1 . Traveling to Mars is usually a lonely business with a single spacecraft taking off to the Red Planet. That appeared to be the case again on July 30, when NASA’s Perseverance rover (火星车) roared at Cape Canaveral. But this time the ship will have plenty of company. On July 19, the United Arab Emirates joined the Mars game, launching Hope spacecraft to orbit Mars. Four days later, China launched its Tianwen-1 spacecraft. And a fourth mission, a joint Russian-European project, ExoMars, was also planned for this summer.

So why all the interest in Mars — and why right now? The timing issue has everything to do with planetary mechanics (行星力学). As they fly their differing solar orbits — Earth on the inner track, Mars on the outer — the distance between the two worlds is forever changing. At their greatest remove, when they are on opposite sides of the sun, they are up to 250 million miles apart.

But once every two years, they line up on the same side of the sun, with just 35 million miles separating them. This summer just such an alignment (排成直线) is taking place, reducing planetary travel time to seven- month. So that explains the when question.

The why part is because of Mars’ potentially biological history. The surface of the planet is covered with dry riverbeds, ancient sea basins, and deep depressions that could only indicate long-vanished water.

Previous rover analyses in similar locations have discovered chemicals that form only in water, proving that Mars was once extremely wet. Now the mission is to look for fossilized organisms or signs of microbial life. Perseverance will collect Martian soil samples, awaiting another spacecraft that could leave Earth as early as 2026, collect the samples and fly them home for analysis.

Finding life on Mars would be a highly significant discovery. The bragging (吹嘘) rights that go with being first to make the find is part of what makes the planet the hot new destination it’s become.

2 . Boris Eldagsen submitted an Al-generated image to a photography contest as a “cheeky monkey” and sparked a debate about AI’s place in the art world.

In March, the Sony World Photography Awards announced the winning entry in their creative photo category: a black-and-white image of an older woman embracing a younger one, titled “PSEUDOMNESIA：The Electrician.”(伪失忆症，电工). The press release announcing the win describes the photograph as “haunting” and “amazing. ”

But the artist, Berlin-based Boris Eldagsen, turned down the award. His photograph was not a photograph at all, as he announced, he had crafted it through creative prompting of DALL-E2, an artificial intelligence image generator.

“I applied as a ‘cheeky monkey’, to find out if the ‘competitions’ are prepared for AI images to enter. They are not.” Eldagsen explained on his website. His entry image has stirred up controversy and conversation about when Al-generated or assisted images should be considered art. Eldagsen started with photography because he thought drawing was a lonely job. When AI generators started, he was hooked from the very beginning. “For me, as an artist, AI generators are absolute freedom. If you are older, you can put all your knowledge into prompting and creating images. If you are 15, you may have probably just generated Batman. ”

The idea of “Electrician" sparked off from a project that was related to his father, who went to war at 17, but, like most of that generation in Germany, never talked about it. After his father’s death, he found some images from the 1940s he hadn’t seen before. He learned a lot about their time just by looking at these images. “Can I recreate images of that time using AI?” And then the “Electrician” just grew.

With DALL-E 2, the image was all done by text prompts and inpainting and outpainting. Can it be regarded as art? There is not a yes-or-no for that.

5 . Humans feed thousands of songs to AI (人工智能). And it is able to analyse the basic information and recognize patterns that can be used to create original music. Such AI-created music is similar to those that any musician might compose.

Recently, an AI-powered system, the Flow Machines, has released a song Daddy’s Car. This system is able to analyse the composers’ original ideas and come up with more ideas to assist them in composing. The system tries to combine the human mind with AI.

Another great invention is Jukedeck, which works very easily. In order to create a new piece, the user just needs to select items like the desired music style (folk, rock, etc.) and the mood (sad or happy). After a few seconds, AI provides a piece of music for the user to download. Each user can create music tailored to his or her interest.

Some musicians use AI to achieve what they could not do on their own. For example, Yacht, an American pop group, has used AI to break out of their comfort zone and try to create something different from their previous songs. Soon they have their new album, which contains 10 songs, all of which are very popular.

The development of AI technology also comes with some concerns. Some human composers fear that their work might be replaced by a machine. Some others are worried about music itself and the music industry, as AI is now able to create music more and more similar to human-composed music.

Faced with this challenge, on one hand, human musicians need to remain creative; on the other hand, they should understand how to use these new tools to explore new frontiers. Perhaps the future role of the human musicians will be to focus on emotions, leaving the machines to take care of other procedures.

6 . If humans do want to set up communities on the moon or other planets, what will they eat? A new test has begun to see if meat cells can grow.

Growing meat from cells even on Earth isn’t easy. Cells from a cow(though it could be any animal)are fed the things they need to grow, like amino acids and carbohydrate. The cells multiply until muscle tissue forms, and eventually becomes meat that you can eat. This process is called “cultivation (培养)”. The meat is grown in tanks that look more like what you’d find in a brewery than a farm yard. The life-cycle of an animal raised for meat — birth, life and kill — is completely ignored.

“Animal cells grow slowly,” says David Humbird, a chemical engineer. “If bacteria were to get into the cultivation, they would grow much faster from animal cells and they will just take over so you aren’t making the animal cells anymore. You are making bacteria. And you have to throw them away,” says Mr Humbird. “Those cells that are themselves grown on eatable material are going to be sugar, amino acids and water. And the caloric value of the cells that you make will always be less than that. At the best case you could probably recover 25% of the calorie and eat them as food. So the question is, why would you drag all those calorie into space just to waste 75% of them?”

Karen Nyberg is a former astronaut. She says food plays a crucial role in space missions. “Food like powdered milk and that sort of thing comes as a regular source for astronauts, and meat produced in space is just something we don’t have. So anything like that makes us feel great and eases our pressure.” For Ms Nyberg, fresh food and vegetables are vital if humans are expected to be away from Earth for years at a time.

Certainly if humanity is serious about putting people on Mars, how to feed astronauts with nutrient-rich food that doesn’t spoil—and tastes good — is an important and difficult mystery.

7 . As different countries plan lunar missions, the European Space Agency says that creating a time zone up there may simplify things.

 What time is it on the moon?

    1    For decades, lunar missions have operated on the time of the country that launched them. But with several lunar explorations heading for the launchpad, the European Space Agency has considered the current system unsustainable (不可持续的).

 What is the solution to keeping time on the moon?

The main objective of establishing a universal timekeeping system for the moon is to streamline communication among the various countries and entities (实体), public and private. The discussion about how to do that is happening. Things are starting to get busy on and above the lunar surface. The M1 lunar lander built by the Japanese company Ispace is set to arrive on the moon in April. A six-legged robot called the Nova-C lander is expected to land on the South Pole of the moon in June.    2     Last year, China completed construction of its own space station and previously hinted that Chinese astronauts would be on the moon by 2030.

 What is the potential for miscommunication?

These missions will not only be on or around the Moon at the same time, but they will often be interacting as well.    3    Time on Earth is exactly tracked by atomic clocks, but synchronizing (同步) time on the moon is challenging because clocks run faster there, gaining around 56 microseconds per day.

“Once a new lunar time zone is established, the methods used to create it will be useful for future space exploration. Astronauts could go to Mars in the next two or three decades.     4    .” Dr. Burns added, “We’re going to be an exploration civilization in which we’re going to be exploring beyond Earth’s orbit, first to the moon, then to mars.”

8 . Scientists of the University of Antwerp and University of Liege have found how the human brain changes and adapts to weightlessness, after being in space for 6 months.

A child who learns not to drop a glass on the floor is an example of how the brain follows the physical laws of gravity to best function on Earth. Astronauts who go to space station live in a weightless environment, where the brain’s rules about gravity are no longer applicable. A new study on brain function in astronauts has found how the brain’s organization is changed after a six-month mission to the International Space Station(ISS).

The University of Antwerp has been leading this BRAIN-DTI scientific project through the European Space Agency. Magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)(磁共振成像)data were taken from 14 astronauts’ brains before and several times after their mission to space. Using a special MRI technique, the researchers collected the astronauts’ brain data in a resting condition.

In cooperation with the University of Liege, recent analyses of the brain’s activity at rest found how functional connectivity, a marker of how activity in some brain areas is connected with the activity in others, changes in specific regions. “We found that connectivity was altered after spaceflight in regions which support the combination of different types of information, rather than dealing with only one type each time,” say Steven Jillings and Floris Wuyts. “Moreover, we found that some of these changed communication patterns remained throughout 8 months of being back on Earth. At the same time, some brain changes returned to the level of how the areas were functioning before the space mission.”

The researchers are excited with the results, though they know it is only the first step in pursuing our understanding of brain communication changes after space travel. For example, we need to understand whether longer time spent in outer space might influence these observations, and whether brain characteristics may be helpful in selecting future astronauts or monitoring them during and after space travel.

10 . What was once science fiction is now a part of our everyday lives, as artificial intelligence (AI) is something that many of us live alongside. According to Statista, in 2019, 3.25 billion virtual assistants were used worldwide and that figure is predicted to be more than double by 2014.

AI is doing more for us than setting reminders, making recommendations, and offering us weather reports. In fact, it could be about to change the healthcare landscape entirely. It is estimated that one in eight people today use health apps regularly. And AI has more to offer.

Dr Emilia Molimpakis is a neuroscientist who co-founded thymia, a platform that uses AI powered games to help doctors spot depression.

“I was inspired to start thymia after seeing my best friend struggle with depression,” she says, “I saw her try to go through the psychiatric (精神病学的) system and fall through the cracks. Despite being seen by a psychiatrist, she ended up trying to take her own life. When that happened, I was the one who found her, and this experience impressed me.”

Aside from blaming herself for not recognizing the signs sooner, what she could not get her head around was how the psychiatrist should not see this coming. She realized that the tools psychiatrists used were still these old-fashioned, pen-and-paper questionnaires that have been found, time and again, to be subjective and not reflecting a patient’s actual mental health status. So, thymia was born.

But as we look into the future, what should we be aware of? Before we dive in head-first, there are still questions we need to answer. As Dr Molimpakis points out, it’s vitally important that AI tools used in healthcare must be trained on a diverse data set that is typical of all groups of people. It should also be used alongside, and in addition to, professional care—not as a replacement. We should also consider carefully how our health data is stored and used. These are topics that both users and professionals have a responsibility to consider.