One of the most efficient ways to achieve peace and speed up economies (经济) is to provide girls with better education and more rights. Today, girls' lack of access (进入) to basic education is getting more serious when it comes to the use of digital (数码的) technology, leaving them far behind boys. And because the world is even more digital, those who lack basic internet skills will find it increasingly more difficult to take part in the formal economy, to get a quality education, and to have their voices heard.

    Since 2013 the global gender gap (性别差异) in male and female access to the Internet has actually increased from 11 to 12 percent. Worse yet, women and girls living in the poorest countries are 31 percent less likely than men and boys to have access to the Internet. In developing countries, some 200 million fewer women than men own a mobile phone, the most common means of internet access there. This digital divide is increasing, and should it continue at the present pace, it is projected that over 75 percent of women and girls will lack internet access and digital skills.

    There are many causes of the digital gender gap. They include girls' exclusion (排斥) from basic education, from specific technology education and high costs of mobile phones and internet access.

    Indeed, one of the so-called reasons why girls may be discouraged from learning how to access and use digital technology is also a groundless one: that girls are simply not good at using technology.

    Without the help of the government, most of the benefits of technological change will be enjoyed only by men, exacerbating gender inequality.

    As if 2016 hadn't been hard enough for China's workforce, a yearly survey has revealed that more than half of the country's white-collar employees got no year-end bonus ahead of the upcoming and costly lunar(农历的) New Year holiday. The survey of 11,500 workers by Chinese employment agency Zhaopin found that 50.9 per cent did not get an annual bonus at the end of 2016. Another 9.6 percent were told their bonuses had been delayed until after the New Year holiday.

    Before the slowdown that began in 2014, employers in China had been less ungenerous with cash bonuses, which can total well over a full month's pay and send employees back home for the holiday with plenty of cash for gifts to elders and other family members or to put away as savings. The impact of weak growth on year-end bonuses may have reached the highest point in 2015, however, when 66 per cent of white-collar workers received no year-end bonuses. And the 2016 level actually represents an improvement from 2014, when 61 per cent had to go without.

    But that recovery has also seen the size of bonuses drop: last year the average bonus was Rmb 12,821（$1,861）, about Rmb 2,000 more than that in 2015 but still about Rmb800 below the 2014 average. More than a quarter of those surveyed who saw their bonuses drop last year blamed the drop on poor company performance.

    Differences among the 34 cities surveyed were still greater, as the average bonus of over Rmb 15,800 in Beijing was more than three times than that in the lowest-paying city of Shenyang. Employees of state-owned firms also expressed more satisfaction with their bonuses than those at private companies — and little wonder, as the average bonus at the former was Rmb 17,318, or about Rmb 6,000 more than what private companies' employees could expect.

    But the impact of companies' stinginess(吝啬) can go beyond simply ruining employees' New Year holiday, possibly coming back to affect employers: 39 percent of respondents said they would look for work elsewhere if their year-end bonus was not returned to normal, an increase of 2.3 Percentage points from 2015.

    For many years, Bruce Bexler dreamed of going to the lands no human had explored and discovered rare, unknown species. That might sound like an impossible dream, but Bexler turned it into a reality.

    In December 2015, he, together with a team of Australian and American scientists, adventured into a rain forest on the island of New Guinea. They were the first people ever to enter the region. “As we were dropped on the ground by helicopter, we found no trails anywhere; it was really hard to get around,” Bexler says.

    Within minutes of landing, the team spotted a black chicken-like bird. The scientists soon determined that the creature was a type of honeyeater-the first new bird species to be sighted on New Guinea in 60 years. The honeyeater wasn't the only surprise for them. They discovered more than 40 previously unknown plant and animal species. “We were like kids in a candy store?' Bexler recalls. “Everywhere we looked, we saw amazing things we had never seen before.”

    The new found species didn't shy away from the scientists. Two long-nosed echidnas even let the visitors pick them up and take them back to camp to study them. Bexler thinks the animals weren't scared because they had never seen humans before. He explains, “This area gives scientists a place where they can study the behaviours of animals that have not yet learned to be afraid of people.”

    Bexler and his team did not have enough time to study the area completely. “We just scratched the surface, Bexler says. “Anyone who goes there will come back with a mystery.”

    Known for its historic stone paths and traffic-jammed streets, France forgoes（放弃）traditional bricks and pavement for shiny solar panels（嵌板）with its new roadway project. French officials announced plans to construct a 1,000-kilometer-long solar roadway, with each kilometer capable of providing enough cheap, renewable energy to power 5,000 homes.

    “The maximum effect of the program, if successful, could be to furnish 5 million people with electricity, or about 8 percent of the French population,” Segolence Royal, France's minister of ecology and energy, said at a conference, reports Global Construction Review.

The street — or “Wattway”—was made possible through the cooperation between the National Institute of Solar Energy and French civil engineering firm Colas. Tests for the road will begin in the spring. The entire project will take an estimated five years to complete, but builders won't have to destroy existing roads in the meantime. Only about a quarter of an inch thick, the solar panels can simply be glued on top of existing streets and are durable（耐用的）enough to bear heavy traffic and weather conditions.

    Despite the bad traffic Parisians associate with their journey to work every day, the average French roadway is packed for only 10 percent of the day, according to Colas' figures. That will leave the solar street with the majority of the day to gather energy from the sun, which makes the project quite promising. The panels collect solar power through a thin layer of polycrystalline silicon（多晶硅）and change it into electricity. Electrical connections can be put into existing traffic structures.

    France won't be the first country to roll out a solar road. A 70-meter solar bike path was set up in the Netherlands in 2014. Within six months, the path had created enough to power a house for an entire year.

    People have been wondering why elephants do not develop cancer even though they have lifespans (寿命) that are similar to humans, jiving for around 50 to 70 years.

    Now scientists believe they know why. A team at the University of Chicago, US has found that elephants carry a large number of genes that stop tumors (肿瘤) developing. To be precise, they found 20 copies of an anti-tumor gene called TP53 in elephants. Most other species, including humans, only carry one copy.

    According to the research, the extra copies of the gene improved the animal's sensitivity to DNA damage, which lets the cells quickly kill themselves when damaged before they can go on to form deadly tumors.

    "An increased risk of developing cancer has stood in the way of the evolution of large body sizes in many animals," the study author Dr Vincent Lynch told The Guardian. If every living cell has the same chance of becoming cancerous (癌变的), large creatures with a long lifespan like whales and elephants should have a greater risk of developing cancer than humans and mice. But across species, the risk of cancer does not show a connection with body mass.

    This phenomenon was found by Oxford University scientist Richard Peto in the 1970s and later named "Peto's paradox (悖论)”". Biologists believe it results from larger animals using protection that many smaller animals do not. In the elephant's case, the making of TP53 is nature's way of keeping this species alive.

    The study also found that when the same genes were brought to life in mice, they had the same cancer resistance as elephants. This means researchers could use the discovery to develop new treatments that can help stop cancers spreading or even developing in the first place.

    "Nature has already figured out how to prevent cancer," said Joshua Schiffman, a biologist at the School of Medicine, University of Utah, US. "It's up to us to learn how different animals deal with the problem so that we can use those strategies to prevent cancer in people."

When looking at fashion shows or the latest magazine trends, you might think you've seen it all before. It seems that designers often revisit past concepts （概念）. However, to glimpse the future of fashion, one must turn to the meeting point of fashion and technology, where innovative ideas are born.

For several years now, people have been talking about "wearable technology" as the next big development. You can already buy watches that do everything your smartphone can do, or glasses with computers that follow your eye movements and feed information to you as you walk around. But there's much more to wearable technology than that.

Sports clothing is one of the areas. Runners already wear small computers on their wrists（手腕） that give them continuous information about how fast they're running, how hard their bodies are working, and so on. Experts agree that it's often sportspeople （usually young men） who are the first to take up new fashion ideas. Others then follow.

Women, it seems, are usually more interested in what clothes look like than what they can do, and technology has a part to play here too. Designers are making clothes that can change color with how you feel, or react to sound. And if you think that sounds unlikely, just think of all the things we accept as quite normal today that seemed impossible or silly only ten years ago.

The primary reason such items aren't available in mainstream stores is their high cost. However, like all technological products, their prices are likely to decrease rapidly, as technological clothing doesn't necessarily have to be costly.