①Facial-recognition（人脸识别）cameras are, everywhere—even in your smartphone. Many people use this technology to unlock（解锁） their phones, open doors, or make quick payments. But during the pandemic（疫情）, can it still work when people put on masks?   

② The answer is no. Scientists are trying to solve this problem. For example, Engineering & Technology（E&T）magazine reports that Hanwang, a tech company in Beijing, has made a new system（系统）. It can recognize 95 percent of people when they wear masks（口罩）.

③ What’s the secret? It’s all about your eyes.

④ Marios Savides from Carnegie Mellon University, US, studies facial recognition. As we get older, he says our faces change shape. But the area around our eyes doesn’t. It stays the same—even if we put on weight. As long as there are enough data（数据）from the area of our eyes, the cameras can recognize us.

⑤ Tech 5 is another facial-recognition company. The Swiss company’s product scans（扫描）the shape of your face. It also scans your iris（虹膜）, which is the colored part of your eyes. Tech 5 hopes to leave out all of the face below the nose.

⑥ This kind of software（软件） is more important than just unlocking your phone. “It can search for criminals（罪犯） and terrorists even when they wear masks, “said Huang Lei from Hanwang. Hanwang’s technology is used by Chinese police in places like subway stations and airports. Similar technology is used by the United States Air Force.

⑦ Huang pointed out one big weakness: it fails when people wear both a mask and sunglasses. “In this situation, all of the key facial information is lost,” Lei said to E&T.

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For people, it’s not surprising that we can open a door, lift a heavy box and control ourselves while walking in the snow. But can a robot do these? Well, Google’s new robot, Atlas, can not only do these things, but it can stand up if it falls down. Although the robot may be slow and clumsy, it was created mainly to work in dangerous places for humans.

Now, robots are much smarter than you might imagine. On March 9 this year, AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence (人工智能) program made by Google’s DeepMind, challenged top professional Go player Lee Sedol from South Korea. And AlphaGo beat Lee at last.

AI is when computers or computer software is able to have intelligent behavior, such as thinking or acting like a human. In our daily life, we already use AI in many ways, such as Apple’s Siri and search engines like Baidu and Google.

Some people may worry whether computers are now smart enough to beat us at everything. But experts say that is not the case. Real life problems can be more difficult than the Go game. For example, humans can watch a person throw down a cup of coffee and know that the result will be a mess on the floor. A computer program would have to know the size of the cup, the height of the cup from the floor and many other things to find out the result. But we never know what will happen in the future.

Do you want to have a birthday party 140 kilometers above the ground, or have a dance weightlessly (失重地) with your friends? Just wait for a few years.

A new business space company in China started to develop a kind of new spaceship in 2017. People with enough money may be able to go on space journeys about ten years later.

Han Qingping, the president of China Rocket Corporation (公司), said the company would develop a kind of spaceship that can take three to five travelers. It can reach a height of 80 km above the ground. The height is right in the top part of the mesosphere (中间层), higher than planes and balloons can travel, but just below the height where satellites (卫星) fly. There travelers will have a new way to watch the mother planet and they can experience weightlessness as well.

Tang Yagang, a head of CALT’s space activity department (部门), said China Rocket Corporation will offer four types of rockets to the market. They can meet different humans’ activities. Now scientists are working hard to make it true and it is certainly that people’s life will be more colorful in the future.