1 . Awe is not an everyday emotion. You don’t wake up awestruck. A satisfying lunch doesn’t leave you filled with awe. Even a great day is unlikely to leave you in a state of breathtaking, all-knowing fear and trembling.

Then what is-awe? Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt suggested that awe（typically includes feelings of grandness. That means awe is inspired by something larger than a person’s self or experience. And it usually helps expand the person s understanding of the world. For example, awe might come from seeing a mountain taller than you thought a mountain could be. Or it might come from listening to a symphony that contains both shockingly 4oud and touchingly quiet notes. People can be awe-inspiring, too: think of meeting a political leader whose power seems limitless.

In order to find out more about the mysterious feeling, the psychologists laid out a research plan. In the years since, they and other researchers have been testing awe. What is it? How does it work? What seems awesome, and why? For the first time, they’re starting to understand both what a we does to us and what it might do for us.

When psychologists first started studying awe, one of the unanswered questions was: What do we look like when we’re feeling it? Emotions come with facial expressions.

Keltner and two workmates guessed that an awe-filled person would widen her eyes and raise her head, eyes and eyebrows, just a bit. And they were on track. When they asked people to perform awe, they found that people indeed often raised their eyebrows and widened their eyes. They also opened their mouths and dropped their jaws.

Another question was the purpose of the emotion. “We developed emotions to help us deal with and survive certain dangers,” explains Craig Anderson, a student in Keltner’s lab, “When people are scared, they freeze or run away. People that behaved like that tended to survive long enough.” In the same way, awe should have some sort of reason for existing.

So far, it seems that the purpose of awe might draw people together. When people are awestruck, they feel like time has slowed. down somehow, and when they feel so, they are more willing to use it to help others. The study also shows that awe promotes generosity. It improves people’s moral decision making. A paper still under review indicates that a we can make people more modest, too.

“We actually experience awe a lot more often than we think,” says one of the researchers, Rudd, “We meet something in the big wide world, our minds open as we look for an explanation, and as a result we open up to connecting to other people. But if you are keeping yourself in your own small world, it’s going to be hard to experience that feeling. Just go out into newness and you’re going to be more likely to run into something that’s awe-inspiring.

2 . It’s a Friday morning in Boston, which means Dr Jim O’Connell is making his rounds. He might be more comfortable inside an exam room, but that’s not where his patients are. O’Connell is one of a handful of physicians making house calls to the homeless in the city. More than 550,000 Americans are homeless, and many have health problems but no access to care. O’Connell and his team are doing something about it. They spend their days walking around where the homeless live — in parks, under bridges, and outside town. They treat about 700 regular patients. During these rounds, O’Connell himself usually sees about 20 patients. He knows where most of them sleep and whom to ask if they are missing.

O’Connell went to Harvard Medical School and was on his way to a famous oncology (肿瘤学) scholarship when his chief suggested he take what was supposed to be a one-year position as the founding physician of a new health-care programme for Boston’s homeless people. That turned into a 33-year career at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Programme, one of the country’s largest of its kind.

O’Connell provides just everything, from stitches (缝线) for an arm to surgery for the soul. If patients can’t be treated on the street, he finds them a treatment bed at the organization’s medical respite (暂缓) facility, a place for patients who are too sick to be on the streets but not ill enough for a hospital stay.

“Everything I had been taught to do in medical school — go fast, be efficient (高效的) — was counterproductive when you take care of homeless people” O’Connell told Harvard Magazine. “When you see somebody outside, you get them a cup of coffee and sit with them. Sometimes it took six months or a year of offering a sandwich or coffee before someone would start to talk to me. But once they form a good relationship with you, they’ll come to you anytime because they trust you.” When asked about how his life might have turned out, had he become a highly paid physician, O’Connell said “I never think about it anymore.”

Some things are more valuable than money. Just ask O’Connell who gets everything from patients who have nothing material to give.

4 . A group of small, wiggling (扭动) robots that communicate by flashing lights can make collective decisions. This is similar to the process bees use to reach a consensus on where to build their nest.

“We believe that in the near future there are going to be simple robots that will do jobs that we don’t want to do, and it will be very important that they make decisions in an autonomous manner,” says Carmen Miguel at the University of Barcelona in Spain. She and her team tested how imitating bees might help with that.

When bees go house-hunting, they communicate their preferred locations through a “wiggle dance”. The more a bee recommends one location, the longer and harder it wiggles. Eventually other bees join them, and they reach a consensus when a majority are wiggling together. Researchers previously translated this behavior into a mathematical model, and Miguel and her colleagues used it to program decision-making rules into small robots called kilobots.

Each kilobot with three thin legs had an infrared-light emitter (红外线发射器) and receiver, and a colored LED light. Within a group, kilobots could move around, turn clockwise or anticlockwise and use infrared signals to exchange information.

Ezequiel Ferrero at the University of Barcelona says that across all the experiments, kilobots reached a consensus within about half an hour, even when they didn’t have many immediate neighbors to communicate with. He says that getting the right combination of how long they spend transmitting their message and how much they walk around allowed them to make a collective decision in the end.

6 . Many people don’t understand why anyone would travel by bicycle. It’s so exhausting. For me it’s the best way to travel. Why I love it and why the effort is paying off, you can read here.

When I sit on the bike, I am free and flexible. I can pause at any time to eat or start the stove to enjoy a coffee with breathtaking views. I’m not dependent on bus or train.     1     I come to places I would never have seen. My bike gives me the possibility of don’t-need-to-plan, which leaves space for adventure. Because adventures don’t come around the corner during a planned hotel-vacation.

I am the whole day in nature. The wind blows around my nose.     2     I see monkeys hanging directly above me in the tree, whales swimming along the coast, a bear waving at us and many more animals. Smelling the blackberries, I’m stopping to fill my stomach. In the car, bus or train I would have missed all of this and much more.

    3     On a longer tour I’m no longer in my normal environment, I’m freed from roles I have to perform and now I’m having time and inner peace to think and reflect. It changes me. I get to know my own limits, can react better to specific situations, and collect knowledge of human nature.     4     I know when I have to end for the day, so that I can still have power for the next day.

I could tell hundreds of stories. Because of getting to know so many people I’m experiencing a lot. The travel form itself invites many to ask questions. And the best thing about it is, that all these stories make me rich. Rich in memories, on which I think with laughter.     5    

9 . A humanoid robot can transmit (传输) video and touch sensations to a person wearing special gloves and a virtual reality (VR) headset hundreds of kilometers away, offering a way for people to attend events without traveling.

The iCub3 robot is a 52-kilogram and 125-centimetre-tall robot with 54 points of articulation (关节点) across its body. Its head contains two cameras where a human’s eyes would be and an Internet-connected computer where the brain would go. Along with the cameras, sensors covering its body send data to the robot’s “brain”. These sensations are then copied on a suit and VR headset worn by a remote human operator.

When the operator reacts to what they see and feel, the suit’s sensors pick up the movements and the robot matches them. “The key is to translate every signal and bit of numeric data that can be sent through the network,” says Stefano Dafarra, who is part of the iCub 3 team. There can be a small delay of up to 100 milliseconds to collect and transmit the visual footage, but the operator can improve this by moving slightly slower than normal.

The team has demonstrated the robot at the Venice Biennale, where it wandered through an exhibition while its operator stood 290 kilometers away in Genoa.

Dafarra hopes people will use iCub 3 to attend events remotely, reducing the need to travel. “But at present, a fall could be hugely damaging to the robot, and it’s uncertain whether it could stand up again on its own,” he says.

“iCub 3 is an interesting robot and has clear advantages over the previous version,” says Jonathan Aitken, whose laboratory owns a prior version of the robot. However, he is disappointed that the team wasn’t clear in its research about the data transmission requirements of the new version of the robot. “It would be good to know just how much data was required, and what the upper and lower bounds were,” he says.