Chinese writer and translator Yang Jiang died early on May 25, 2016 in Beijing at age 104. The longest-living Chinese woman writer, she was known for her modest, subtle and witty writing style.

    Yang became a household name in China for her novels, essays, plays and translated works. Her most popular novel, Baptism, describing a group of intellectuals (知识分子) adjusting to a new society in the early 1950s, has been translated into French and English.

    Yang began learning Spanish in 1959 at age 48, and started to translate Don Quixote in 1962. She was the first to translate Don Quixote into Chinese. The work was stopped twice due to the "cultural revolution". She completed it in 1976, and the Chinese edition was published in 1978 and has sold more than 1 million copies. In that year, the Spanish king and queen visited China, and then-leader Deng Xiao-ping gave the royal couple Yang's translation as a gift. Yang was received by Deng at the Great Hall of the People. While shaking hands, Deng asked her when she had completed the translation. "It's just published," she replied, having no time to tell the full story.

    She was married to Qian Zhongshu, a well-known scholar and author of the best-selling novel Fortress Besieged. Yang's memoir about her family, The Three of Us, written after her husband and daughter died, in 1998 and 1997 respectively, was translated into German.

    Yang never stopped writing. At 94, she started writing the book Walking onto the Edge of Life to reflect on her life. It won China's top book award in 2007. At 100, she was still writing articles for newspapers.

    A biologist once criticized for stealing eggs from the nests of the rarest bird in the world has been awarded the "Nobel Prize" of conservation after his methods saved nine species from extinction.

Professor Carl Jones won the 2016 Indianapolis Prize — the highest accolade in the field of animal conservation — for his 40 years of work in Mauritius, where he saved an endangered kestrel from becoming the next Great Auk.

    When the 61-year-old first travelled to the east African island in the 1970s, he was told to close down a project to save the Mauritius kestrel. At the time there were just four left in the wild, making it the rarest bird on Earth. However, he stayed, using the techniques of captive breeding (人工繁殖), which involved snatching eggs from the birds' nests and hatching(孵化)them under incubators, prompting the mothers to lay another set of eggs in the wild.

    A decade later, the number of Mauritius kestrels had soared to over 300 and today there are around 400 in the wild. The biologist has also been necessary in efforts to bring other rare species back from the edge of extinction, including the pink pigeon, echo parakeet and Rodrigues warbler.

    Prof Jones was awarded the $250,000 (£172,000) prize at a ceremony in London.

"As a young man in my 20s, I certainly didn't enjoy the stress and the tension of the criticism I received," reflecting on the start of his career, he said the Maurutius kestrel project had been seen as a "dead loss" at the time. In the 1970s there was fierce opposition to the captive breeding techniques, with critics arguing that they were too risky and took the emphasis off breeding in the wild.

    Prof Jones has devoted his whole life to his work, only becoming a father for the first time eight years ago, at 53. He said receiving the prize was particularly important to him, because it proved that his work to save birds was right.

    Photos of the moon are beautiful if taken well, but it can be very hard to get a picture of the moon that doesn't look blurry! In order to take a perfect picture of the moon, apart from a high­quality camera, the associated equipment and the skills to set up your camera, you also need to pick a proper time and a good place.

    Choose your favorite moon phase. The moon can be photographed in any phase except the new moon, which is not visible to Earth. The first quarter, half, and third quarter phases provide high contrast that allows you to see the craters(坑) in greater detail, while the full moon is a dramatic choice for a skyscraper. What phase you choose is up to your personal preference, but it's best to have a phase chosen before going out to photograph the moon.

    Learn when the moon rises and sets. When the moon sets or rises, it is closer to the horizon, making it appear larger and closer. This makes it much easier to photograph! Check an almanac(年历) or a weather app for moon rising and setting times in your area.

    Pick a clear night. Clouds, fog, and air pollution will blur your photographs. Check a weather app or watch the weather forecast before leaving for your session and while photographing. A clear night with low smog content and no rain is best for moon photography.

    Choose a location away from direct light sources. The moon appears bright because it reflects the light of the sun, and additional light from streetlights, homes, and cars can make the moon appear duller and blurrier in pictures. It is fine if there is light in the distance, but be sure that you are not photographing close to another light source.

    When Shakespeare was twenty-one, he went to London, a very interesting place, to try his fortune.

    There was the famous London Bridge and St. Paul's Cathedral, and palaces and markets and long streets full of shops.

    Then, too, there were the daily crowds where could be seen people from all over the world. Knights, scholars and the highwayman (拦路强盗）or thieves, who had been infamous for their clever robberies, passed by each other.

    Here, also, were noblemen dressed in gold, from Italy and Spain and France; slaves from Spanish America, sea captains and ministers, soldiers and servants—all held by chances or interests within the gray walls which circled London, and whose gates gave welcome to as strange a crowd as could be found in the world.

    Into this curious crowd came Shakespeare, quick to see and eager to learn. And before long all these strange sights were as familiar to him as the faces of his own town's residents. Each one told its story to him so plainly that, as before he had learned the secrets of the fields and woods, so now he learned men and men's interests that make up the great world.

    And he learned these lessons so well that when he came to write his plays, he made such use of them as no writer ever made before or since; for it is the use of this knowledge of the world, combined with his own genius, that makes Shakespeare the greatest dramatist that has ever lived.

    If you're a fan of smart technology, you may have had some sleepless nights lately. That's because Alexa, the artificial intelligence (AI) behind US company Amazon's Echo smart speakers, has been "letting out an unprompted (自发的),creepy (令人毛骨悚然的)cackle for no apparent reason, according to BBC News.

    Many social media users shared their stories of Alexa scaring them with the seemingly unprompted laugh.

    "Every time Alexa laughs, an angel dies," Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk joked on social media.

    On March 7, Amazon released an update that fixed the problem, saying that the laugh was caused by Echo devices mistakenly thinking that users had said the command " Alexa, laugh".

    However, what should have been a funny story raised the ongoing topic of man versus machine.

    With the rise of artificial and robotic technology, "Digital machines started to demonstrate broad abilities in pattern recognition, complex communication, and other area that used to be particularly human," wrote Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in their book The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. They believe that AI will "do more and more, and our lives will get better".

    However, ever since the earliest days of AI there have been concerns that some day, software will take over the world, leaving the fate of humans unknown.

    "With artificial intelligence we are order the demon (魔鬼)Musk told students during a meeting at MIT in 2014. "If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful

    Many scientists have shared the same concern. The late British physicist Stephen Hawking said at a technology conference in Portugal in November that "computers can. in theory, imitate human intelligence, and exceed it ••• AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization."

    If creators are to safely control AL however, Hawking suggested that they "employ best practice and effective management".

    I am an optimist and I believe that we can create AI for the good of the world," he said at the conference. "We simply need to be aware of the dangers, identify them, employ the best possible practice and management, and prepare for its consequences well in advance."

When your boss calls and tells you to send $100,000 to a supplier, be on your toes. It could be a fake call. As if fake emails weren't enough, on the rise now is the deep fake audio (虚假音频) that can be cloned to sound almost real and perfect and is easy to create. "It's on the rise, and something to watch out for," says Vijay Balasubramaniyan, the CEO of a company called Pindrop.

Balasubramaniyan stated during a safety meeting how easy it is to use machine to create sentences that a person probably never said from recorded words. "All you need is five minutes of audio, and you can create fake audio," says Balasubramaniyan. Then, he showed a database (数据库) of voices, typed a sentence, and connected it to a famous people's name on the list. A few seconds later, he clicked "play", and it sounded quite real.

More costly are fake phone calls, where cheaters are able to fake the phone number of real contacts and make calls that result in workers sending off lots of money. He mentioned the example of a United Kingdom energy company in 2019 that got attacked by deep fake audio in a call that asked a worker to send $243,000 to a supplier. Reported by the Wall Street Journal, the worker was directed to pay it within an hour.

Balasubramaniyan says if you were to get that kind of call from a "boss" be doubtful and ask to call back right away to prove authenticity (真实性). Besides this, in his opinion, companies need to use more safety measures for keeping up with deep fake artificial intelligence (AI) that produces phone calls and software to check authenticity versus fake calls. "This is a threat that's waiting to happen," he says. "It's a very small number now, but it's very real."