4 . “The arrow shot is so straight that it hits the bull’s eye. The young people will have good luck…” Dargye sang as he worked on his handmade bag.

Dargye, 56, an artist who excels at traditional craftsmanship (技艺) and Tibetan folk music in Drinba village in Dragyib district, Nyingchi, Tibet autonomous region, remembers many folk songs he learned from his father and uncle. Now, it’s his turn to pass them on.

“I have liked traditional songs and dances since I was a child,” said Dargye, who has four apprentices (学徒). “The songs tell the histories of our ancestors and carry our unique culture, and it’s always a lot of fun to perform these traditional songs and dances at various gatherings.” The song topics vary from archery, love, to labor and praise for the land. In addition to teaching these songs to his family members and apprentices, he also uses social media platforms such as WeChat to teach songs.

His daughter, Chok Butri, also admires the folk culture. After posting a video of her daughter, Tsering Kyi, dancing on Douyin, she gained a lot of new fans on the popular short-video platform. “We are modern people living in a modern era, so it’s important and our responsibility that we use modern tools to pass on our traditional culture to make it last forever.” said Chok Butri, adding that she often posts songs and dances on WeChat and Douyin.

Dargye and his fellow villagers also recreate songs, adding modern elements such as aircraft and trains to the lyrics. Besides singing and dancing, Dargye makes handicrafts decorated with Tibetan cultural elements, including various hide and hair ropes, bags made of leather and cloth, and knife sheaths.

The local government encourages villagers to inherit (继承) and develop folk songs and other forms of traditional culture. Dargye’s efforts to preserve folk culture have been acknowledged by the government. In 2014, he was chosen as a county-level intangible (无形的) cultural inheritor and receives funds every year.

5 . Each year, the world loses about 10 million hectares of forest—at area about the size of Iceland — because of cutting down trees. At that rate, some scientists predict the world’s forests could disappear in 100 to 200 years. To handle it, now researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have pioneered a technique to generate wood-like plant materials sin a lab. This makes it possible to “grow” a wooden product without cutting down trees.

In the lab, the researchers first take cells from the leaves of a young plant. These cells are cultured in liquid medium for two days, then moved to another medium which contains nutrients and two different hormones (激素). By adjusting the bormone levels, the researchers can tune the physical and mechanical qualities of the cells: New the researchers use a 3D printer to shape the cell-based material, and let the shaped material grow in the dark for three months. Finally, the researchers dehydrate (使脱水) the material, and then evaluate its qualities.

They found that lower bormone levels lead to plant materials with more rounded, open cells of lower density (密度), while higher hormone levels contribute to the growth of plant materials with smaller but denser cell structures. Lower or higher density of cell structures makes the plant materials softer or more rigid, helping the materials grow with different wood-like characteristics. What’s more, it’s to be noted that the research process is about 100 times faster than the time it takes for a tree to grow to maturity!

Research of this kind is ground-breaking. “This work demonstrates the great power of a technology,” says lead researcher, Jeffrey Berenstab. “The real opportunity here is to be at its best with what you use and how you use it. This technology can be tuned to meet the requirements you give about shapes, sizes, rigidity, and forms. It enables us to grow’ any wooden product in a way that traditional agricultural methods can’t achieve.”

As I worked as a sports journalist for my first 10 years with China Daily, I have     1     (close) followed how China has grown from a minor player in the international sports arena into a global sports power.

    2     it had a huge population, China was not much of a global force in sports until the1980s. However, it was very good at table tennis at that time. The first major international breakthrough for China came in 1981     3     its women’s volleyball team won the Women’s Volleyball World Cup. Understandably, sports fans went crazy. Parades celebrating the victory     4     (hold) on many university campuses     5     some students shouting slogans such as “revitalizing (振兴) China”, which has since become the goal of the nation.

    6     (motivate) by the victory, China invested more of the limited resources in training athletes. The investment paid off, as China got     7     (it) first Olympic gold medal in shooting in 1984. In all, Chinese athletes won 15 gold medals in the Los Angeles Olympics,    8     (set) the course to becoming a global sports power. In     9     past decade, Chinese athletes have been winning about 120 gold medals in international sports games every year.

As China invests more resources in the sports sector thanks to the fast-paced economic development and winning world titles becoming normal for Chinese athletes, the government started encouraging ordinary     10     (citizen) to play sports.

8 . When I stepped into the Samcheong Park Library in Seoul, I saw the future. The simple building had a nice selection of books and a cafe where readers could enjoy coffee while gazing at the leaves outside. It was specifically designed without any latest technology.

“What’s so innovative about that?” a librarian in Toronto asked when I showed her pictures. Innovation to her meant digital technology, like 3D printers. “Why couldn’t they both be innovative?” I asked.

We are constantly told that innovation is the most important force in our economy, without which we would be left behind. But that fear of missing out has led us to fall into the false trappings of innovation over truly innovative ideas that may be simpler and more effective. This mindset implies that if you just buy the new thing, you have innovated! Each year, businesses and individuals run around like broken toy robots, trying to figure out their strategy for the latest buzzword equipment.

At best, this is a waste of resources. Devices are bought, used and abandoned, as the technology’s capabilities fall short of its promise. But at its worst, this approach can truly cause damage. Schools cut field trips to purchase tablets with few proven benefits. Companies that applied AI into hiring have actually strengthened gender and racial prejudices.

True innovation isn’t just some magic devices. It is a continuing process of reflection and reassessment, which often means adopting “old” ideas and tools in a new context, or even returning to methods that worked in the past. Adjusted properly, these rearview(后视的) innovations have proved as transformative as novel technologies.

Look no farther than the streets of New York, which have been redesigned recently to accommodate cyclists with car-free zones. The idea isn’t new. It was created half a century ago, with the aim of bringing cities back to their residents. And while e-reader sales have been exploding, Penguin just announced it would publish tiny printed books, an ideal solution for a market demanding both convenience and physicality.

9 . When Belquer first joined a team to make a better live music experience for deaf and hard-of-hearing people, he was struck by how they had developed more solutions to enjoy concerts. “What they were doing at the time was holding balloons to feel the vibrations (震动) through theirfingers,” Belquer said. He thought the team could make something to help hard-of-hearing people enjoy live music even more with the technology now available.

Belquer, who is also a musician and theater artist, is now the “Chief Vibration Officer” of Music: Not Impossible, which uses new technology to address social issues like poverty and disability access. His team started by tying different vibrating cell phone motors to bodies, but that didn’t quite work. The vibrations were all the same. Eventually, they worked with engineers to develop a light haptic (触觉的) suit with a total of 24 vibrating plates. There are 20 of them tied to a undershirt that fits tightly around the body like a hiking backpack, plus one that ties to each wrist and ankle. When you wear the suit, it’s surprising how it feels.

The vibrations are mixed by a haptic DJ who controls the location, frequency and intensity of feeling across the suits, just as a music DJ mixes sounds in an artful way. “What we’re doing is selecting and mixing what we want and send it to different parts of the body,” said the DJ. The haptic suits were just one component of the event. There were American Sign Language interpreters; the music was displayed on a screen on the stage.

The suits are the star attraction. Lily Lipman, who has auditory processing disorder, lit up when asked about her experience. “It’s cool, because I’m never quite sure if I’m hearing what other people are hearing, so it’s amazing to get the music in my body.”

10 . People from East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why.

Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly (均匀的) across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes.

“We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions,” Jack said. “Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect (忽略) the mouth.”

According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.

The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.

It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than did Westerners. “The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions,” Jack said. “Our data suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less.”

In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.