1 . Fu Cong, a Chinese-born pianist, died on Monday at a hospital in London, where he had lived for many years.

A lover of classical music from a young age, Mr. Fu began taking piano lessons when he was 7. He made his first stage appearance in 1952. The concert caught the attention of officials in Beijing, who selected him to compete and tour in Eastern Europe. Mr. Fu soon moved to Poland, where he studied at the Warsaw Conservatory (音乐学校) on a scholarship. To prepare for the fifth Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1955, he practiced so hard that he hurt his fingers and was nearly cut from the first round of the competition.

Mr. Fu was one of the first Chinese pianists to achieve global fame when he took third place in the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1955. He also won a special prize for his performance of Chopin's mazurkas. Almost overnight, he became a national hero. To China, Mr. Fu's recognition in a well-known international competition was evidence that the country could stand on its own artistically in the West. Chinese reporters came to interview Mr. Fu, while many others went to his father, Fu Lei, for advice on child-raising.

In 1981, a volume of letters written by his father, was published in China. Full of advice, encouragement, life teachings and strict paternal love, the book Fu Lei's Family Letters became a best-seller in China. Besides influencing a generation of Chinese, Mr. Fu's words resonated (引起共鸣) long after his death with the person for whom they were intended.

“My father had a saying that 'First you must be a person, then an artist, and then a musician, and only then can you be a pianist,'" Mr. Fu Cong once recalled in an interview. "Even now, I believe in this order-that it should be this way and that I am this way.”

4 . Becoming a real runner

I would never use the word “athletic” to describe myself. To me, athletes are people who really enjoy working out. I remember crying in middle school when I had to run a mile during gym class. I huffed and puffed as I jogged. As I grew up, I would go to the gym, but I never enjoyed working out. That, I thought, was for real runners.

In June 2017, my friend sent me an email that would forever change my attitude towards running. He was training for a 200-mile relay (接力赛) and wanted me to be on his team. I would run three legs between four and six miles each over the course of two days. Figuring that I would never again have the chance to work with some top runners, I immediately agreed, and started running outside to prepare.

That first run was hard. I purposefully avoided Central Park in order to stay away from real runners. After a few blocks, I was already winded, and ran the rest of the way home. I called my mom, choked up, to say I had no hope at all of running this relay. But she encouraged me to keep at it, so I didn't quit. I went from running four miles a week to eight within one month before my advanced training began.

I was frightened going into the first training session with the team as everyone else was super “athletic”. We ran for five miles, and I was significantly slower. However, my teammates were so supportive that I felt the runner’s high, which I had never believed existed.

One day, about two weeks into training, my ankle gave out while I was running in Central Park. I was diagnosed with a stress fracture (应力性骨折). The doctor told me to stop running for two months. It took me a while to face the fact that I was out of the race. My doctor told me that he too had once been struck down with a stress fracture, and the following year, he beat his best running time in a half-marathon. That brought me hope.

I made it through the next two months by picturing myself running again. Just yesterday, for the first time since that fateful day, I took my outdoor run with my physical therapist. I mentioned that I might run a half-marathon the next year. Now I wake up excited for the days I get to run. Maybe I am a “real runner” after all.

5 . In November 2019, Luke Summerscales and Jessica Jacobs were in a remote mountain range of New South Wales, fighting some of the worst bush-fires on record in Australia, when another disaster struck: a fellow firefighter collapsed from a heart attack. The nearest ambulance was more than an hour away and the terrain（地形）was too steep for a rescue helicopter to land, so the pair started doing CPR on 53-year-old John Kennedy until he was able to breathe on his own.

In November 2020, the Country Fire Authority recognized their actions by giving them both Chief Officer Commendation awards. But they're volunteers. Summerscales builds houses for a living; Jacobs works as a university lab technician. Starting in late 2019, as record fires spread fast across their nation during its summer season, they joined tens of thousands of Australians who set aside their usual lives to help stop the spread of the fires.

As climate change heightens both the frequency and intensity（强度）of bushfires, firefighters are being tested to new extremes. Australia unusually relies on volunteer labor in the state of New South Wales, which suffered some of the country's most severe fires during the 2019-2020 bushfire season, close to 90% of the men and women fighting fires were volunteers. It's been this way for more than a century in Australia, with ordinary citizens working together to protect the land.

2019 was Australia's hottest and driest on record, and the resulting fires all but exhausted the men and women constantly called to battle them. Peter Holding, 66, who has been a volunteer firefighter for 43 years, says he's never seen anything as severe as last summer's bushfire season. Still, as Australia's fire season intensifies in late 2020, its volunteer firefighters are preparing to do battle again.

6 . Folk tales have saddled the moon with major responsibilities: moods, increases in crime and even mental disorders are blamed on the Earth's only constant natural satellite. But could the "lunar effect" disturb sleep?

Scientists have long understood that human activity is facilitated by light, be it sunlight, moonlight or artificial light. But a recent study suggests our ability to sleep is distinctly affected by the lunar cycle, even when taking into account artificial sources of light.

Using wrist monitors, researchers tracked sleep patterns in 98 individuals living in three local communities in Argentina over the course of one to two months. One rural community had no electricity access, a second rural community had limited access to electricity, while a third community was located in an urban setting and had full access to electricity.

Participants in all three communities showed the same pattern of sleep oscillations as the moon progressed through its 29.5-day cycle, with sleep duration changing by between 20 and more than 90 minutes, and bedtimes varying by 30 to 80 minutes.

In each community, the peak of participants sleeping less and staying up later occurred in the three-to-five-day period prior to full moon nights, and the opposite occurred on the nights before the new moon, the authors found.

Unsurprisingly, data showed the "lunar phase effect" on sleep appeared to be stronger the more limited access to electricity was.

“The result strongly suggests that human sleep is synchronized with lunar phases regardless of ethnic and socio-cultural background and of the level of urbanisation," the researchers wrote in the journal Science Advances.

De la Iglesia added: “We humans tend to believe that we managed to somehow control nature, and the use of artificial light is a great example of that. But it turns out that there are some forces of nature that we cannot get away from.”

Derk-Jan Dijk, a professor of sleep and physiology and the director of a sleep research centre at the University of Surrey, described the study as exciting but noted that the researchers had not addressed internal influences such as body clocks that could affect sleep patterns.

7 . When newspapers and radios report the damage caused by a hurricane (飓风)called Hazel,girls named Hazel are probably played a joke on by others.To keep out of trouble,the Weather Bureau says,“Any resemblance(相似)between hurricane names and the names of particular girls is only accidental.”

Some women became angry because hurricanes are given their names,but many other women are proud to see their names make headlines.They don’t even care that they are the names of destructive storms.Because more women seem to like it than dislike it,the Weather Bureau has decided to continue using girls’ names for hurricanes.

In some ways a hurricane is like a person.After it is born,it grows and develops,then becomes old and dies.Each hurricane has a character of its own.Each follows its own way through the world,and people remember it long after it has gone.So it is natural to give hurricanes names,and to talk about them almost as if they were alive.

8 . Thinking of getting your child to take up a sport that involves a coach or instructor? There is a piece of good news. A new study finds that children who join in organized physical activities at a young age are less likely to have emotional difficulties by the time they turn 12.

“The primary school years are a critical time in child development,” said Frédéric N. Brière, a professor of psycho-education who led the study. And every parent wants to raise a well-adjusted (适应性强的) child. Besides keeping children from sitting for long, physical activities, such as structured sports, have the potential physical and mental benefits, Brière believes, something parents seem to know instinctively (直觉地).

“We followed a large representative population of typically developing Canadian children over time to examine whether consistent participation in organized sports from ages 6 to 10 would lessen risks associated with emotional distress, anxiety, shyness, social withdrawal (不合群) at age 12, said Brière. “Our goal was to test this question as critically as possible by excluding pre-existing child or family conditions that could offer a different explanation.” To do this. Brière and his team examined data from children born in 1997 or 1998. From ages 6 to 10, mothers reported whether their child participated in organized physical activities. At age 12, teachers reported on the child's levels of emotional distress, anxiety, shyness, and social withdrawal at school.

“The results revealed that children who participated in sports consistently from ages 6 to 10 showed fewer cases of those factors at age 12 than their peers who did not engage in physical activities in a consistent way,” said Brière. “We found these benefits above and beyond pre-existing individual and family characteristics.”

Brière concluded, “Getting kids actively involved in organized sports seems to promote global development. This involvement appears to be good on a socio-emotional level apart from the physical benefits it brings. Being less emotionally troubled between primary and high school is a priceless benefit for children,as they are about to enter a much larger universe with bigger academic challenges.

9 . It’s not new for labs to use robots. But earlier robots usually stayed in one place.

The UL robot, which scientists at the University of Liverpool (UL) have developed, is the opposite of that. The 1.75-meter robot is similar in size to a human. Though it weighs much more than most people, it’s able to easily move about in the same sort of space as humans do.

It uses a special laser system called LIDAR to guide itself—even in the dark. Once it’s close to a work station, it can move into a more exact position through its touch sensors. With one long arm which can turn in almost any direction, the robot is able to use several different kinds of lab equipment to run its own experiments. Some of the equipment has been changed slightly to make it easier for the robot, but basically and most impressively, it’s the same equipment a human would use. The robot was built and programmed by Benjamin Burger, a PhD student at the university, who says it took a lot of effort to program the robot so that it can do things without making mistakes.

Over the next 8 days, the robot ran 688 experiments, always choosing its next experiment based on the results of the last one.

Andrew Cooper, who led the program says, “The robot ran for 172 hours, stopping for only a couple of hours each day to recharge its batteries. To do the same amount of work would have taken a human several months. It isn’t cheap—it cost around $125,000 and took years to program. But the scientists compare that to the cost of other laboratory equipment which they say can also be quite expensive. The fact that the robot can be used for many different purposes is a huge advantage. It is meant to help scientists, rather than replace them, and it frees up time for the human researchers to think creatively.”

10 . A recent report in the journal Nature Climate Change said that with Climate changing increasingly, polar bears may be wiped out by the end of this century. However, unless more is done, their extinction is likely to come earlier because their homes may disappear. And according to Science Daily, the Arctic, the only natural habitat for polar bears, is in danger. Sea ice in the area could disappear completely by 2035. This is undoubtedly bad news for this animal because they use the floating sea ice to hunt.

Scientists made this prediction by using the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre climate model. According to Science Daily, this model allowed researchers to compare Arctic sea ice conditions during the last interglacial period—the warm period that occurred around 127,000 years ago—with present conditions. Researchers found that during the last interglacial period many shallow pools of water formed on the surface of the Arctic sea ice during spring and summer. These pools, known as melt ponds, played a key role in the melting of the sea ice. This is because if there are larger areas of melt ponds, more heat is absorbed by sea ice, which causes it to melt further.

In the last interglacial period, the Arctic sea ice actually disappeared. This is a frightening thought for scientists who see the pattern repeating. “If what’s happening to the Arctic right now is anything like the last interglacial period, there’s a chance that it could be almost free of sea ice in only 15 years,” a researcher told MSN. In addition to the potential extinction of some animals, the melting of sea ice could cause serious natural disasters. It could increase floods along coastal areas.

To save the most northern region of the earth, what we should be doing is “focusing all our minds on achieving a low-carbon world”, Louise Sime, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, said in a statement.