Where are the dolphins?

Interest in extraterrestrial life has tended to focus on a search for extrasolar planets similar to the Earth. But what of forms of intelligent life that are very different from those found on Earth? Some features of life will not be peculiar to our planet, and alien life will resemble ours in such universals. But if intelligent, non-humanoid aliens exist, where might they be? Would they wish to visit Earth and would we know if they did?     

What are the memory sources of dreaming?

Investigators since Freud have appreciated that memories of the people, places, activities and emotions of daily life are reflected in dreams but are typically so fragmented that their predictability is nil. The mechanisms that translate such memories into dream images remain largely unknown. New research targeting relationships between dreaming, memory and the hippocampus is producing a new theory to explain how, why and when we dream of waking life events.     

Where do flare ribbons stop?

The standard flare model,which was proposed based on observations and magnetohydrodynamic theory,can successfully explain many observational features of solar flares.However,this model is just a framework,with many details awaiting to be filled in, including how reconnection is triggered.In this paper,we address an unanswered question:where do flare ribbons stop?With the data analysis of the 2003 May 29 flare event,we tentatively confirmed our conjecture that flare ribbons finally stop at the intersection of separatrices(or quasi-separatrix layer in a general case)with the solar surface.Once verified,such a conjecture can be used to predict the final size and even the lifetime of solar flares.     

Welcome contributions from all over the world

Tsinghua Science and Technology (Tsinghua Sci Technol), a comprehensive academic journal sponsored byTsinghua University, is published bimonthly. This journal aims at presenting the up-to-date scientific achieve-ments with high creativity and great signif…     

Welcome contributions from all over the world

Tsinghua Science and Technology （Tsinghua Sci Technol）, a comprehensive academic journal sponsored by Tsinghua University, is published bimonthly. This journal aims at presenting the up-to-date scientific achievements with high creativity and great significance in various engineering fields and in mathematical sciences, life sciences, chemistry, physics, etc. Contributions within the above scope all over the world are welcome.     

Welcome contributions from all over the world

Tsinghua Science and Technology (Tsinghua Sci Technol), a comprehensive academic journal sponsored by Tsinghua University, is published bimonthly. This journal aims at presenting the up-to-date scientific achievements with high creativity and great significance in various engineering fields and in mathematical sciences, life sciences, chemistry, physics, etc. Contributions within the above scope all over the world are welcome. Tsinghua Sci Technol has an excellent editorial committee inclu…     

What are universities for?

Governments worldwide rightly regard universities as fundamental to the achievement of many national priorities. But it is the paper’s contention that many misunderstand their true benefit to society. Investments in universities are increasingly based on the belief that the science labs in particular of research-intensive universities can be the source of a continuous stream of people and ideas that will spawn innovative and fast growing companies to form the nexus of the knowledge-based economy. This belief is a source of misconceived policies that offer only ultimate disillusion. It is the totality of the university enterprise that is important, as the only place where that totality of ourselves and our world is brought together, and which makes it the strongest provider of the rational explanation and meaning that societies need. In research, universities create new possibilities; in teaching, they shape new people. Its graduates learn to seek the true meaning of things: to distinguish between the true and the merely seemingly true, to verify for themselves what is stable in that very unstable compound that often passes for knowledge. It is the complex, interacting whole of the university that is the source of the separate economic, social, cultural and utilitarian benefits valued by society. It needs to be understood, valued and managed as a whole. These perceptions are a direct challenge to not only to governments but to university administrators who have been either cowed or seduced into the slipshod thinking that is leading to demands that universities cannot satisfy, whilst obscuring their most important contributions. The challenge to both is to permit autonomy without oppressive accountability, and to give staff and students the freedom to think, speculate and research. These are the very conditions of the personal and collective creativity that are the sources of a university’s deepest benefits to its society.