The world's first luxury space hotel, Aurora Station, was announced Thursday at the Space 2.0 Summit in San Jose, California. Developed by US-based space technology start-up Orion Span, the space station will host six people at a time, including two crew members, for 12-day trips of space travel. It plans to welcome its first guests in 2022.

    "Our goal is to make space accessible to all," Frank Bunger, CEO and founder of Orion Span, said in a statement." Upon launch, Aurora Station goes into service immediately, bringing travelers into space quickly and at a lower price point than ever seen before."

    While a$10 million trip is outside the budget of most people's two-week vacations, Orion Span claims to offer an authentic astronaut experience. "It has taken what was historically a 24-month training to prepare travelers to visit a space station and streamlined(精简)it to three months, at a fraction(小部分)of the cost," says Bunger. During their 12-day adventure, the super-rich travelers will fly at a height of 200 miles above the Earth's surface in Low Earth Orbit, where they will witness incredible views of the blue planet. The hotel will orbit Earth every 90 minutes, which means guests will see around 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours.

    Activities on board include taking part in research experiments such as growing food while in orbit, which guests can take home for a super-smug souvenir, and soaring over their hometown. Guests can have-live-video chats with their less-fortunate loved ones back home via high-speed wireless Internet access and, upon(return to Earth will be greeted with a specially arranged hero's welcome. While enjoying the thrills of zero gravity, the travelers will be able to float freely through the hotel, taking in views of the northern and southern aurora from the station's windows.   Deposits are already being accepted for future stays on the space hotel.

    Eudaimonia is an Ancient Greek word, particularly stressed by the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, which deserves far more attention than it has because it corrects the shortfalls (缺失)in one of the most central, but troubling words in our modem language: happiness.

    When we nowadays try to clearly express the purpose of our lives，it is the word "happiness" that we commonly turn to. We tell ourselves and others that the most important principle for our jobs, our relationships and the conduct of our day-to-day lives is the pursuit of happiness. It sounds like an innocent enough idea, but too much reliance on the term means that we frequently unfairly tend to quit or, at least, heavily question a great many challenging but worthwhile situations. The Ancient Greeks did not believe that the purpose of life was to be happy; they proposed that it was to achieve Eudaimonia, a word which has been best translated as "fulfilment".

    What distinguishes happiness from fulfilment is pain. It is very possible to be fulfilled and—at the same time—under pressure, suffering physically or mentally, overburdened and, quite frequently, in an irritable (易怒的)mood. This is a slight psychological difference that is hard for the word "happiness" to capture, for it's tricky to speak of being happy yet unhappy, or happy yet suffering. However, such a combination is readily accommodated within the respected and noble-sounding idea of Eudaimonia.

    The word encourages us to trust that many of life's most worthwhile projects will sometimes be in conflict with contentment, and yet will be worth pursuing. Properly exploring our professional talents, managing a household, keeping a relationship going, creating a new business venture or engaging in politics... none of these goals are likely to leave us cheerful and grinning on a daily basis. They will, in fact, involve us in all manner of challenges that will deeply exhaust and weaken us, provoke (激怒)and wound us. And yet we will perhaps, at the end of our lives, still feel that the tasks were worth undertaking. Through them, we'll have achieved something deeper and more interesting than happiness.

    With the word Eudaimonia in mind, we can stop imagining that we are aiming for a pain-free existence—and then blaming ourselves unfairly for being in a bad mood. We'll know that we are trying to do something far more important than smile all the time: we're striving to do justice to our full human potential.

    You probably know that frogs hop (双足跳). But did you know that there's a small frog in the Pacific Northwest that belly flops (肚子先着水)? It's called a tailed frog.

    Dr. Rick Eisner, who has been studying tailed frogs for the past few years, says, "I've looked at thousands of jumps and have never seen them land on their feet like other frogs." Most of the time, tailed frogs land on their stomachs and then bring their back legs in to prepare for another jump.

    Eisner first noticed these frogs because of the way they swim. Other frogs kick both of their back legs at the same time. But when a tailed frog swims, it pushes first with one leg and then the other.

    To try to find out why tailed frogs bellyflop, Eisner and other scientists collected and filmed different kinds of frogs. They found that all of the frogs start their jumps the same way: They hold out their legs. The change comes in the landing. Tailed frogs can't move their back legs as quickly as other frogs do. Maybe they don't need to. Tailed frogs live around water and quickly jump into the water to escape danger.

    Early frogs developed around watery areas and could jump quickly into the water to escape danger. Scientists think those frogs blended in with (与…融合在一起) the green plants on the side of the rocky rivers, just like today's tailed frogs. "I would guess that other animals would have problems detecting them," explains Eisner. When other animals find those early frogs, the frogs could jump into the river. They didn't need to continue hopping.

    Tailed frogs and other kinds of frogs went their own ways about 200 million years ago. Tailed frogs stayed by rivers. Other kinds of frogs moved to places where new hopping skills allowed them to survive.

    Our plan was to drive into Cambridge, catch the 7:34 train to Liverpool Street Station, then to separate and meet again for lunch. We should have arrived at Liverpool at 9:19, but due to a typical London fog, the train had to move along so slowly that it was not until 10:30 that it got there. In spite of our late arrival, Joan, my wife's sister, decided that she would go to see the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London while we went shopping. It was only after her sister had disappeared into the fog that my wife realized that we hadn't decided where we should meet for lunch. Since I had our three tickets for the concert in my pocket, this was indeed a problem. There seemed to be nothing we could do except taking a taxi to the Tower of London, and try to find her there. Needless to say, we didn't find her.

    It was now one o'clock, and the concert began at 2:30. "Perhaps she will think of waiting outside the concert hall," suggested my wife hopefully. By this time the fog was so thick that road traffic had to stop, and the only way to get there was by underground railway. Hand in hand we felt our way along the road to where we thought the nearest station should be. An hour later we were still trying to find it. Just as I was about to lose my temper completely when we met a blind man tapping his way confidently through the fog. With his help we found Tower Hill tube station just fifty yards down the road.

    By now it was far too late even to try to get to the concert hall before the performance began at 2:30, so we decided to return to Cambridge. It took seven long hours instead of the usual two to make that journey. Nor were we able to get any food and drink on the train. Tired and hungry we finally reached home at ten, opening the door to the sound of the telephone bell. It was Joan; she had seen the Crown Jewels, had managed to get another ticket for concert, and had had a wonderful dinner at a restaurant near the hotel where she decided to stay for the night. Now she was ringing to discover whether we had had an equally successful day.

    If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? That's the question that changed my life forever.

    At the age of 19, I became a massage therapist(治疗师). For the first time in my life, I felt free, independent and completely in control of my life. That is, until my life took a detour. I was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis. Over the course of two months, I lost my spleen(脾), my kidneys, and both of my legs below the knees.

    One day, I went home. I crawled into bed and this is what my life looked like for the next few months me passed out, escaping from reality, with my legs resting by my side. I was completely physically and emotionally broken. But I knew that in order to move forward, I had to let go of the old Amy and learn to embrace the new Amy. And that is when I began to realize that I didn't have to be small any more. I could be as tall as I wanted or as short as I wanted depending on whom I was dating. And if I snowboard again, my feet aren't going to get cold. And the best of all, I thought, I can make my feet the size of all the shoes that are on the sales shelf. And I did!

    I started snowboarding. Then I went back to work. And then I co-founded a non-profit organization for physical disabilities so that they could get involved in action sports. And just this past February, I won two World Cup gold medals, making me the highest-ranked adaptive female snowboarder in the world.

    Eleven years ago, when I lost my legs, I had no idea what to expect. But if you ask me today, if I would ever want to change my situation, I would have to say no, because my legs haven't disabled me. They've forced me to rely on my imagination and to believe in possibilities, and that's why I believe that our imaginations can be used as tools for breaking through borders, because in our minds, we can do anything and we can be anything. It's belief in those dreams and facing our fears directly that allow us to live our lives beyond our limits.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology have-in just two years-nearly doubled the number of materials known to have potential for use in solar fuels.

They did so by developing a process that promises to speed the discovery of commercially viable (商业可行性) generation of solar fuels that could replace coal, oil, and other fossil fuels.

Solar fuels, a dream of clean-energy research, are created using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Researchers are exploring a range of possible target fuels, but one possibility is to produce hydrogen by splitting water.

Each water molecule (分子) consists of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms are extracted, and then can be reunited to create highly flammable hydrogen gas or combined with CO 2 to create hydrocarbon fuels, creating a plentiful and renewable energy source. The problem, however, is that water molecules do not simply break down when sunlight shines on them-if they did, the oceans would not cover most of the planet. They need a little help from a solar-powered catalyst (催化剂).

To create practical solar fuels, scientists have been trying to develop low-cost and efficient materials that perform the necessary chemistry using only visible light as an energy source.

A new method was developed through a partnership between the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) and Berkeley Lab's Materials Project, using resources at the Molecular Foundry and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSCC). JCAP focused on developing a cost-effective method of turning sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into fuel. It is led by Caltech with Berkeley Lab as a major partner. The Materials Project is a program based at Berkeley Lab that aims to remove the guesswork from materials design in a variety of applications.

"What is particularly significant about this study, which combines experiment and theory, is that in addition to identifying several new compounds for solar fuel applications, we can also learn something new about the basic electronic structure of the materials themselves." says Neaton, the director of the Molecular Foundry.