What is your favourite colour? Do you like yellow, orange, red? 【小题1】

Do you prefer greys and blues?Then you are probably quiet, shy, and you would rather follow than lead. You tend to be pessimist. At least, this is what psychologists tell us, and they should know, because they have been seriously studying the meaning of colour preference, as well as the effect that colours have on human beings. 【小题2】 If you happen to love brown, you did so, as soon as you opened your eyes, or at least as soon as you could see clearly.

【小题3】 A yellow room makes most people feel more cheerful and more relaxed than a dark green one; and a red dress brings warmth and cheer to the saddest winter day.     【小题4】 A black bridge over the Thames River, near London, used to be the scene of more suicides than any other bridge in the area-until it was repainted green. The number of suicide attempts immediately fell sharply. Perhaps it would have fallen even more if the bridge had been done in pink or baby blue.

【小题5】 It is an established fact that factory workers work better, harder, and have fewer accidents when their machines are painted orange rather than black or grey.

Surrounding Science

A new Science Museum app explores common objects in the world around you. If you’ve played the mobile game Pokémon Go, you’ll know that its monsters can be found wherever you walk. Now the technology behind that game is being used for a new app from the Science Museum.

It’s called Wonderlab AR and is free to download from the app stores on Apple and Android mobile phones. The aim is to encourage people to get outside and learn about the science in our everyday environment—from traffic lights and electric car charging points to cashpoints, telephones and even toilets. Instead of catching monsters, in this game you’re looking for “discoveries” (as the app calls them) from different fields of science: including electricity, forces, light, maths and sound. The app uses augmented-reality (AR) technology from a company called Niantic, which is best known as the developer of Pokémon Go.

That’s why Wonderlab AR looks quite a lot like that game, showing you a map of the “discoveries” in your current location in the real world. You’ll see them on the map but to collect them, you have to walk to their real-world location. Although the Science Museum is in London, the app works anywhere in the country and there are lots of things to discover near you.

Alongside the app, there is also a new website from the Science Museum called Wonderlab+ (tinyurl. com/TWJ-Wonderlab). This site is for young people aged seven to 15 years old and is a mixture of fun maths and science hands-on activities, including YouTube videos, online quizzes, questions and games.

Both the app and website are based on the Wonderlab galleries that people can visit at the Science Museum in London and the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England. The app and website allow people who live in other parts of the UK to learn more about the science of everyday objects and experience the exhibitions.

One of the many difficulties to humans freely exploring and inhabiting (居住) Mars is the planet's lack of oxygen. Luckily NASA's Perseverance Rover (“毅力”号火星探测器)can help. Using an instrument called MOXIE (short for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utillzation Experiment, the rover successfully took carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and turned it into oxygen. NASA said it plans to conduct more MOXIE tests.

MOXIE ran its first test for roughly an hour, producing just under six grams of oxygen. That's enough to keep an astronaut going for about 10 minutes. It won't keep someone alive for long, but it's a key step forward in exploring Mars. Not only could that oxygen be used to allow people to breathe, but it would also lighten the load for return missions to Earth, or for trips to other parts of the solar system. Rockets need oxygen to burn fuel during liftoff. Being able to create it on Mars would mean spacecraft can bring less of it from Earth, significantly cutting down their weight. Less weight means less overall fuel needed to launch rockets.

Oxygen is the heavier part of rocket fuel. If NASA wanted to get four astronauts of Mars, the spacecraft would need 27.5 tons of oxygen to do it Keeping those four breathing for a year would require about one ton. At the rate MOXIE is going, producing 27.5 tons would take more than 475 years. But future devices (设备) could be larger and more efficient than the 38-pound MOXIE. One day, we will come up with a bigger plan for humans when we finally send them there to make enough oxygen.