1 . A few days before New Year 1944, Patricia Krueger received a telegram from the U. S. Army. She hoped it would contain a belated birthday greeting from her husband, an army flight engineer, Charles Krueger, whom she had not heard from for 2 weeks. Instead, the message said he wasn’t coming home: His B-29 had been lost and he was later declared MIA (missing in action). Their son, John Krueger from Middleton, Wisconsin, is still in tears when he recounts this story.

Decades later, the military continues to work to bring back the remains of soldiers like Charles Krueger. The job of finding them falls to DPAA (Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency), created in 2015 after critics charged that the previous MIA search process was slow, and behind on innovations in science and technology. Between 1973 and 2014, the remains of only 1,849 missing service member s were returned to their families; in 2021, the agency accounted for the remains of 141 MIAs; according to DPAA figures.

To accelerate the work, Congress gave DPAA the authority to develop public-private partnerships with scientists and groups outside the government. “Teaming up with academic scientists introduces new ways of thinking,” says military historian Michael Dolski. “Working with partners allows us to tap into their technologies and capabilities in ways that we just can’t maintain.”

For scientists, the work is more than technically satisfying. “It’s the most rewarding aspect of my career,” says Mires, a scientist working with the agency. “In other archaeology sites I’ve worked on, the history is remote,” he says. “Here, you’re doing something not for a thing, but for a person, and all the people they touched.”

2 . Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) will soon test a new oven for making chocolate chip cookies. A spaceship carrying the cooking equipment and other supplies was launched on Saturday from the Wallops Flight Facility in the United States. The shipment, weighing 3,700 kilograms, reached the space station on Monday. The goal is to explore the possibility of making freshly baked cookies for space travelers.

American company Nanoracks designed and built the oven and helped with organizing the flight to the space station. Hilton Double Tree hotels supplied the cookie dough (生面团) the astronauts will use.

In the past, space station crews have created their own pizzas using a thin, fiat piece of bread known as flatbread. Astronauts have tried other creative ways to make food, such as creating salads from vegetables grown in the space station. Results have been mixed.

The cookie baking will be a slow process. The oven can heat just one cookie at a time. The test could take weeks before the astronauts have chance to try out freshly baked cookies.

Five unbaked cookies have been in a space station freezer for several weeks. Each is in its own individual clear bag made out of silicone. The oven can heat foods to temperatures as high as 177°C. That is twice the temperature of the U.S. and Russian food warmers on the space station. The oven uses electric heating elements.

Mary Murphy is with Nanoracks. Murphy says she expects a baking time of 15 to 20 minutes for each cookie when the oven is heated to about 163°C. She adds that the smell of baking cookies should fill the space station each time a cookie comes out of the oven.

The oven’s first use will be the real test. Without the force of gravity, the astronauts do not know exactly how the cookie will look. Three of the space-baked cookies are to be returned to Earth for testing.

4 . The evidence for harmony (和睦) may not be obvious in some families. But it seems that four out of five young people now get on with their parents.

An important new study into teenage attitudes shows that their family life is more harmonious than it has ever been in the past. “We were surprised by just how positive today’s young people seem to be about their families,” says one member of the research team. “They’re expected to be rebellious (叛逆的) but actually they have other things in their minds; they want a car and other material goods, and they worry whether school is serving them well. There’re more negotiations (协商) between parents and children, and children expect to take part in the family decision­making process.”

So it seems that this generation of parents is much more likely than parents of 30 years ago to treat their children as friends. “My parents are happy to discuss things with me and willing to listen to me,” says 17­ year old Daniel Lazall. “I always tell them when I’m going out. As long as they know what I’m doing, they’re fine with it.” Susan Crome, who is now 21, agrees. “Looking back on the last 10 years, there was a lot of what you could call negotiations. For example, as long as I’d done all my homework, I could go out on a Saturday night. But I think my grandparents were a lot stricter with my parents than that.”

One of the researchers comments, “Our astonishment that teenagers say they get along well with their parents comes because of a brief period in our social history when teenagers were regarded as different beings. But that idea of rebelling and breaking away from their parents really only happened during that one time in the 1960s when everyone rebelled. Now, the situation has changed.”

5 . The UK has many strange traditions.    1    This tradition comes Shrove Tuesday, or, as many like to call it, Pancake (薄饼) Day. The day falls on the last Tuesday of February this year.

    2    As contestants (参赛者) run, they have to toss the pancake in the air so that it flips and lands back in the pan on the other side. The winner is the first to reach the finish line, although they should also be careful to make sure that the pancake is complete and that it hasn’t broken along the way.

One of the most famous pancake races is the Rehab Parliamentary Pancake Race. This takes place on the morning of Shrove Tuesday in London, outside the Houses of Parliament.    3    One team is made up of Members of Parliament, and the other is made up of journalists. Most of them take part in the race wearing their work suits! The race is shown on the news and is covered on TV all around the world.    4    It raises awareness for the charity Rehab, which works with people with disabilities and others who suffer from social exclusion in the UK.

Another important aspect of the race is the official starter.    5    This is seen as an important role and is usually given to a British news presenter. But whoever is chosen usually has a hard time trying to control the race—the MPs are known for cheating every year!

8 . China is recognized as a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition systems. A Chinese company says it has created a new facial recognition system that can identify people even if they are wearing masks (口罩). Engineers at the Beijing-based company say their system is the first to be created to effectively identify people wearing face masks.

The company told a news agency that a team of 20 people built the system in about a month. The system is based on existing technologies developed over the past 10 years. The process involved adding a collection of about 6 million unmasked faces and a much smaller collection of masked faces, the company said.

The company is now selling two main kinds of products that use the new technology. One performs “single channel” recognition, which is designed to be used at the entrances to buildings. The other product is a “multi-channel” recognition system that uses groups of surveillance (监视) cameras. It can identify individuals in a crowd of up to 30 people within a second.

“When people are wearing a mask that covers the mouth and the nose, the recognition rate can reach about 95%, which can ensure that most people can be identified,” said Huang, vice president of the company. He added that the system’s success rate for people not wearing a mask is about 99.5%.

However, the new system struggles to identify people wearing both a mask and sunglasses. “In this situation, all of the key facial information is lost. In such cases recognition is graunchy,” Huang said.

People react to the new technology differently. While some citizens have been against using such tools, the majority have accepted the technology as an effective way to reduce crime and catch criminals.

9 . Elon Musk isn’t content with electric cars, shooting people into orbit and populating Mars. He also wants to get inside your brain.

His goal is to develop devices that can provide treatment to neural (神经的) diseases and that may one day be powerful enough to put humanity on an equal footing with possible future super intelligent computers.

Not that it’s anywhere close to that yet.

In a video Friday obviously aimed at seeking new employees, Musk showed off the second version of the Neuralink, a device about the size of a large coin. It’s designed to be put in a person’s head. An earlier version of the device has to be placed behind an ear like a huge hearing aid.

But the young company is far from having a commercial product, which would involve complex human trials and governmental approval. Friday’s video showed three pigs. One, named Gertrude, had a Neuralink device in its brain.

Musk, a founder of both the electric car company Tesla Motors and the space-exploration firm SpaceX, has always been worried about that smarter AI machines will outwit humans. His solution? Link our brains to computers so we can keep up with or even win over them in intelligence!

Musk urged coders (程序员), engineers and especially people who have actually created a product to apply. “You don’t need to have brain experience,” he said, adding that this is something that can be learned on the job.

Connecting a brain up directly to electronics is not new. Doctors have already put similar devices in brains to treat such conditions as Parkinson’s disease. In 2016, researchers reported that a man regained some movement in his own hand with a similar brain implant. But Musk’s proposal goes beyond this. Neuralink wants to build on those existing medical treatments and work on devices that could link our brains to computers one day.