China became the first country to clone a monkey using non-reproductive cells, reducing the need to keep lab monkeys and paving the way for more accurate, effective, and affordable animal tests for new drugs .

By December of 2017, Chinese scientists had created two clone macaques named "Zhong Zhong" and "Hua Hua" by nuclear transferring of somatic cells -- any cell in the organism other than reproductive cells. This was the similar technology used to create the famous clone sheep Dolly in 1996.

"Cloning a monkey using somatic cells has been a world-class challenge because it is a primate（灵长类）that shares its genetic makeup, therefore all of its complexity, with humans." Pu Muming said.

"For drug and other lab tests, scientists have to purchase monkeys from all over the world, which is costly, bad for the environment and produces inaccurate results because each monkey might have different genes, " Pu said.

"By cloning monkeys using somatic cells, we can mass produce large numbers of genetically identical（相同的）offspring in a short time, and even change their genes to suit our needs," he added. "This can save time, cut down experiment costs, and produce more accurate results, leading to more effective medicine."

"This achievement will help China lead the world research in an international science project related to neural（神经的）mapping of primate brains，," he said. However, bio labs from the United States, Japan, and European countries are also very able, and they will quickly catch up to China after the monkey cloning technology is made public, Sun added."This means we have to innovate（创新）continuously and work extra harder this year to stay ahead," he said.

If we want to find out what kind of technology people used in the past, we normally have to rely on archaeologists to find ruined buildings and parts of tools or instruments or machines. Archaeologists then try to reconstruct, sometimes with the help of computer technology, what these ancient buildings and objects must have looked like, and how they might have been made. Sometimes historians are lucky and find an ancient document with a written description of these ancient buildings and objects.

We can understand, then, why Chinese historians were so excited when they found cave paintings which show ancient science. They found these paintings in the world-renowned Mogao Grottoes of Dunhuang City, in Northwest China's Gansu Province. There are 500 man-made caves and they have survived for at least 1,600 years. Almost all of these caves have paintings on their ceilings or walls and they date from the 4th to 14th centuries. Wang Jinyu is an expert on these cave paintings (also called frescoes) and he says: “We discovered frescoes containing scientific and technological content in almost all of the caves which have frescoes.” What is remarkable about these cave paintings according to the Xinhua News Agency is that they provide evidence of "scientific and technological inventions by ancient Chinese in maths, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography, agronomy, architecture, textiles, traffic and transportation, arms and military equipment and medical sciences".

Among the discoveries experts have made are cave paintings showing ancient techniques of pottery making and wine production and paintings showing ancient weaving machines and then toothbrushes! The paintings also give some evidence of the lifestyle at the time with, for example, pictures of people boiling milk over 1,000 years ago. Experts believe that there is more evidence to be found, but even now the caves are a wonderful natural museum. If the walls and ceilings of the caves were all put together they would form a tapestry 20 kilometers long and 2 meters high!

Hollywood’s theory that machines with evil(邪恶) minds will drive armies of killer robots is just silly. The real problem relates to the possibility that artificial intelligence(AI) may become extremely good at achieving something other than what we really want. In 1960 a well-known mathematician Norbert Wiener, who founded the field of cybernetics（控制论）, put it this way: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot effectively interfere(干预), we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”

A machine with a specific purpose has another quality, one that we usually associate with living things: a wish to preserve its own existence. For the machine, this quality is not in-born, nor is it something introduced by humans; it is a logical consequence of the simple fact that the machine cannot achieve its original purpose if it is dead. So if we send out a robot with the single instruction of fetching coffee, it will have a strong desire to secure success by disabling its own off switch or even killing anyone who might interfere with its task. If we are not careful, then, we could face a kind of global chess match against very determined, super intelligent machines whose objectives conflict with our own, with the real world as the chessboard.

The possibility of entering into and losing such a match should concentrate the minds of computer scientists. Some researchers argue that we can seal the machines inside a kind of firewall, using them to answer difficult questions but never allowing them to affect the real world. Unfortunately, that plan seems unlikely to work: we have yet to invent a firewall that is secure against ordinary humans, let alone super intelligent machines.

Solving the safety problem well enough to move forward in AI seems to be possible but not easy. There are probably decades in which to plan for the arrival of super intelligent machines. But the problem should not be dismissed out of hand, as it has been by some AI researchers. Some argue that humans and machines can coexist as long as they work in teams—yet that is not possible unless machines share the goals of humans. Others say we can just “switch them off” as if super intelligent machines are too stupid to think of that possibility. Still others think that super intelligent AI will never happen. On September 11, 1933, famous physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, with confidence, “Anyone who expects a source of power in the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” However, on September 12, 1933, physicist Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced(中子诱导) nuclear chain reaction.