Preparations Underway for Moon Landing

China is making preparations for a moon landing that will place its astronauts on the lunar surface, according to a senior official at the China Manned Space Agency, who said our astronauts will definitely touch down on the moon.

The news conference invited key figures from China’s manned space programs, who are also members of the Communist Party of China,     1     (share) their stories and thoughts with journalists.

China’s space authorities have a long-term plan to land astronauts on the moon and set up at least one scientific station there. They hope to use the manned missions to carry out scientific surveys     2     technological research, explore ways to develop lunar resources and strengthen the nation’s space capabilities.

Toward that goal, the editor-in-chief of Aerospace Knowledge magazine, said Chinese engineers need to build new, stronger carrier rockets and spacecraft     3     they arrange a moon-bound journey for Chinese astronauts. “The nation’s current rockets and manned spaceships     4     not send astronauts to the moon     5     they are not designed for such a mission. We need to design a new rocket, a new spacecraft, a lunar landing capsule fit for a moon walk. We also need to upgrade our ground support system     6     was designed for operations in low-Earth orbit     7     on the lunar surface,” he explained.

Designers at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, the country’s major maker of carrier rockets, are researching a super-heavy rocket that will be several times bigger and mightier than the Long March 5, now the biggest and strongest in China’s Long March rocket family.

    8     a length of nearly 90 meters, the new rocket, which has yet     9     (name), will have a liftoff weight of about 2,000 metric tons and will be able to place a 25-ton spacecraft into an Earth-moon trajectory, designers said,     10     (add) that this new model will serve the manned lunar landing.

2 . Scientists in the U. S. have developed a new training program for the brain that they say can make you smarter. Called “Gist(主旨)Reasoning Training,” the program developed out of the University of Texas at Dallas goes beyond standard memory recall and information _______ tests and improves cognitive performance by _______ the brain in areas like strategic attention, integrated reasoning and innovation, they claim.

To start, participants - who ranged from teenagers and healthy adults to brain injury victims and seniors at risk for Alzheimer’s disease - were _______ with filtering competing information and focusing on only important, essential components. They were also instructed to _______ the information, finding common _______ or developing generalized statements from what they were reading. Each strategy was designed to build on the previous exercise. Participants were encouraged to apply the same mental strategies outside the training sessions.

After about a dozen 45- to 60- minute sessions, conducted over two months, cognitive _______ were recorded in areas like abstraction, reasoning and innovation, scientists said, and by extension, also improved memory, planning and problem solving. “What’s exciting about this work is that in randomized trials _______ gist reasoning training to memory training, we found that it was not learning new information that engaged widespread brain networks and _______ cognitive performance, but rather actually _______ processing of information and using that information in new ways that augmented brain performance,” said the study co-author Sandra Bond Chapman in a statement.

________ helping seniors improve their cognitive function in old age, a strategic and more analytical approach to brain boosting exercises could also be used by young people to develop an early ________, and help middle-aged adults sharpen their skills and remain“ ________ healthy,” scientists say.

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. Research out of the University of Los Angeles California published last year also found that older adults who ________ used a brain-fitness program called Dakim Brain Fitness improved their memory and language skills. Another ________ way to keep mentally fit? Hit the pavement and go for a run or brisk walk, as it’s been well ________ that physical activity is an effective brain booster.

4 . I Am Not a Robot

An annoyance, an important security feature, an uncomfortable request: however you feel about being asked to prove you are not a robot, it has become a daily occurrence for most of us, but perhaps not one we would miss if it were to suddenly go away.

A new feature in the latest versions of iOS and macOS, Apple’s operating systems for smartphones and computers, promises to give the boot to “captchas” once and for all.     1    

“Sometimes a captcha is just a button to press,” said Apple engineer Tommy Pauly. “But other times it can be a challenge to fill out.”

The term captcha is in fact an acronym (首字母缩略词) for   “completely automated public Turing test (图灵测试) to tell computers and humans apart.” To help stop fraud (欺诈), these little tests often pop up when you’re signing up for or onto a website.

    2     If you get it wrong, it may ask you to start again, leading you to wonder if you really know what a traffic light looks like—or if you might really be a robot after all.

But captchas are now fast becoming unusable, making the Internet a wasteland of difficult puzzles. Users must struggle to do the most basic things. “We’ve literally all found ourselves at one time or another complaining: ‘Those were all the pictures with traffic lights,” said Effie Le Moignan, a researcher in social computing at Newcastle University.

Internet users struggle to tell the difference between a wear of paint on a sidewalk and a formalized crosswalk that’s often requested in a traditional captcha, and worry that one wrong answer may lock them out of an account.     3    

“You likely don’t enjoy being interrupted by these,” said Apple’s Tommy Pauly. “I certainly don’t. The reason these experiences exist is to prevent dishonest activity. If you run a server, you don’t want it to be defeated by fraud.     4    ”

The company worked with Fastly and Cloudflare to build the new feature. It works by allowing your device to send a statement confirming it is being used by a human to the requesting website.

5 . Venus (金星) has long played second to its redder, smaller and more distant neighbor. Given how inhospitable (不宜居住的) Venus has appeared to be, we have spent the majority of the last century pinning some of our biggest hopes of finding signs of life on Mars.

That all changed on September 15, 2020. It was announced that a strange gas called phosphine had been spotted in the clouds above Venus. The gas is produced by microbes, extremely small living things, here on Earth, so the discovery has renewed hopes that there might be life on Venus. Now we need to know for sure.

There is, after all, only so much we can do with ground-based instruments. Venus is extremely bright. This brightness, caused by the intense reflection of sunlight from its thick clouds and highlighted because of its closer distance to Earth, basically blinds our instruments from making more detailed observations of the planet. It is like trying to look at the road while another car’s high beams (远光灯) are pointed in your direction.

“To really get to the heart of this question, we need to go to Venus,” says Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University. But of course, that is easier said than done. Temperatures at the surface reach 464℃, and pressures are 89 times higher than on Earth. Only the Soviet Union has successfully landed on the Venusian surface—its Venera 13 lander functioned for 127 minutes before succumbing to the bad weather in 1982. It is not easy to justify spending hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars on a mission that could be over in a matter of hours without giving us what we need.

An orbiter is the most sensible start. Unlike ground-based observations, orbiters can peer into the atmosphere and would have a better time observing how phosphine levels change over time or over what regions they are most concentrated. An orbiter also presents the opportunity to complete more challenging projects by potentially venturing directly into the planet’s atmosphere. A sample return mission could be possible, in which a spacecraft flies into the atmosphere and bottles up some gas to bring back to Earth for laboratory analysis.

Trying to find life on another planet, however, is not simply a walk from point A to point B. No single mission to Venus will be able to finish all the work necessary to answer the question. It might be time to think not just about what the next mission to Venus should be, but what a whole new era of Venus exploration would look like: a group of multiple missions that explore Venus in joint efforts—the way we currently do with Mars.

6 .

Lego: One Step Closer to Being Sustainable

The Lego Group is one step closer to reaching its goal of making all its products from sustainable materials by 2030.

The Danish toymaker revealed a prototype (雏形) brick made from     1     plastic. In a news release, Lego said the PET plastic from     2     bottles makes up the first brick to meet the company’s “strict quality and safety requirements.” One way the company     3     safety is by sourcing materials from suppliers that use processes approved by the US Food & Drug Administration and European Food Safety Authority.

“The biggest     4     on our sustainability journey is rethinking and innovating new materials that are as long-lasting, strong and high quality as our existing bricks—and fit with LEGO elements made over the past 60 years,” Lego Group Vice President of Environmental Responsibility Tim Brooks said. “With this prototype we’re able to    5     the progress we’re making to the public.”

It will be “some time” before bricks made from used materials can be     6    , Lego said. The company will continue to test and develop the PET formulation (配方) and decide whether to move to the     7     production phase, which is expected to take at least a year. One factor the company is testing is how the material can be     8    .

“Experimentation and failing is an important part of learning and     9    . Just as kids build, unbuild and rebuild with LEGO bricks at home, we’re doing the same in our lab,” Brooks said.

The move follows last year’s announcement that the company was making a $400 million investment over three years into sustainability     10    . It included phasing out the single-use plastic bags from its boxes and instead using recyclable paper for its packaging.