As a senior school graduate, with COVID-19 cases rising and lockdown hitting, I’ve had plenty of concerns. Losing my graduation ceremony was one of them. But being unable to lend a hand to my community at such a terrible time was the greatest concern. Except for wearing my mask, following the health officials’ guidelines, and assisting seniors to get their groceries, there wasn’t anything more I could do.

Then it struck me. Solving COVID-19 relied only on individual steps and the goodwill of human awareness. But the next challenge we have to deal with ahead is climate change known as the silent pandemic without a vaccine. So all I could think of was: Why don’t we do the same for it, and try to deal with global warming through our everyday activities?

I have decided to take a gap year and created an app to help people reduce carbon emissions from their shopping and transport activities. Even though I’d never written any program before, my will was greater than any excuse I could think of. The first version was just a one-screen app. Through the lockdown, I’ve had only 70 people to test the concept with and barely created any impact. Plus, the process of leading a social organization seemed like a small boat in a rough sea to me. But instead of giving up, I chose to fill the gap. And the coolest thing was that the more I was learning, the more people got interested in the idea. Through every leadership program, I built a stronger user community where each person was equally passionate and brave to make a change. Their enthusiasm was my greatest fuel for innovation.

Today, through the app, over 4,000 people reduced more than 150,000 kg carbon emissions. The app turned into an international movement. I proved to myself that miracles really happen when you dare to make a change.

Scientists in Rome have unveiled the first bionic(仿生的) hand with a sense of touch that can be worn outside a laboratory. The recipient, Almerina Mascarello, who lost her left hand in an accident nearly 25 years ago, said “It’s almost like it is back again”.

In 2014 the same international team produced the world’s first feeling bionic hand. But the sensory and computer equipment it was linked to was too large to leave the laboratory. Now the technology is small enough to fit in a backpack, making it portable.

The prosthetic hand (假肢) has sensors that detect information about whether an object is soft or hard. These messages are linked to a computer in a backpack that converts these signals into a language the brain will understand. The information is relayed to Almerina’s brain via tiny electrodes(电极) implanted in nerves in the upper arm. In tests Almerina - who was blindfolded - was able to tell whether the object she was picking up was hard or soft.

Professor Silvestro Micera, a neuroengineer at EPFL in Lausanne and Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa told me, “We are going more and more in the direction of science fiction movies like Luke Skywalker's bionic hand in Star Wars - a fully controlled, fully natural, sensorised prosthesis, identical to the human hand.” A robotic prosthesis better than the human hand is still a long way off, but the team believe it might eventually be a reality.

Almerina was able to keep the bionic hand for six months, but it has now been removed, as it is still a prototype. The scientific team say they hope to miniaturise（使小型化）the technology even further so that a sensory bionic hand can be commercialised. Almerina said that when the bionic hand is perfected, she would like it back for good.

Creativity is the ability to generate novel, useful ideas and innovation is the successful application of those ideas. With this in mind, it is easy to think that technology has made us more creative; the digital revolution has clearly produced a large number of innovative products and services.

However, it would be naive to imply that these activities are truly indicative of creativity, even if quantity does eventually lead to quality. For instance, the probability of taking a great photograph does increase when there are millions of Instagram pictures taken every day, and when 500 million tweets are generated daily, it is highly probable that one or two will be funny.

Yet, much of the content people generate is unimportant and unoriginal. Before the Internet it would have stayed in the minds of their authors, but our thoughts can now be broadcasted to the world as if they were worthy creations. The only thing that appears to have increased, rather greatly, is people’s self-perceived creativity. From the use of emoji instead of words, to the use of predetermined functions to express our views — liking, sharing and disliking, these new forms human interaction promote efficient but lazy behaviors so that we can devote more time to consuming more content.

Although user-generated content has been growing rapidly in the past decade, much of it is noise and the result is that valuable and trustworthy information is now harder to find. In an age of information glut, everything is freely available but knowledge is hard to gain. This paradox highlights the importance of the “less is more” philosophy of life.

Curiosity evolved to make sense of the world and help us master our environments. Our ancestors must have benefited from taking on as much information from their surroundings as they could paying attention to everything and turning into the learning machine. Yet in an age of information glut, the curious mind is forced to ignore as much of the available data as it can, in order to consume only what is valuable.