from the lander and rover back to scientists on Earth, also carries a suite of scientific instruments. It has two cameras and a spectrometer (光谱仪), which it will use to create a map of the mineral composition of Mars's surface, as well as radar and detectors to examine particles in the Martian atmosphere. It will also look for deposits of water ice that could be helpful for future explorers.

Tianwen-1 won't be alone in Mars orbit. The United Arab Emirates has just launched its first mission to Mars, and NASA's Perseverance rover is set to launch on 30 July. These missions are all leaving now because Mars is at its closest point to Earth, which happens once every two years.

5 . For one person who passed away, another life supersedes him.

Back in January, Connie Despanic and Benjamin Hall were celebrating the birth of their new born son at the hospital. Though they had agreed on naming him Kingston, they had not yet decided on a middle names. However, they soon found inspiration in an unlikely place; a handwritten letter that was given to them shortly after their son’s birth. The letter read, “To my dad’s angel, even though I will never know your name, you are the first child born here after my dad’s passing. When one life is taken, another is given.”

The letter was written by Jamie Fontenot. Her father James had just passed away in the same hospital. As Jamie was missing her father, a sweet song started to play on the overhead speakers. When she asked nurses about the song, they said that the hospital played the song whenever a baby was born. In her time of heartbreak, Jamie found comfort in the new life that followed her dad’s death, so she wrote the letter and asked the nurses to give it to the baby whose birth caused the music.

Upon reading the note, Connie started to cry. She was full of appreciation for the letter. She and her husband agreed that their son’s middle name should be James. After delivering the note to the baby’s family, the nurses insisted on introducing Jamie to Connie and her new born son. The meeting was an emotional one. And over the course of the last year, the two families have kept in touch and become fast friends.

6 . Plastic baby bottles shed microplastics when heated. Should you be worried about its side-effects? We still don’t have enough evidence of health risks posed by microplastic consumptions by infants or adults.

“The last thing we want to do is unduly alarm parents,” said John Boland, a professor at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and one of the authors of the Nature Food study. While the health effects of microplastics are still unknown, parents can significantly reduce their infants’ exposure by adding some steps to their bottle preparation routine, Boland said. He recommends letting plastic bottles cool completely after sterilization(消毒) in hot water, then washing them out at least three times with water that’s been allowed to cool to room temperature after being sterilized by boiling. Researchers here also found that plastic tea kettles, plastic instant noodle cups and plastic food storage containers all released similarly high levels of microplastics when subjected to heat.

As for what those microplastics may be doing in our bodies, the evidence so far is quite limited and unclear, Schwabl said that points to a need for more research into microplastics released from plastic food storage containers, especially when they are subjected to higher temperatures. He noted some research has found microplastics can cause inflammation(发炎) in the organs, while other studies “show they do not harm.” “The threshold at which they cause problems has not been determined for humans,” Schwabl said. For now, Schwabl agrees we shouldn’t panic. He’s avoiding plastic containers in his daily life – “not so much that I am afraid of the ingestion, but I think thereby I may be contributing to reducing the amount of plastic waste” that makes its way into the environment.

At the moment, there is no need to be afraid, but it is an open question and definitely an unmet need.