Before the discovery of DNA information in the 1980s, fingerprint (指纹) science was the easiest way to solve serious crimes. It’s believed that each one of us has our own fingerprints. But did you know that our fingerprints could show a lot about us?

According to the expert, fingerprints can show lifestyle and environment, eating habits, possible medical problems and even the job of a person.

So how can we work all this out from just a simple fingerprint? Well, a fingerprint is formed when a finger touches a surface. Most fingerprints can’t be seen to the eye and require a chemical development process in order to make them shown.

Besides, its use could be much wider. For example, it may be helpful in the future to doctors treating their patients. A fingerprint exam may also tell a doctor whether a patient is properly taking medicine. In the treatment of some serious illnesses, talking proper medicine is important.

In the future, fingerprint science can be used by the police and help doctors keep us in the best possible health.

You and I can tell one face from another, but can computers do the same with few mistakes? At an earlier time, many people thought it was impossible, but now, the development of technology has made it come true.

New technology like facial recognition (脸部识别) technology helps to make our lives better and more convenient in many ways. People can easily come into their office buildings and check e-mails by using it. It can also help the police to find missing kids and bad people by sending the pictures taken from video cameras on the streets to the facial recognition system. More and more shoppers use their e-wallets with the new technology to pay for things they buy in the shopping malls and many kinds of stores.

In the fall of 2017, Apple even used this technology to open the smart-phone in no more than one second. However, what is facial recognition technology and how does the system make it?

First, facial recognition technology checks the space between eyes, the eye color, the ear size and the lip thickness. Then the system makes a record of your face and saves it in the database (数据库). That is to say, if you want to get the right to go into some places or to do something, you just look at the camera and let your picture run through the database.

Once the system checks your face and finds that it is correct, you can then get the right to go into the places or to do something.

However, is there any way to fool the facial recognition system? The answer is yes. Although it is an amazing technology, it sometimes doesn’t work. The following are some examples.

In the Three-Body Problem books, Trisolarans, a type of alien (外星人), can dehydrate (脱水) their bodies. Then they can live through terrible environments and come back to life again hundreds of years later. Is it possible that humans could be like that as well?

Scientists have now made a new discovery by studying water bears. These organisms (微生物) can live without water for a long time.

When water bears find themselves somewhere without water, they go into a form. In this form, there are no signs of life. Deep freezing, volcanic fire, the dark space… these tiny water bears just sleep it off and wake up again when it’s safe.

But how do these little eight-legged water bears live without water? Scientists are looking for the answer now. As water leaves a cell (细胞), some kind of protein (蛋白质) must help the cell keep its strength to avoid breaking apart. Now scientists have found proteins are special to water bears. The proteins protect their cells against dehydration.

Scientists also put those proteins into human cells. They found these proteins can strengthen the human cell so that it won’t become smaller in size when losing water.

With experiments using human cells showing successful results, Trisolarans may come to be a reality some day.