People who work with octopuses(章鱼)or who spend a lot of time in their company describe the sense that when you look at an octopus, there is something looking back. Given this feeling as a starting point, how do you begin to explore the consciousness(意识)of an animal so unlike ourselves?

Imagining an octopus’s inner life is a hard thing to do from our human standpoint. When you picture the tips of your suckered limbs moving, what do you imagine it feels like? “The octopus’s arms are, in some ways, more like lips or tongues than hands,” says Godfrey-Smith, a professor of history and philosophy of science. “There’s a great deal of sensory information that’s coming in every time the animal does anything. That’s very different from our situation.”

Take a closer look at the octopus’s nervous system, and things get even stranger. The octopus’s arms have more autonomy than our human arms and legs do. Each has its own minibrain, giving it a degree of independence from the animal’s central brain. Our own nervous system, however, is highly centralized, with the brain the center of sensory integration, emotion, movement, behavior and other actions.

The closer you look at the octopus’s body and nervous system, the harder it becomes to grasp—or believe you are grasping—what it might be like to be an octopus. However hard it might be to do, it’s worth trying to understand whether octopuses have consciousness, and what it’s like if they do, says Godfrey-Smith. This is why the octopus is such an interesting case. Octopuses are different enough from us that a lot of our assumptions about them have to be questioned—and even our assumptions about ourselves. “By asking whether octopuses are conscious like us, we might be asking a question that doesn’t make a lot of sense because we don’t fully know what it’s like to be conscious,” says Godfrey-Smith.

High school seniors missed out on so much in 2023—no proms, no traditional graduation ceremonies. But that has not stopped some of them trying to solve the world’s biggest challenges. And Lillian Kay Petersen from Los Alamos, New Mexico, is among them.

Petersen invented a simple tool for predicting harvests early in the growing season, which could facilitate food allocation(分配) planning and offer useful resources to those working to tackle global food insecurity. She first tested her tool, which analyzed daily satellite imagery using accepted measures of vegetation health, on known domestic crop data. She then carried out experiments for countries in Africa and successfully predicted harvests with high accuracy against reported production.

Petersen won first place and the $250,000 top award in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2023, one of the oldest and most reputable science and math competitions for high school seniors in the US.

In 2014, Petersen’s family adopted her three younger brothers and sisters, all of whom suffered from malnutrition due to food insecurity in their childhood. Their struggles against the lifelong effects left a deep impression on her. After reading about a disastrous drought in Ethiopia between 2018 and 2019, she put her computer science knowledge to use. “I wanted to find a way to help aid organizations monitor crop condition as droughts evolve, to help them respond to food crises with a better time, and to help children so that they don’t face malnutrition and lifelong consequences,” she said.

While in high school, she began monitoring droughts in Africa using satellite imagery. Later, she published her first paper on the subject in a peer-reviewed journal. She has also met with the International Food Policy Research Institute to discuss the global pandemic and its effects on crop production in Africa.

China launched a Long March 3B carrier rocket on May 17 to transport a satellite into space for the country’s Beidou Navigation Satellite System, marking the first deployment (部署) of a Beidou satellite in three years.

The satellite has typical functions for a third-generation Beidou satellite — positioning, navigation and timing. Compared with previous Beidou satellites, it has some upgraded hardware and features a stronger signal, faster transmission speed and higher operational stability, said Chen Zhonggui, chief designer of Beidou’s third-generation satellites.

Despite being called a backup, the satellite is designed to start working as soon as it enters orbit. Its primary tasks are to expand the service areas of Beidou’s short-messaging function, enhance Beidou’s positioning accuracy as well as improve the network’s operational continuity and reliability, he noted.

“Before the end of this year, another two backup Beidou satellites are scheduled to be launched to further strengthen the reliability of the network,” said Wang Dong, deputy project manager of the third-generation Beidou network.

Beidou is currently China’s largest civilian satellite system and one of four global navigation networks, along with the United States’ GPS, Russia’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo.

Since 2000, a total of 60 Beidou satellites, including the first four experimental ones, have been lifted on 45 Long March 3 series rockets from Xichang. In June 2020, the final satellite to complete Beidou’s third-generation network was lifted by a Long March 3B rocket at the Xichangcenter. The following month, President Xi Jinping announced that the system had been completed and had begun providing full-scale global services.

Currently, there are 46 satellites in active service, including the latest one. And China plans to establish the next generation of the Beidou system by 2035. The new version will be “omnipresent (无处不在的), smarter and more integrated” and upon its completion, there will be Beidou service not only on land and sea, but also in the sky, outer space and deep within the oceans, according to the China Satellite Navigation Office.