1 . Song Yingxing was a Chinese scientist and encyclopedist (百科全书编纂者) who lived during the late Ming Dynasty. The British biochemist and historian Joseph Needham called him “The Diderot of China”.

Song Yingxing was born in Fengxin county in Jiangxi province in 1587. He took part in the second highest imperial (科学) examinations in Beijing six times, but failed to become a jinshi. After that, he decided to give up taking exams and turned to the practical knowledge of natural science. Then Song Yingxing spent four years teaching his students in his hometown.

Although it was a job like teaching, it was a very important stage in Song Yingxing’s life, because many of his works were written here. And Song Yingxing had been living in a secluded (隐居的) life in the past ten years. Because he didn’t want to be an official, Song Yingxing lived a very poor life in his later years.

He was the author of Tian Gong Kai Wu, an encyclopedia that covered a wide variety of technical subjects. As Joseph Needham has observed, the vast amount of accurately drawn illustrations in this encyclopedia dwarfed the amount provided in previous Chinese encyclopedias, making it a valuable written work in the history of Chinese literature. Tian Gong Kai Wu records all aspects of technology up to the mid-Ming period. The book constitutes a complete system of science and technology, and provides a systematic summary of ancient Chinese technology, the experience accumulated by China in agriculture, and China’s achievements in technology.

Many of the production techniques described in the book are still in use today. At the same time, Tian Gong Kai Wu broke from Chinese tradition by rarely referencing previous written work. It was instead written in a style strongly suggestive of personal experience. The book was translated into Japanese, French, English, German, Italian, and Russian, and was widely circulated in Europe and Japan.

In addition, Song Yingxing had made great achievements in many fields. His research was very extensive. In physics, he studied the occurrence of sound and, finally concluded that sound is transmitted in the air.

2 . Eugene Newman Parker, a leading figure in heliospheric(日球层的) physics for the past half century, passed away peacefully at his home in Chicago on Mar. 15. He was 94.

Hailed(誉为) as a visionary in the field of heliophysics, Parker revolutionized our understanding of the sun and its effects on Earth and other bodies within the solar system. NASA even stated that “the field of heliophysics exists in large part because of Dr. Eugene Parker. In 2018, Parker became the first living scientist to witness the launch of a spacecraft that was named in his honor.

Parker is best known for his groundbreaking theory on the existence of a phenomenon called “solar wind”, a continuous stream of charged particles that flow off the sun. It can become violent, causing space weather that impacts the Earth. When Parker’s research was published in 1958, his theory was initially met with skepticism(怀疑) and ridicule by the scientific community. The general view at the time was that the space between planets was an absolute vacuum(真空), and was thus completely empty of any matter. But, there were no errors in his study or his calculations, and the theory was later proven to be correct in 1962, when a NASA spacecraft mission to Venus revealed the constant presence of a supersonic wind—exactly as Parker had predicted.

That experience likely led to the advice Parker often gave young researchers: “If you do something new or innovative, expect trouble. But think critically about it because if you’re wrong, you want to be the first one to know that.” Parker never co-authored a paper with his students, thus urging them to be independent.

Parker was humble, straightforward, and wise. His son Eric said, “My sister Joyce and I didn’t get a real feel for what a ‘big dog’ our dad was in the field.” They got an even better sense when a month after Parker’s death, they traveled to Lund, Sweden, to accept on his behalf the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy.

4 . Experts often tell students to center their efforts on a narrow field to get a job after school.     1    

One of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was Danish scientist Morten Meldal, who is 68 years old and works at the University of Copenhagen. When describing his career, Meldal said he started out as an engineer but changed to chemistry because he “wanted to understand the world.”

    2     They might believe they have to center their work and school lives in one field to be successful. But a study from professors at Michigan State University shows that is not always the case. The researchers looked into past Nobel Prize winners and their students.     3     some of what they learned from their teachers is how to live a life with many interests. They are, in a way, learning how to be creative.

Nobel winners are nine times more likely to have experience in working with wood, metal or in the arts than most scientists. The researchers also found that the Nobel winners have an open mind about their life experiences. Unlike many people who spend long hours at work and give up their outside interests,     4    

The researchers say that, even among people who do not win big prizes, those with many interests are often successful. They pointed to a 2022 report about students who study two major fields in college.     5     Double majors are often more creative and more interested in starting their own businesses than those who centered on only one study area.

6 . The daughter of a romantic poet and occasional freedom fighter, Ada Lovelace had a famous but absent father. She never knew Lord Byron, as just weeks after her birth in 1815, he divorced her mother Isabella Milbanke Byron and left to fight in the Greek War of Independence. In an effort to prevent Ada from developing her father’s unpredictable temper, Isabella decided that her daughter should devote her life to study.

Ada studied hard despite the fact that society did not encourage women pursuing interests in science. Her life changed when she met inventor Charles Babbage at a party. As he demonstrated a working section of his mechanical calculator, Ada was taken in by how it worked and wanted to know more. Impressed by the 17-year-old’s obvious passion, Babbage became her tutor. Ada married in 1835 and became a mother, but she continued to take an active interest in study, socialising in intellectual circles with the likes of Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday.

Ada stayed in contact with Babbage, who in 1837 had proposed a new machine, the analytical engine. In 1843, Ada was asked to translate a French text written by engineer Luigi Menabrea about Babbage’s new design. After completing the translation, Ada was encouraged by Babbage to write her own notes on his work.

After nine months of hard work, Ada presented Babbage with a detailed list of notes that was three times longer than the original article. In her calculations, Ada wrote what are considered the first ever computer algorithms to be used in a new type of machine. She essentially provided the first ideas for computer programming in what was a groundbreaking proposal on the potential of computers.

Ada died of cancer aged only 36 and her work was largely recognised until the 1950s when her notes were republished. In 1979 the US Department of Defence named a programming language ‘Ada’ in her honour.

7 . At 1:43 a.m. October 5, 2022, Stanford chemist Carolyn R. Bertozzi was awakened by a phone call from a Nobel committee representative who told her, “You have 50 minutes to collect yourself and wait until your life changes.” Instructed not to share the announcement outside of her tightest inner circle, the first person Bertozzi called was her father, a retired physics professor from MIT. “He’s 91 and, of course, he was just overjoyed,” said Bertozzi.

Carolyn Bertozzi, born October 10, 1966, Boston, was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her development of bioorthogonal reactions, which allow scientists to explore cells and track biological processes without disturbing the normal chemistry of the cell. She shares the $10 million Swedish kronor (about $1 million USD) prize equally with Morten Meldal, professor at University of Copenhagen and K. Barry Sharpless, professor at Scripps Research “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.”

Carolyn received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1988 and a doctorate in the same subject from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco, from 1993 to 1995. She became an assistant professor at Berkeley in 1996 and a full professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology in 2002. She also held an appointment as a professor of molecular and cellular pharmacology from 2000 to 2002 at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2015 she became a professor of chemistry at Stanford University.

“I could not be more delighted that Carolyn Bertozzi has won the Nobel Prize in chemistry,” said Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. “In pioneering the field of bioorthogonal chemistry, Carolyn invented a new way of studying biomolecular processes, one that has helped scientists around the world gain a deeper understanding of chemical reactions in living systems. Her work has had remarkable real-world impact, providing new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to treat disease. Carolyn is so deserving of this honor, and all of us at Stanford are too proud to call her one of our own.”

Carolyn’s bioorthogonal reactions have been used to study how cells build proteins and other molecules, to develop new cancer medicines, and to produce new materials for energy storage, among many other applications.

8 . No two snowflakes are alike?Wilson A.Bentley, a farmer and amateur meteorologist, sought to answer that question, dedicating himself to________flakes of snow for 50 years.

Bentley was born in 1865 and_________on a farm.On his 15th birthday,Bentley’s mother gave him an old_______.It was snowing that day, and the boy________getting a glimpse of a six-sided snowflake with the_______. When he was 17, Bentley asked his parents to buy him a new, better microscope and a camera.His father argued that it was a waste of time. Finally, his father gave in. Bentley built a wooden frame to________the new equipment and then spent 2 years figuring out how to take a picture of a snowflake_________a microscope. On January 15,1885,he did it,creating the world’s first photo of snowflake. Every winter for the rest of his life, Bentley studied snowflakes in a(n)_______room in the back of the house. The process was difficult and cold. (Outdoors, he collected snowflakes on a wooden tray that was painted_______to observe it. Whenever it snowed, Bentley caught and captured flakes, sometimes working all night. He found that most snowflakes had six sides, ______others looked like triangles, or columns—no two were alike.

Bentley_______his snowflakes with anyone who was interested. He wrote articles for scientists and for_______such as National Geographic. Occasionally, he felt_________that few people seemed to care about his work.Still,he________stopped.In 1920,Bentley was elected as one of the first members of the American Meteorological Society, which later________him its first research grant in 1924.

Wu Jianxiong earned many nicknames throughout her years as a physicist, including “the First Lady of Physics” and “Chinese Marie Curie.” Born on May 31,1912,Wu Jianxiong and her father were very close     1     her father was the one encouraged her to pursue (追求) her education as far as she could, even though few women     2     (encourage) to pursue higher education in China at the time. Wu’s father opened a school     3     she attended until she went to a boarding school in Suzhou.

Wu was awarded many times for her professional     4     (achieve) she was a pioneer in a male-dominated (男性主导的) field     5     she turned her challenges in the sciences     6     opportunities at every turn.   Regarded as a true heroine and as the “    7     (great) female Chinese scientist in the twentieth century”, Wu has encouraged future generations of physicists with her work. After retirement, Wu focused on encouraging young girls to pursue careers through educational programs and     8     (speak) about her struggle to acquire recognition for her work, hoping     9     (influence) women across the U.S. and China. She passed away on February 16, 1997. She was buried in the courtyard of Mingde School in China,     10     school her father started and she attended as a young girl.