Earlier this year, the social media website Facebook announced that it would work with several news organizations — including The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC — to place news stories directly into users' personal Facebook webpage.  Stories published using Facebook Instant will load more quickly and keep the style of the original publisher, who will keep all the advertising income the stories earn — at least for now. The deal shows how important social media has become to news organizations, and is a clear sign of how the world of news is changing — and has been for a while.

    When Google News began in 2002, many saw it as the death of the newspaper. It had no human editor. Instead Google used, and still uses, a secret computer program that selects and displays news stories according to the reader's personal interests. More recently, Associated Press and Yahoo! have been publishing computer-written articles. Both use special software to automatically produce stories about company financial results and sports reports — areas where the quality of writing is felt to be of secondary importance to the accuracy of the data.

    Should we be worried about such developments? I think we should. One concern is that facebook, Google and other social media websites see journalism as a sideline, a way of putting people in front of advertisements. It isn't their primary function — so if it stops making them lots of money, they're likely to stop doing it.

    There's also a concern that computer-written articles are not actually journalism at all, because what a human news team produces is actually quite complex. A well-written news story puts information in context, offers a voice to each side of an argument and brings the public new knowledge.

    Though economics and speed of delivery mean readers will probably choose a computer-written story over a carefully shaped article — at least for daily news — I don't think the computers will be writing any in-depth articles for a while yet.

    Taxi-booking app Uber agreed to sell its business in China to Didi Chuxing. The two firms had been fierce competitors, but Didi Chuxing had controlled the Chinese market with an 87% share.

    Uber China launched in 2014, but it had failed to make any profit for a long time. Cheng Wei, founder and chief executive of Didi Chuxing, said the two companies had learned a great deal from each other over the past two years in China. He added that the deal would set the mobile transportation industry on a healthier path of growth at a higher level. As part of the deal, Mr. Cheng would join the board of Uber, while Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick would also join Didi's board.

    Uber's China business would own its separate branding while US-based Uber Technologies would hold about 17.5% in the combined company. Didi Chuxing is backed by Chinese Internet giants Tencent and Alibaba.

    Uber had been struggling to break into the Chinese market despite having Chinese search engine Baidu as an investor. Last February, the company admitted it was losing more than $1 billion a year in China. “Funding their Chinese dreams was becoming too expensive for Uber,” Duncan Clark, chairman of Beijing-based consultancy BDA, told the BBC. Travis Kalanick said, “As a businessman, I've learned that being successful is about listening to your head as well as following your heart.”

    The fierce competition had led both companies to spend much more on their journeys. The combination is likely to see fewer such subsidies（补贴）. “One thing to watch carefully is how quickly consumers feel the impact as subsidies are withdrawn.” Mr. Clark added.

    The deal with Didi Chuxing came just days after China had agreed to provide a legal framework for taxi-ordering apps. Both Uber and Didi welcomed the decision. The new rules took effect last November and could, among other things, forbid such platforms to operate below cost.

    While your pet fish may appear to be unaware of your presence, chances are that it knows you extremely well and can probably even identify you from a crowd of human faces!

    To test if this was accurate, some scientists decided to study archerfish（喷水鱼）. These animals don't have a sophisticated（复杂的）brain that is necessary to recognize the slight differences between human facial features.

    They began by presenting four archerfish with images of two human faces. Initially, the fish spit at both. However, they soon learned spitting water at the one selected by the researchers earned them a food treat. After that, they focused primarily on that image. The researchers then took the experiment one step further by introducing 44 other human faces to the mix.

    To the researcher's astonishment, the trained archerfish were able to recall the learned image almost 81% of the time. And this accuracy improved to 86% when the researchers made the identification even harder, by replacing the colored photos with a set of black and white images and hiding the shape of the head.

    The results of the study suggest that though having tiny brains, archerfish may have developed high visual discrimination abilities. While it is contrary to the previous theory that a sophisticated brain is necessary to recognize human faces, the researchers believe they do not recognize faces by recalling complex facial information like gender and identity, but more likely by discriminating between detailed  patterns. Even so, the fact that these archerfish could “remember” those faces demonstrates that they have an impressive memory for details that lasts much longer than the originally-thought 3 seconds!

    This is not the first time researchers have realized how “smart” fish are. Previous studies have shown that fish can recognize those fish they have “socialized” with previously, and even recall complex three-dimensional maps of their surroundings.

Are we alone in the universe? A team of scientists announced on January 6, 2015 that they had identified eight planets beyond our solar system, three or four of which orbit in their stars' "Goldilocks Zone" — the region where temperatures are not too hot or too cold for water, which is a necessary ingredient for life as we know it, to exist liquid form. This may be good news for people hoping that Earth is not the only inhabited world in the universe.

    The scientists, led by Dr. Guilermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, made the discoveries using data collected by the planet-seeking Kepler telescope.

    NASA launched Kepler in 2009. Since then, the telescope has identified more than 1,000 planets outside of our solar system. Torres and his team analyzed the data about the eight newly discovered world to determine which ones are most likely to be similar to our Earth.

    Among the new discoveries, the scientists say the planets called Kepler438b and 442b are the closest to Earth. Kepler 438b is just about 10% larger than our planet, and gets 40% more of its energy from its star than Earth receives from the Sun. Temperatures there would be about 140 degrees. Kepler 442b is about 33% larger than Earth, but receives 30% less energy from its star. That would make it a potentially chillier world than our own. Torres says it is possible for life to exist and survive in either of those temperatures, but for that to happen, these planets would need to have another key ingredient for life: a heat-trapping atmosphere like Earth's.

    While these findings add to the possibility that life exists beyond Earth, Torres cautions against drawing conclusions, “We are not claiming they are inhabited,” he says. In fact, these planets are so far away that the scientists cannot observe them directly, which can be explanation for why for now it remains unknown whether these planets contain life. But the discovery of planets in their stars' habitable zones suggests that somewhere out there, some form of alien life may have taken hold.

    If you could have a superpower, what would it be? Other than flying and communicating with someone from his mind (which, let's be honest, would probably actually be awful), breathing underwater is one of the favorites. You can hang out with Aquaman and Ursula, and when the end of the world comes and we're all living under water, you'll be fine.

    With this in mind, a student at the Royal College of Art, London has designed a 3D-printed amphibious garment called AMPHIBIO —essentially a set of gills (鳃) —for this very purpose. According to Jun Kamei, a biomimicry designer and materials scientist, it is "for a future where humankind lives in the water".

    With the world set for a global temperature increase of 3. 2℃ (5. 7℉) by 2100, rising sea levels are a very real threat to large coastal cities, potentially affecting up to 2 billion people —or 26 percent of the current global population.

    Kamei's little device uses a specially designed porous (多孔的) material that fills oxygen again in the water and releases carbon dioxide. It is inspired by water-diving insects that create their own little scuba diving set by creating a protective bubble of air around their body thanks to their water repellent (防水的) skin.

    The technology is easily 3D-printable too, which will be great when we need them together. These "gills" could replace heavy and clumsy scuba equipment, making it more similar to free diving but for longer. This could have immediate applications for underwater rescue plans —the 12 boys rescued by divers from a flooded cave in Thailand, for example, where it took weeks to work out how to get the boys and the vital breathing equipment through those narrow tunnels.

    So far, the tech has only been tested as a working prototype, not actually on humans, so the dream may have to be on hold for now. And scaling up and testing on humans is Kamei's next plan. This may sound unbelievable, but Kamei insists he has a much more optimistic vision of the future.

    There was an earthquake this morning. I was working in front of my computer when it hit the city. The quake started with a sudden loud noise. I thought that something heavy in a neighbor's house probably had fallen. However, the walls and the floor began to shake. I finally realized it was an earthquake.

    My son Zac, a sixteen­year­old boy, was sleeping with his door locked. Being sixteen, he can sleep through any kind of noise. "Zac!" I shouted. "Are you OK?" But nobody replied. I was a little worried. I couldn't imagine that someone was able to get such a deep sleep. The house was dancing. There were waves in the swimming pool. I was afraid the house would come down. "Zac!" I yelled, knocking on his door with an open palm (手掌). "Zac! Wake up! It's an earthquake! We need to get out!"

    My son finally emerged in his underpants. We looked around the room. I knew that we should hide under a table to stop things from falling on us and stay away from glass. Unfortunately, none of our furniture was designed for hiding under. "Should we go into the garden?" Zac asked. "No, trees could fall on us!" I said. Actually, Zac had done earthquake drills (训练) at school. He must have been told to hide under a desk and cover his head. But we had nothing to cover our heads in the house.

    Luckily, before we took any action, the windows stopped moving and the pool calmed down. Everything went back to normal soon. But both my son and I knew what we should do, because we knew if there had been a really big earthquake this morning, we couldn't have escaped from it.