1 . Nick Verel, a 53-year-old kidney transplant (肾脏移植) recipient in Ohio, should have been near the top of the list to receive a COVID-19 vaccine (疫苗). Yet like millions of others, he wasn’t having any luck scheduling an appointment. Nick would sit with computers on his lap trying for hours to book an appointment on different sites, which ended up in vain no matter how concentrated he was. “I felt hopeless,” Nick says.

Then he heard about Zwinggi, a 40-year-old mother of three who was helping to secure appointments for vulnerable individuals like Nick. So he messaged Zwinggi on Facebook: Can you help? Thirty-five minutes later, Zwinggi reported back — Nick successfully had an appointment to get the vaccine.

2 . When you think about it, food is an important part of our lives. Family gatherings center around food and the celebration of major life events and milestones involves food in one way or another. The same holds true for us here on the Space Station. Food is important and ends up usually being a topic of discussion for almost every crew.

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Our food also comes packaged in many ways. But no matter what the form of the food though, you still have the same problem eating it- - you do not want it flying away from you and making a mess when you open it up. In this case a little bit of extra water is extremely helpful. It keeps the food kind of sticking together and to the package and to your spoon. Small things do escape from time to time, but we really try hard to minimize the random flying food problem. That is enough for now! Next time I will write about how to cook in space.

3 . The call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of still-uncontrolled pandemic and economic crises in the world’s most technologically advanced nations. Not very long ago, it was also unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations and that safety nets would be proven so disastrously lacking in flexibility.

4 . As much as many ALifers hate emphasizing their research’s applications, the attempts to create artificial life could have practical payoffs. Artificial intelligence may be considered ALife’s cousin in that researchers in both fields are enamored by a concept called open-ended evolution (演化). This is the capacity for a system to create essentially endless complexity, to be a sort of “novelty generator”. The only system known to exhibit this is Earth’s biosphere. If the field of ALife manages to reproduce life’s endless “creativity” in some virtual model, those same principles could give rise to truly inventive machines.

5 . Mars, the distant red planet, carries China’s great dream in spaceflight as well as the numerous puzzles of curious people: Why do humans explore Mars? Will humans really emigrate to Mars? What will the everyday life be like on Mars if humans really live there? Shanghai Astronomy launched its original situational exhibition “Living on Mars” — to reveal the secrets of Mars and solve visitors’ puzzles about the life on Mars.

Time: October 15, 2021 to March 2, 2022 (closed on Mondays, except national holidays)

Location: B1 Temporary Exhibition Hall

6 . Over the next few weeks, Mika would stop by occasionally. Sometimes, she only stayed for a few minutes; other times, she would wander around my apartment much longer. Each visit brightened me. Mika even helped me connect with some new neighbors, who asked if Mika was my cat. Apparently, Mika visited them as well.

While the lockdown has been awful, I suspect I might not have ever met Mika if it had not happened. But perhaps she came by at this time because she sensed a need for connection on my part.

While dogs are said to be man’s best friend, a good cat can be everyone’s best friend.

7 . Space architects design buildings and houses and offices and a whole bunch of other stuff that humans need to survive—both here and in space plus design ways to get between them. They deal with problems that Earthbound architects don’t even dream about. For example, a lack of oxygen or atmosphere. A lack of sunlight. Too much sunlight. Microgravity. A lack of material to build what you need. Or no way to ship material that you need to where you need it.

It’s not hard to imagine the problems that space architects will face, now and in the future. It’s not hard to imagine either that we can’t even begin to imagine some of the challenges they’ll be up against. Carving out a space in space for our species to continue is a huge undertaking, perhaps the most daring ever for mankind. But we’ve taken the first step, haven’t we?

8 . Opening day at the nation’s second-largest school district unfolded with a mix of emotions: frustration over long waits, anxiety over health protocols and concern for how things would go for children who have been learning online for a year and a half. But for many, the sense of joy and relief at being together again eased the worries.

In the early morning at John Marshall High, lines of students waiting to enter extended two blocks. By 9 a.m., some students were still waiting, having missed part of the first class.

9 . The Lantern Festival also marks the last day of the lunar New Year celebration. Though far from home, the festive sentiments in space are the same. The China Manned Space Agency released a video on social media platforms on Tuesday, showing that the taikonauts had decorated the orbiting core module with red lanterns, Chinese knots and paper-cutting decorations. Wearing new clothes，the trio（三人小组）enjoyed the traditions of eating dumplings and posting spring couplets on walls. During the Chinese New Year holiday, they were also spotted watching the Winter Olympics and doing workouts in orbit.

10 . To see how well it could perform, the researchers asked the AI to complete a song. They fed the AI the opening to Guang Yin De Gu Shi, a real Chinese pop song, and then measured how closely it was able to match the song in terms of generating melodic segments（旋律片段）of similar length. For good measure, they also gave the same task to two other music-generating AIs which were less advanced than HAT. While HAT outperformed its computer rivals（对手）, the segments it created were disconnected from each other and clearly not human-made, though they were roughly the same length as those in the human-made tune.

“There is still a huge gap between the HAT-generated pieces and the real works,”conclude the authors, suggesting that a future study can attempt to create an AI that can “polish” the music it creates to close that gap.