Many people have participated into lots of virtual meetings these years. Some research shows this adjustment might not impact workplace productivity to any great degree. A new study, though, suggests otherwise.

In the study, 602 participants were randomly paired and asked to come up with creative uses for a product. They were also randomly selected to work together either in person or virtually. The pairs were then ranked by assessing their total number of ideas, as well as those concepts' degree of novelty, and asked to submit their best idea. Among the groups, virtual pairs came up with significantly fewer ideas, suggesting that something about face-to-face interaction generates more creative ideas. The findings could stiffen employers' resolve to urge or require their employees to come back to the office.

"We ran this experiment based on feedback from companies that it was harder to innovate with remote workers," said lead researcher Melanie Brucks. "Unlike other forms of virtual communication, like phone calls or e-mail, videoconferencing copies the in-person experience quite well, so I was surprised when we found meaningful differences between in-person and video interaction for idea generation."

When random objects were placed in both the virtual and physical rooms, the virtual pairs of participants spent more time looking directly at each other rather than letting their look wander about the room and taking in the entire scene. Eyeing one's whole environment and noticing the random objects were associated with increased idea generation. On platforms, the screen occupies our interactions. Our look wavers less. "Looking away might come across as rude," said Brucks, "so we have to look at the screen because that is the defined context of the interaction, the same way we wouldn't walk to another room while talking to someone in person."

Like most educators, Brucks has primarily taught virtually in the past three years, and she did notice some benefits of the approach as well. Her students were more likely to take turns speaking and her shyer students spoke up more often, rid of the anxiety that comes from addressing a large classroom. Brucks found that one solution to improving virtual idea generation might be to simply turn off the camera, for her students felt "freer" and more creative when asked to do so. And this may be sound advice for the workplace.

Virtual teamwork can't replace face-to-face teamwork. Idea selection proficiency (能力) is only valuable if you have strong options to select from, and face-to-face teams are the best means to generate winning options. Perhaps the workplace will find a compromise—a sweet spot in the middle that balances working from both home and office.

Arguably, the biggest science development of the year to date has been the images of the very depths of the universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Those images beg a comparison between the external and internal universes that science is bent on observing and understanding.

Decades ago, astrophysicist Carl Sagan famously said, "The universe is also within is. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." He was commenting then on the reality that our internal universe was as complex and as fantastic as the outer space.

There are many similarities between the progress we've made in understanding the universe and in piecing together life's inner workings. Like the technological developments that took us from Galileo's telescope to the Hubble to the JWST, life science tools have also improved rapidly. From early light microscopes to modern super-resolution ones, these developments have afforded researchers a deep look into biology's infinitesimal (无限小的) landscape. Learning that living things were composed of cells was, not a terribly long time ago, a revolutionary observation. Since then, scientists have been able to dive ever deeper into the components of life.

Going beyond merely observing the complicated makeup of organisms, life scientists can now discover the workings of molecules (分子). And that is where scanning the universe differs from peering into biology. Understanding the universe, especially from a functional standpoint, is not necessarily an immediate urgency. Understanding biology on that level is. Simply observing the amazing internal structure of cells is not enough. Biologists must also characterize how all those parts interact and change in different environments and when faced with various challenges. Being able to image a virus or bacterium is nice at the level of basic science. But knowing how viruses gain entry into cells and spread, infect, and disable can literally save lives. Through time, biology has risen to this mechanistic challenge. Not only can life science tools produce images of cell components, even more importantly, they can help predict the effects of drugs on receptors, of immune cells on foreign invaders (入侵者), and of genetic perturbations (基因干扰) on development and aging.

This is not to belittle the work of scientists researching into universe. They should rightly be praised for delivering views of impossibly distant, impossibly massive phenomena. My aim is to celebrate these accomplishments while at the same time recognizing that science's inward search for detail and insight is equally impressive and, in my view, more urgent. The output of both the outward and inward explorations should stimulate wonder in everyone. After all, it's all star-stuff.

Imagine having the opportunity to sing together with hundreds of other people while you are at home alone. You can do this in a virtual choir. Virtual choir members record themselves while they perform alone on video. These videos are uploaded onto the Internet, and then they are put together into one video that you can see online—a virtual choir. Anyone can take part in a virtual choir from anywhere—all you need is a video camera and an Internet connection. A virtual choir enables people to add their voices to those of other individuals and become part of the global community. It has proved to be a positive influence on the lives of many people.

The virtual choir was the idea of award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre. He fell in love with Mozart's classical music when he sang for the university choir. Moved by this music, he said, "It was like seeing color for the first time." Over ten years after his graduation. Whitacre's original compositions began to become quite popular among choirs and singers. This led to the creation of the virtual choir.

In 2009, Whitacre received a video of a girl who was singing one of his works. Inspired, he asked his fans tomake videos, which he then joined together into one performance. His first virtual choir, "Lux Aurunque", had 198 singers from 12 different countries. It has received millions of views on the Internet. Since then, the virtual choir has become a worldwide phenomenon. Whitacre's next effort was the virtual Youth Choir for UNICEF, which was first seen on stage on 23 July 2014 in the UK. Altogether, 2,292 young people from 80 countries joined in to sing Whitacre's song "What If'".

The virtual choir is a wonderful way for people around the world to sing with one voice and thus make the world a better place.

Schools in the US and elsewhere are announcing bans on the recently released Al-powered ChatGPT out of fear that students could use the technology to complete their assignments. However, bans may be practically impossible given how difficult it is to detect when text is composed by ChatGPT. Is it instead time to rethink how students are taught and evaluated?

Educators are starting to question what it means to assess, student learning if an AI can write an essay or paper similar to, or even better than, a student would - and the teacher can't tell the difference. Many teachers believe the time-honored learning tradition will be destroyed from the ground up by Chat GPT. The Los Angeles Unified School District in California first blocked the use of ChatGPT on networks and devices in December 2022.

However, removing technology from the classroom can mean undesirable consequences, such as creating more obstacles for students with disabilities, says Trust. Additionally, restricting the use of ChatGPT on school networks and devices can't stop students from using ChatGPT at home and in libraries.

It is also unclear if anti-cheating software can reliably detect Al-assisted writing.  OpenAI is working to develop a digital watermark that can help teachers and academics spot students who are using ChatGPT to write essays. OpenAI's attempts to watermark AI text, however, hit limits.

Instead of worrying about how ChatGPT could enable cheating, educators should ask what motivates students to cheat in the first place and work on developing relationships of trust, says Jesse Stommel at the University of Denver in Colorado.

"Talk to students really frankly about what ChatGPT's capable of, what it's not," says Stommel. "Have students use it to write an essay about Jane Austen and gender dynamics, and then have them read that essay and peer review it and think about what ChatGPT gets right and wrong. "

"If the self or person of today, and that of tomorrow, are not the same, but only like persons, the person of today is really no more interested in what will befall(降临到……头上) the person of tomorrow, than in what will befall any other person," Joseph Butler, a well-known philosopher wrote in 1736.

The theory caught the attention of a researcher called Hal Hershfield, who suspected that a disconnection from our future selves might explain many unreasonable elements of human behaviour including our unwillingness to exercise often.

To find out, Hershfield first had to find a way to measure someone's "future self-continuity". He settled on a simple graphic that presented pairs of circles representing the current self, and a future self (see below). The circles overlapped(重叠) to varying degrees, and the participants had to identify which pair best described how similar and how connected they felt to a future self 10 years from now.

He then compared these responses to his participants' real-life behavior. Hershfield first looked at his participants' real-life savings and he found that the more the participant felt connected to their future self, the more money they had already squirrelled away. What's more, people who score highly on the future self-continuity measure have higher moral standards than the people who struggle to identify with their future selves.

Hershfield confirmed that someone's (in)ability to identify with their future self can have long-term consequences for their overall wellbeing and that our sense of connection to our future selves can be strengthened. You might consider a simple imaginative exercise in which you write a letter to yourself 20 years from now, describing what is most important for you now and your plans for the coming decades.

It might seem strange to start a "conversation" with an imagined person but once your future self becomes alive in your mind, you may find it much easier to make the small personal sacrifices(牺牲) that are essential to preserve your wellbeing.

Isaac Newton's book, the Principia, transformed human understanding of the forces of nature, providing a mathematical basis for the movement of planets, moons, and comets(彗星), as well as objects on Earth. Recently, a new survey has more than doubled the known number of first editions of the book, including the first ones found in Asia. Nearly 200 first editions of Principia were newly identified in the survey, bringing the total known number to 386. The volumes cover 27 countries on five continents, including Africa and Australia.

Until now, the size of the Principia's first edition had been thought to be small-around 250-based on a 1953 survey that put the number of copies at 189. That figure partly reflects a long-held idea that the book, formally titled the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, was virtually incomprehensible outside of a small circle of expert mathematicians. But the new survey suggests that the great volume, at 500 pages and written in Latin, may have been popular in many parts of the world.

Behind the pages of the Principia, in which Newton laid out his three laws of motion, is an interesting history that involves the astronomer Edmond Halley and ether great figures. Most famous today for the comet that bears his name, Halley sought Newton's input on the shape of planetary orbits, a question that Halley and his colleagues had been puzzling over. Excited by Newton's answer—an ellipse(椭圆), and even more so by a paper he later sent to show his calculations, Halley pushed Newton to write the Principia, then funded its publication and was key to promoting it.

Such a precious book of knowledge carries enormous value. "In a sense, the Principia combined all the work that was done for the previous hundred years," says Mordechai Feingold, a science historian at the California Institute of Technology. "It took Newton to put together the ideas, that Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and other scientists had put forth insofar as heavenly bodies(天体) are concerned, to realize that Earth is a planet like any other planet and there's a mutual(相互的) attraction between all those heavenly bodies. "

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich has the perfect long-lasting solution to our fog problem. They have developed a very thin and gold-based transparent coating that can transform sunlight into heat, which can be applied to glass to prevent it from fogging.

The special coating is developed using titanium oxide(氧化钛) and gold particles. It selectively absorbs infrared(红外线的) radiations from the sunlight and creates a heating effect that is powerful enough to keep fog away from the surface of glass. The coating basically employs heat to stop fogging. The coating absorbs a large part of the infrared radiation, which causes it to heat up—by up to 8℃.

Previously, products like anti-fogging sprays create a very thin film of water on the surface to remove fog. The problem with such surfaces is pollution. Along with water, the sprays also soak up dirt, dust, oil, and various other dirty substances, and just a little dirt on the surface makes it useless. However, the new coating repels(排斥) water. Furthermore, the coating is significantly thinner, which makes it more transparent as well as flexible. It is heated passively and requires, during daytime, no additional energy source.

Gold might be expensive, but the researchers stress that their coating requires so little that the material costs remain low. Their coating is produced with standardized and readily scalable(可称量的) methods, all cost-effectively. However, although this product can work at very low levels of solar irradiation, it does rely on a certain amount of light.

The researchers will develop the coating further for other applications. In the process, they will examine whether other metals work just as well as gold. There is no need to fear, however, this would cause a car or a building to heat up more in the summer. The researchers have already filed a patent. Hopefully, this groundbreaking product will soon be available on the market.

According to a study done by University of Michigan, shopping to reduce stress was 40 times more effective at giving people a sense of control and shoppers were three times less sad than those only looking at items.

More than half of the 1,000 consumers surveyed by Credit Karma, head researcher of the study, said they have shopped to deal with feelings of stress or depression. About 48 percent of men and 31 percent of women who have stress shopping said they had purchased alcohol when stressed. About 82 percent of women spend on clothing compared to 52 percent of men. Women also lead shopping for jewellery, 42 percent, compared to 22 percent for men.

In some sense, stress shopping can actually help you live a healthier life by making sure that your blood pressure is lowered. The survey found 82 percent had only positive feelings about their purchases and that the positive mood was long-lasting. However, stress shopping, for many, could grow into a drive that uses up money, causes conflict, and therefore adds great stress to life.

Despite the in-time joy from purchases, stress shopping never proves along-lasting cure to stress or depression. Actually it needs to be avoided anyhow. Whether you're purchasing Christmas presents or buying groceries, having the items you need written down will provide you with brightness while shopping. Reward yourself for sticking to your list and you'll be more likely to commit to it.

In addition, always think about what you struggle with most financially. Do you spend too much money at the mall? Eating out? Vacations? Make a list of where your money is going and take necessary steps to resist your desire. For example, if you spend too much money on dining out on weekends, stuff your cupboard with food on Friday. So you'll be more likely to stay in and cook. And you need to give up the need to keep up with others. Everyone's financial situation is different and comparison may lead to debt and dissatisfaction with what you already have.

The robot watched as Shikhar Bahl opened there frigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door and more，analyzing this data and readying itself to imitate（模仿）what Bahl had done. It failed at first, missing the handle completely at times, grabbing it in the wrong spot or pulling it incorrectly. But after a few hours of practice, the robot succeeded and opened the door.

"Imitation is a great way to learn, "said Bahl, a Ph. D. student at the Robotics Institute (RI) in Carnegie Mellon University. " Having robots actually learn from directly watching humans remains an unsolved problem in the field, but this work takes a significant step in enabling that ability."

Bahl worked with Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, both faculty members in the RI, to develop a new learning method for robots called WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning. WHIRL is an efficient computation program for visual imitation. People constantly perform various tasks in their homes. With WHIRL, a robot can observe those tasks, gather the video data it needs and then go about practicing and learning to accomplish the tasks on its own.

The team added a camera and their software to an off-the-shelf robot, and it learned how to do more than 20 tasks—from opening and closing appliances, cabinet doors and drawers to putting a lid on a pot, pushing in a chair and even taking a garbage bag out of the bin.

Current method for teaching a robot a task typically relies on reinforcement (强化) learning. In reinforcement learning, the robot is typically trained on millions of examples in imitation and then asked to adapt that training to the real world.

This learning model works well when teaching a robot a single task in a structured environment, but it is difficult to extend and deploy (调动). WHIRL can learn from any video of a human doing a task. It is capable of being easily expanded, not limited to one specific task and can operate in realistic home environments.

Poet Wadsworth Longfellow said "music is the universal language of mankind", and there's growing evidence that he was right. New research shows people with Alzheimer's (老年痴呆) disease often respond to familiar music or song lyrics, even when their memories and ability to participate in conversation may be flagging.

Jonathan Graff-Radford, Doctor of Medicine, explains on The Mayo Clinic website why this may be:" Musical memories are often preserved in Alzheimer's patients because key brain areas linked to musical memory are relatively undamaged by the disease. "

When English senior Ted McDermott was diagnosed with Alzheimer in 2016, his son Simon McDermott found Ted became verbally and physically violent as the disease progressed. Grateful for the resources provided by the Alzheimer's Society, Simon and 80-year-old Ted made videos of their daily car duets (二重唱) for a fundraising ''Singing for the Brain" program in 2019. Truly remarkable, considering that some days Ted didn't recognize Simon.

The songs brought them to the attention of the public. In just a few months their efforts had considerable success on YouTube, raising over &100, 000, and resulting in a contract with Decca Records for 80-year-old Ted. Although Ted has begun to decline a little in the last years, he always remembers the words to his favorite songs and is happy to go with Simon daily in the car to sing. Different music-related programs and projects are offered by the U. K. Alzheimer's Society organizations. These programs are designed for people with Alzheimer to provide mental stimulation in a supportive social environment.

Social engagement and keeping your brain active, along with a healthy diet and exercising, may seem like obvious good habits to follow for your health in general. They've also been proven to be factors in reducing the risk of developing Alzheimer.

It's never too late to start taking care of your body and your brain—so make music appreciation or singing part of the routine of your loved one struggling with Alzheimer. As William Shakespeare said, "If music be the food of love, play on."