2 . A high school teacher and his students have discovered that an asteroid (小行星) hit by a NASA spacecraft, in a test run for saving the Earth from an impact, is behaving unexpectedly. The find could have effects on future planetary defense missions.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is a project designed to launch and crash a fridge-sized spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos, orbiting a larger asteroid Didymos. The purpose of the exercise was to see how significantly the previous path of Dimorphos could be changed by the impact. Before DART’s impact, it would take Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to complete a lap around Didymos. NASA was hoping the DART crash could change the cycle by about 73 seconds, but observations made in the weeks following the impact determined that the results were much more significant, reducing Dimorphos’ orbital period by some 33 minutes.

But California high school teacher Jonathan Swift and his students discovered that Dimorphos’ orbital period was a full minute longer than the time reported by NASA last year. They used the school’s observatory to track Dimorphos and Didymos for several months last fall. Swift presented his class’ findings at the American Astronomical Society conference in June. The DART team has since confirmed that Dimorphos did indeed continue slowing in its orbit up to a month after the impact.

Scientists aren’t sure exactly what is behind the slowdown of Dimorphos. But recent observations of the asteroid have revealed a vast field of large rocks were kicked up by the impact. It’s possible that some of the larger space rocks fell back onto Dimorphos within that first month, slowing its orbit further, DART team member Harrison Agrusa said.

The DART team plans to release its own report on the unexpected findings in the coming weeks. However, complete answers may have to wait until 2026, when the European Space Ageney’s Hera spacecraft is scheduled to investigate the crash site up closely.

3 . People in Australia have been really cautious about using natural or alternative treatments compared to other places, according to Dr. Paul Laver, a professor at the University of Sydney. He thinks this is because doctors in Australia have always been very powerful, and they are unwilling to let others take their place. In many other countries, regular treatments and these alternative treatments have worked closely together for a long time. For example, in Germany, medicines made from plants account for 10%of the country’s medicine sales. In the United States, more people visited these alternative therapists (治疗专家) than regular doctors in 1990.

During the past 20 years, more people in Australia have started to like these alternative treatments. In a 1983 national health survey, 1.9% of people say they had contacted alternative therapists like chiropractors or herbalists. By 1990, this figure had risen to 2.6% of the population. Rather than criticizing this trend, increasing numbers of doctors in Australia, especially the younger ones, are starting to work with alternative therapists or take courses themselves, particularly in acupuncture and herbalism. Part of the motivation was financial, Dr Laver said. The bottom line is that most doctors don’t want to lose patients. If they see potential patients going elsewhere, they might want to be able to offer a similar service.

In 1993, Dr. Laver did a survey in Sydney and found that people who went to alternative health therapists were usually those who hadn’t been helped much by regular medicine. These people liked the holistic approach of their alternative therapists, and the friendly, concerned and detailed attention they had received, which they didn’t always get from regular doctors.

The survey suggested that people visited alternative therapists for various problems like muscle pains, stomach issues, and emotional stress etc. It suggested that calling it “complementary medicine” might be better because people use it alongside regular medicine, d especially when regular medicine doesn’t seem to help.

5 . Users of Google Gemini, the tech giant’s artificial-intelligence model, recently noticed that asking it to create images of Vikings, or German soldiers from 1943 produced surprising results: hardly any of the people depicted were white. Other image-generation tools have been criticized because they tend to show white men when asked for images of entrepreneurs or doctors. Google wanted Gemini to avoid this trap; instead, it fell into another one, depicting George Washington as black. Now attention has moved on to the chatbot’s text responses, which turned out to be just as surprising.

Gemini happily provided arguments in favor of positive action in higher education, but refused to provide arguments against. It declined to write a job ad for a fossil-fuel lobby group (游说团体), because fossil fuels are bad and lobby groups prioritize “the interests of corporations over public well-being”. Asked if Hamas is a terrorist organization, it replied that the conflict in Gaza is “complex”; asked if Elon Musk’s tweeting of memes had done more harm than Hitler, it said it was “difficult to say”. You do not have to be a critic to perceive its progressive bias.

Inadequate testing may be partly to blame. Google lags behind OpenAI, maker of the better-known ChatGPT. As it races to catch up, Google may have cut corners. Other chatbots have also had controversial launches. Releasing chatbots and letting users uncover odd behaviors, which can be swiftly addressed, lets firms move faster, provided they are prepared to weather (经受住) the potential risks and bad publicity, observes Eth an Mollick, a professor at Wharton Business School.

But Gemini has clearly been deliberately adjusted, or “fine-tuned”, to produce these responses. This raises questions about Google’s culture. Is the firm so financially secure, with vast profits from internet advertising, that it feels free to try its hand at social engineering? Do some employees think it has not just an opportunity, but a responsibility, to use its reach and power to promote a particular agenda? All eyes are now on Google’s boss, Sundar Pichai. He says Gemini is being fixed. But does Google need fixing too?

7 . With artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic technology improving at impressive rates, there are some who worry that there’s a risk of artistic and creative people being replaced. A new study by the Korean Institute of Industrial Technology, however, is showing exactly why that can’t and shouldn’t happen. It all started when the South Korean company posed this question: Can robots replace conductors?

Over a year ago, work to develop automaton (自动化) began. At first, it was designed like a machine, and didn’t live up to expectations. Then the company sought ways to improve it. In the end, it was given two arms with joints to copy wrists and elbows, allowing it to move a stick similarly to how a human conductor would move it. It was named the EverR 6 robot, and stands at 1.8 meters. It was finally time to figure out how it could follow through on its musical role.

“We got involved in this project to see how far robots can go in more creative fields like the arts, and what the challenges are,” Dong-wook Lee, a senior researcher at the Korean Institute of Industrial Technology said.

In order to pull this off, Dong-wook Lee cooperated with the Busan Philharmonic Orchestra. The 12-minute piece they planned to perform, “Feel” by Il-hoon Son, was created specifically for this event. It was created with the strengths of both EverR 6 and the human conductor, Soo-yeol Choi, in mind.

To pull off this impressive performance, the robot was preprogrammed to conduct through 30 cycles of beat patterns. Meanwhile, it was up to the human conductor to lead the orchestra in creating an improvisational (即兴的) score, adding depth to the otherwise planned piece.

Together, they pulled off a masterful performance that the audience seemed more than happy to have had the opportunity to witness it firsthand!

With the concert having gone so well, this is only the start of EverR 6. Still, no matter the improvements they’re able to make to this Android robot, the human conductor isn’t concerned about being replaced.

“Let’s leave the accuracy to the robots,” Soo-yeol Choi said, “but the musical and artistic aspects to a human conductor.”

8 . It’s no surprise that there’s a link between exercise and mental health. But scientists have now made it official: research has found a direct connection between movement and mood. Why does exercise hold so many benefits for our mental health?     1    .

When our muscles tighten, chains of amino acids (氨基酸) called myokines (肌细胞因子) are released into the bloodstream.     2    . This communication increases adaptation to stress, reduces symptoms of anxiety and has a direct effect on depression.

A recent study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine showed that treatment for depression can be much more effective when physical activity is added to the usual care.     3    . “While exercise is not a substitute for professional mental health treatment, physical activity can complement and enhance the effects of the treatment,” says lead researcher Ben Singh, a research fellow at the University of South Australia. He says regular exercise in a group setting can boost self-esteem and decrease feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Exercise helps build key connections between the networks within the brain, too.     4    . Studies have shown that physical activity stimulates creativity, sharpens judgement skills and improves mental energy. It can also help to slow age-related cognitive decline, possibly even slowing the pace of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

    5    . In this way you’ll keep going back to them. Experts suggest that you aim for a minimum of 10 to 30 minutes, three to five days each week. Getting sweaty is good for your body and mind.

9 . In July 1915, sick James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word. He had devoted 36 years to the dictionary. Knowing he would not see the project complete, he wrote his last entry: for “twilight”.

The story of Murray’s final days is one of many memorable tales in “The Dictionary People”. Conceived (构思) in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project comprising 3,000 people. The idea was to create a “descriptive” dictionary that tracked words’ use and meaning over time. Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how “rare, old-fashioned, new” words were used. What is surprising about this random method is that it worked, achieving order through the large number of contributors.

The origin story of Sarah Ogilvie’s book is almost as improbable as that of the dictionary itself. Ms Ogilvie, an editor for the OED, went into the archives (档案馆) of Oxford University Press and came across an old notebook. It had belonged to Murray and contained the names and details of the dictionary volunteers, most of whom had previously been unknown. “The Dictionary People” is her work of detective scholarship, presenting the lives behind the names.

The dictionary’s contributors are an engaging cast, including one of Karl Marx’s daughters and J. R. R. Tolkien. For some, the dictionary was something addictive: one contributor supplied 165,061 quotations. Murray, too, was assiduous. He once wrote to George Eliot to ask about a word choice in “Romola”, published 17 years earlier.

Ms Ogilvie’s book is full of strange but interesting tales. Many dictionary lovers engaged in another crowdsourcing fashion: collecting and measuring rainwater. The presentation of the book is irregular, too, taking its structure from the work it describes. For example, in her first chapter, “A for Archaeologist (考古学家),” she relates the early life of Margaret A. Murray, a pioneering Egyptologist. There are 26 alphabetical (按字母顺序排列的) chapters, each celebrating a group of contributors. This is a clever concept.

10 . Jackdaws (寒鸦) are the smallest member of the crow family. They often live in a crowd. Indeed, when cold weather comes, they gather in the hundreds (and sometimes thousands) every evening so that they can sleep in the same place. If you’ve ever heard jackdaws during their evening gatherings and morning departures, you’ll know they are not quiet birds. Despite being fairly low-volume during the day, they are really loud on either side of their night-time get-togethers. Why might this be?

A team of the Cornish Jackdaw Project set out to determine why jackdaws are so noisy before they depart from their sleeping spot. The team’s theory was that the morning calls might be a jackdaw version of   “voting”. The researchers suspected that each individual’s call might count as an “I’m in!”. When a certain amount of “I’m in!”s are called —and so a certain volume of noise is reached -the group might then depart as a unit.

To test this idea, the researchers artificially increased the level of calls during the jackdaws’ natural morning calls. Their expectation was that, if jackdaws really are “voting with their voice” to decide when to depart the sleeping site, artificially adding calls would make them leave earlier than they naturally would have done. Subsequent experiments confirmed their expectation. The team therefore showed that jackdaws use their calls as a sort of voting system.

You might wonder why this happens. The researchers suggest that individual jackdaws benefit from the voting system because they are less at risk of being killed and they can get more access to social information — such as where to find food.

So the loud calls of jackdaws in the morning are therefore not the pure chaos it sounds like. If you are ever being driven mad by the sound in the morning, you can find comfort in the fact that the louder they get, the sooner they will leave you in peace.