Cancer is a leading cause of death around the world.

    When it comes to cancer, the sooner you know you have it, the better your chances of surviving are.

    A new blood test could change the way doctors and researchers find cancer in patients. Researchers say the test could provide some hints of the early forms of the disease.

    Gareth Jenkins is a professor at the University of Swansea. He says he and his team did not look for cancer. They instead looked for a by-product of cancer, mutated (突变的) red blood cells. They looked for, what Jenkins calls, the collateral (附带的) damage of cancer—the damage left by the disease.

    “In this blood test we don't measure the presence of cancer，we measure the presence of mutated red blood cells which are the collateral damage that occurs—a by-product of the cancer developing.''

    The researchers used normal laboratory equipment to perform the tests. This equipment looks for changes in the structure of millions of red blood cells. Those mutated cells lack a surface protein (蛋白质) that healthy cells normally have.

    “The goal of the test is looking for very rare cells which have picked up a mutation. The number of mutated red blood cells in a healthy person is around 5 or so mutated cells per million; so, you have to look at millions of red blood cells to discover those rare events. The number increases in cancer patients—it goes up to 40 or 50 on average.”

    The researchers tested blood from about 300 people, all of whom have cancer of the esophagus (食管). Patients with esophageal cancer have high levels of mutated red blood cells. Jenkins says that at this point he is not sure if other cancers would produce similar results.

    The hope is that the new test could one day become part of commonly used medical methods to find out if a person has cancer. These new technologies could save millions of lives.

The Change of Bossy (好指挥人的) Lily

    I am a helpful person. However, my classmates used to call me “Bossy Lily”.

    One day, the class shouted again, “Bossy Lily, bossy Lily!” My teacher, Ms. Flora sent me to sit in the 1 for a while to quiet the class. I didn't understand why the class got 2 when I tried to show Mike how to handle the record player. I was only trying to 3 I also couldn't understand why the teacher had sent me to the corner. I was taught to always help my 4if they didn't know something. I thought the class was 5 in their judgment of me. I thought the teacher was wrong in 6 with them.

    When everyone was excused for break, Ms. Flora kept me in. I 7 I was in serious trouble, but I still didn't understand how my 8 could have caused the teacher to react like this.

     “Why am I here and not at break?” I asked Ms. Flora. The teacher didn't say a word.9 she placed a word puzzle in front of me. Surprised as I was, I got out my pencil and 10 to solve it. It was 11 with many words I didn't understand. I raised my hand for help, but Ms. Flora 12 me. I 13 with the word puzzle until I was about to give up. But I was not a quitter, so I stayed with the challenge. Soon I had solved the problem 14my own. I was so proud I did the puzzle by myself that I raised my hand high to get Ms. Flora's 15. Ms. Flora picked up the finished puzzle and 16.

    “I'm glad that you learned this important 17 from me.” I was 18. She hadn't done anything. Now she was taking the credit for my hard work!

    “Now perhaps you have learned to let other students make discoveries 19. After all, that is the fun of 20.”

    In that moment, I decided that I would never do anything that would cause them to call me “Bossy Lily” ever again.

    Hotshot jet pilots are no match for cliff swallows. The birds rocket over bridges and skim over lakes, rushing forward at accelerations that would knock an Air Force. By tracking these contests with high-speed cameras, a new study gives the first, in-depth peek into avian aerodynamics (鸟类空气力学) in the wild. "The findings may even provide insight into how to design better micro air vehicles-tiny drones. This technology will be brilliantly useful," says biomechanics expert Jim Usherwood of the United Kingdom's Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield. "High-resolution field studies like this have never been done before for birds."

    For cliff swallows, the trouble starts when they return from wintering in South America to their summer homes in North America. After arrival, they seek out their old mud nests—usually located under concrete bridges and freeways-and start rebuilding their homes. But rather than hunt down a fresh supply of mud, some swallows prefer stealing supplies from their more hardworking neighbors. Others take things further and will even lay an egg or two in their neighbor's nest before taking off.

    Battles in the air follow if the invaders are caught in the act, and a new study takes advantage of these fights to learn how birds perform high-speed maneuvers (演习). The team placed three cameras along a North Carolina lake crossed by a highway bridge that houses several cliff swallow nests and waited for the battles to commence.

The team was surprised to learn that most of the time, chasers copied the move of fleeing invaders. Swallows also pull very hard turns to escape an enemy, with one extreme case reaching 7.8 gravity. Fighter pilots usually pass out at about 5 or 6 gravity, which is why these experiments have earned interest, and partial funding, from the Office of Naval Research. The Navy may use the findings to build better guidance systems for micro air vehicles. However, the swallows' biomechanics are complex, and now the team is simply trying to collect a few tricks.

    The World Health Organization recently said that it planned to add gaming disorder (游戏成瘾) to its new list of disease classifications, angering the gaming industry but pleasing doctors who hope it may make treatment more easily available.

    Some US experts said it would make little difference when it comes to helping people with the disorder, although others said it would bring attention to a disorder that people sometimes don't recognize. So some experts disagree WHO's plan.

    Many of us enjoy video games, but does playing our favorite game for a couple of hours every night mean we're suffering from gaming disorder? Not according to the WHO.

    The symptoms listed by the WHO include a lack of control over gaming, treating gaming more seriously than other life interests and daily activities, and continuing to play games despite the negative consequences that playing them might have.

    "The behavior pattern is enough to result in significant damage to one's personal, family, or social life." the WHO said.

    Meanwhile, Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University has carried out influential research into the cause of gaming addiction in young people." I and many others had assumed that gaming is not really a problem but is a symptom of other problems," he told NBC News. Many had thought it was simply a failure of self-control. To see if it was, Gentile's team studied a group of children who had been gaming for several years." We found that when kids became addicted, their anxiety increased … and their grades decreased," Gentile said. When kids were able to back off from gaming, their symptoms disappeared, he added.

    Gentile thinks medical organizations should pay attention to the WHO's proposal." This isn't an issue of opinion; it's an issue of science," he said." This is a major scientific and medical organization. They don't do things lightly and without reason."

    Dr Petros Levounis, chair of psychiatry at the New Jersey Medical School at Rutgers University, said that he hoped the WHO's proposal would lead to more research into obsessive (过度的) behavior among all types of people.

    "Now, there is renewed interest and excitement," he said. So some experts are in favour of WHO's plan.

    Many of you may have used Siri, a voice assistant of US tech company Apple. You only have to say "hey Siri" and it will answer to your command. However, we may be sacrificing our privacy to enjoy this convenience.

    According to a recent report by the Guardian, Siri can be accidentally triggered and start recording private conversations, such as discussions between doctors and patients. Some of these recordings are then given to workers outside the company to review.

    Apple claimed the data was used to help Siri improve, but users were not informed of this measure in the first place.

    Apple's Siri is not the only voice assistant to come under fire.

    In 2018, Alexa, a voice assistant developed by US tech company Amazon, recorded a private conversation between a couple and sent it to a stranger without their permission.

    These issues deepened concerns that tech companies are infringing users' rights of privacy.

    Many people have long feared that tech companies are listening and collecting data from private conversations, reported Forbes. Using this data, third party companies could then paint an accurate picture of users' habits and preferences in order to serve them more targeted advertisements, or even worse, sell this private data.

    Despite this risk, the popularity of voice assistant seems to be unstoppable.

    "In the near future, everything from your lighting to your air-conditioning to your refrigerator, your coffee maker, and even your toilet could be wired to a system controlled by voice," commented The Atlantic.

    Colin Horgan wrote on the blog site Medium that he believed people's daily lives will soon become a source of data.

    "The sounds of our homes, the symphony of life – laughing, crying, talking, shouting, sitting in silence – will no longer be considered memories, but data," he wrote.

    To deal with the issue, Blake Morgan, reporter for The Atlantic, believed that the answer is transparency.

    "All companies need to have messaging ready to explain to customers what they do with private data," she wrote on The Atlantic.

On an autumn afternoon, a remote sheep farm in southern Greenland is quiet. The silence is abruptly broken when dozens of sheep come thundering across the hills overlooking the farm. Walking after them are Lars Nielsen and his 37-year-old son Kunuk Nielsen.

The Nielsen family has owned and run the farm since 1972. Kunuk says the summers now are longer than when he was a child and that drought has become a problem. The fields are not so green as those in the old days. He has to buy hay (草料) from European countries.

The effects of a warming climate are obvious on the land. While he intends to struggle on, his older brother Pilu has chosen a different path.

Pilu, 40, lives in Qaqortoq in the south of Greenland -- a town of about 3,000 people. Ten years ago, he got his helicopter pilot's license and is now part owner of a small company called Sermeq Helicopters. It caters to construction and telecommunication workers and an increasing number of foreign tourists.

Pilu says he loves his family's sheep farm. But he saw that warming temperatures were making remote areas of Greenland more accessible and wanted to look for other opportunities. His company's most popular tours include a visit to Greenland's glaciers.

The warming temperatures are also affecting traditional ways of life, particularly hunting. The sea ice is changing; it's becoming less so that hunting on ice becomes more difficult. When there's no sea ice, it's difficult to use dog sledges (雪橇), and the whole culture around having dogs and dog sledges and doing traditional hunting on the ice is sort of diminishing.

Besides, many Greenlanders, like Pilu, are leaving the countryside for towns and the capital city Nuuk, where opportunities are greater. A report found that Nuuk's share of Greenland's population grew from 17.2% in 1977 to 29.2% in 2014. If there were enough houses in Nuuk, the share would even be bigger.