1 . Extremely authentic-looking prosthetic (假体的) eyes can now be 3D-printed in a fraction of the time it would normally take to produce the eyes by hand, scientists demonstrate in a new study.

The new technology can create a prosthetic eye in just 90 minutes, compared with the eight hours it would normally take a skilled technician, or ocularist, to produce one by hand. The 3D-printed eyes require five times less labor to make than traditional methods, the scientists behind the technology wrote in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

The 3D-printed eyes also look more natural than traditional prostheses; this could help improve a patient’s self-confidence in using the devices. “Patients are very conscious about wearing a prosthesis, and they don't want others to notice,” Johann Reinhard, lead study author and a researcher at the Fraunhofer

Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Germany, told us. “With these more realistic eves, it might help them to participate more in society,” he said.

The new printing approach involves taking a specialized image of a patient’s empty eye socket and of their healthy eye. These images are then processed and used to draft blueprints that can be sent to be 3D-printed in the lab. These 3D-printed eyes closely replicate the color, size and structure of the patient's healthy eye and are particularly good at capturing the colored part of the eye, known as the iris, and the white part of the eye, called the sclera. Once finished, the eyes take 15 to 30 minutes to be installed by an ocularist, Reinhard said.

“About 80% of adults in need of prosthetic eyes could theoretically have one made this way, either due to a birth defect that causes an eye to be small or missing or because they’ve lost an eye,” the team said. “However, this wouldn’t be possible for all patients, such as those who have a very complex eye socket, as the software wouldn’t be able to find a matching shape for the prosthetic eye,” Reinhard said.

“More data are needed to see if this technique could also be used to make prosthetic eyes for children,which would require more regulation,” Reinhard said.

2 . The age-old chore of dusting could soon be a thing of the past. Scientists are developing “self-cleaning” surfaces that make dust particles unable to stick to them. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin say the particles instead stick to each other and simply roll off the surfaces with nothing more than the assistance of gravity.

The scientists altered the geometry (几何构造) of flat surfaces at a level invisible to human eyes. The team made a tightly-packed nanoscale (纳米级) network of pyramid-shaped structures on the surfaces which made it difficult for dust particles to stick to the material. Instead, the particles stick to each other before rolling off the material due to gravity.

The study, funded by a grant (拨款) from NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, tested the material by piling lunar dust on their engineered surfaces before turning them on their sides. The team found that just two percent of the surface remained dusty, compared with more than 35 percent of an unaltered smooth surface. The new surface could provide a passive solution to removing dust, as opposed to more active methods like using wipers and fluid to clear dust from a car windscreen.

“What we’ve demonstrated here is a surface that can clean itself,” says lead study author Chih-Hao Chang. “Particulates aren’t able to stick to the surface, so they come off using just the force of gravity.”

Study authors hope the material provides a solution to space dust, which can be extremely harmful in such a high-risk environment and is almost impossible to clean out. Space dust has previously caused great damage to NASA’s human spaceflight Apollo missions and has even caused rovers on Mars to malfunction and fail. “There’s not much you can do about lunar dust in space—it sticks to everything and there’s no real way to wipe it off,” says Samuel Lee, a lead author of the study. “Dust on solar panels of Mars rovers can cause them to fail.”

However, the researchers also believe the discovery could prove useful on Earth, preventing solar panels from collecting dust and losing efficiency. These surfaces may even protect our screens and windows from irritating dust.

3 . I have always been proud of my handwriting, a skill I was taught in grade school. The teacher was teaching us the Palmer Penmanship Method, drilling into us the importance of forming big flowing lines when we wrote g’s and s’s as well as beautiful f’s that in my mind were like fairy tale princesses wearing fancy hats while extending their right foot. We were strictly prohibited from using block letters on our homework, as they lack the beauty.

Now it becomes apparent that young people no longer learn cursive (草书). They type everything, mostly on their phones. Beautiful handwriting is a thing of the past. This has become a source of great sadness among traditionalists.

But recently something happened that shook my faith in cursive. To my complete disbelief, not one but two of my close friends complained about the handwriting on my postcards. They were grateful for the beautiful postcards I regularly sent, but they said they honestly couldn't read a thing I had written. One friend went so far as to ask if I could use block letters next time so that she could understand what I was writing.

Initially, I was angry. I had made the effort to cover an entire postcard with what I viewed as not just handwriting but calligraphy. But then I showed an English friend a postcard I'd just written, and he said that the only thing that was readily understandable was the letters “U. S. A.” The rest of it, he politely suggested, looked like “chicken scrawl”.

Looking at the postcard dispassionately, I unwillingly admit that he has a point. All the m’s and n’s run together, and the l’s look like l’s. The a’s are indistinguishable from the q’s. So, from now on, I'm taking their advice and using block letters to communicate.

In fact, I just now sent an old friend a postcard. But this time, I simply wrote — in big block letters:

DEAR ALICE:

HI.

JOE.

I hope she gets the message.

4 . In today’s digital era, social media users are increasingly coming across fake news online. This leads to the pressing issue: What causes people to fall for misinformation on the Internet?

According to researchers at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology,   users can easily fall into an echo chamber (回声室) — a sort of virtual space where users consume only one-sided news, eventually distrusting any opposing views. “We all tend to agree with the group opinion. Hence, people naturally get together with others who hold the same opinion,” said Dongwon Lee, one of the researchers. “But if you’re not cautious, there is a high risk of falling into an echo chamber.”

To prevent this phenomenon, the researchers have crafted a novel tool, a game named ChamberBreaker, to help players resist echo chambers and reduce the rate of fake news spread. The fundamental approach employed by ChamberBreaker centers around a decision-making procedure that mirrors the creation of echo chambers. In ChamberBreaker, a player is tasked with trying to have community members fall into an echo chamber. To begin, the player is randomly assigned a situation that focuses on a health, political or environmental issue, and is presented with six pieces of news on that topic. Then, the player selects news that could cause the other members to fall into an echo chamber while at the same time maintaining their trust. If successful, the community members will fall into an echo chamber and the player will witness the resulting negative effects on the community.

After developing ChamberBreaker, researchers tested it with over 800 subjects to see if it raised awareness of echo chambers and changed news consumption behaviors. The researchers found that those who played ChamberBreaker were significantly more likely to state their intention to observe online information from more diverse perspectives and showed an increased awareness of the echo chamber phenomenon.

Ultimately, the researchers hope that their methodology can excite a greater interest in the scientific and scholarly study related to information consumption. The application of tools like ChamberBreaker, which focuses on fostering analytical reasoning, may lead us towards a more informed online community.

5 . This question has fascinated behavioural scientists for decades: why do we give money to charity?

The explanations for charitable giving fall into three broad categories, from the purely altruisic (利他的)— I donate because I value the social good done by the charity. The “impurely” altruistic— I donate because I extract value from knowing I contribute to the social good for the charity. And the not-at-all altruistic— I donate because I want to show off to potential mates how rich I am.

But are these motives strong enough to enable people to donate as much as they would want to? Most people support charities in one way or another, but often we struggle to make donations as often as we think we should. Although many people would like to leave a gift to charity in their will, they forget about it when the time comes.

Many people are also aware that they should donate to the causes that have the highest impact, but facts and figures are less attractive than narratives. In a series of experiments, it was found that people are much more responsive to charitable pleas that feature a single, identifiable beneficiary(受益者), than they are to statistical information about the scale of the problem being faced. When it comes to charitable giving, we are often ruled by our hearts and not our heads.

The good news is that charitable giving is contagious—seeing others give makes an individual more likely to give and gentle encouragement from an important person in your life can also make a big difference to your donation decisions— more than quadrupling them in our recent study. Habit also plays a part— in three recent experiments those who volunteered before were more likely to do donate their time than those who had not volunteered before.

In summary, behavioural science identifies a range of factors that influence our donations, and can help us to keep giving in the longer term. This is great news not just for charities, but also for donors.

6 . Five times stronger than steel, spider silk’s unique qualities were recognized by the Ancient Greeks—and more recently, scientists have looked at applications from medicine to engineering. Now, a Japanese startup, Spiber, has begun to change the textile industry with this remarkable material.

The company started by making a substitute in the lab that is similar to spider silk in structure. After studying thousands of different spider species and other silk-producing life forms, Spiber successfully produced an alternative to spider silk. This breakthrough was achieved by fermenting (发酵) a mixture of water, sugar, and nutrients with special microbes to produce protein polymers (聚合物). These polymers are then made into fibers, paving the way for a range of innovative fabrics.

However, shifting from lab to practical application presented challenges. In 2015, Spiber partnered with The North Face Japan to produce a limited-edition run of 50 “Moon Parka” jackets to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landings. But during the design process, the team discovered that spider silk became smaller when exposed to water, and had to transform the protein to make the fiber suitable for an outdoor jacket, which took them four years to perfect.

Currently, the company uses sugarcane and corn for its fermentation process — crops that use large volumes of land and change food resources. To reduce its environmental impact, Spiber is developing a process called “biosphere circulation” that will transform deserted clothes made from natural materials like cotton into the sugars needed for fermentation.

With approximately 100 billion yen ($783 million) in funding, Spiber plans to significantly speed up its production of protein polymers by the end of 2025. “Mass production will help bring the price of fibers down and allow Spiber to expand beyond the high-end designer market and thus we have the means to create solutions to enable more circular fashion,” says Higashi, head of business development at Spiber. “It’s our mission to bring those solutions to the world.”

10 . Cultural heritage sites are a nonrenewable resource. Today architectural heritage sites are being destroyed at an alarming rate. They’re threatened by rising seas, pollution, overtourism, conflicts and so on. Recently, Notre Dame Cathedral has attracted international attention.

Since its main construction from 1163 to 1350, Notre Dame Cathedral repeatedly has been damaged and repaired. On April 15, 2019, the landmark’s roof caught fire, causing the collapse of its spire (尖顶) and upper walls severely damaged. Work on the site began quickly. Through the work of photographer Tomas van Houtryve, writer Robert Kunzig, and artist Fernando Baptista, people will see restoring scenes where ruins are cleared and statues saved. Even the COVID-19 pandemic caused only a two-month delay. Architects have said the expensive project is on track to be completed in 2024.

And thorny questions arise. What duty do we owe the creations of our ancestors? What lesson can we draw from their presence?

Humankind has answered that differently. In Dresden, Germany, the Frauenkirche, an 18th-century baroque church, was famous for its bell-shaped dome (穹顶). In February 1945, one of the most destructive bombing attacks of World War II reduced the city to ruins. After German reunion, the church was reconstructed using many of its original stones, as a symbol of peace and harmony. Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church also fell to bombing but had a different story. Its spire has been left a ruin on purpose to be a “warning monument” against war and destruction.

Like the Frauenkirche, Notre Dame is being rebuilt as close as possible to how it was before, including using the original, toxic metal — lead (铅) — for the roof, causing the debate about how to restore and maintain historic buildings. Actually, no one claims to have the “right” answers on preservation; there may not even be right answers. What people could do is to continuously monitor the global care of cultural heritage sites, as a matter of significance to humanity’s past, present, and future.