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I was getting more excited as we got off the train at beautiful Grand Central Station. After tour at the Museum of Modern Art, we _______ Radio City Music Hall and the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. In one of the _______ in the area, I found a tiny boxed set of Peter Rabbit books, perfect for my _______. Was there anything like Christmas in New York? Having experienced an exciting and tiring tour, we called a _______ back to Grand Central Station.

On the way home I realized that my handbag was gone -- lost or _______. I had no idea. All the magic of this special day _______. I glumly (闷闷不乐地) pictured a jam-packed Department of Motor Vehicles and all the phone calls that I’d have to make to get my _______ cards replaced with new ones. And I’d never _______ all those precious photos of my daughters.

The days slipped by while I got rides to college and _______ going to the DMV (车管所) at such a busy time of year. Then I got an unexpected ________, a box with the return address of Radio City Music Hall. ________, I opened it and shouted in a joyful ________.

There was my old handbag, with everything ________ good inside — license, cards and photos — and one thing that hadn’t been there ________, a handwritten note, saying, “I found this handbag lying under the seat of my taxi by ________. Merry Christmas!”

Scientists in the Netherlands have trained bees to identify COVID-19 through their sense of smell, according to a press release from Wageningen University. The research was conducted on more than 150 bees in Wageningen University’s bio-veterinary research laboratory.

The scientists trained the bees by giving them a treat — a sugar-water solution (溶液) — every time they were exposed to the scent of a mink (貂) infected with COVID-19. Each time the bees were exposed to a non-infected sample, they wouldn’t get a reward. Eventually, the bees could identify an infected sample within a few seconds — and would then stick out their tongues like clockwork to collect the sugar water.

Bees aren’t the first animals to detect COVID-19 by scent. Researchers have also trained dogs to distinguish between positive and negative COVID-19 samples from human saliva (唾液) or sweat with fairly high levels of accuracy. A small German study found that dogs could identify positive COVID-19 samples 94% of the time. That’s because metabolic changes from the coronavirus make an infected person’s bodily fluids smell slightly different from those of a non-infected person. But researchers still aren’t sure whether animals are the best bet (赌注) for sniffing out COVID-19 cases outside the lab.

“No one is saying they can replace a PCR machine, but they could be very promising,” Holger Volk, a neurologist, told Nature. PCR machines are what lab technicians use to process standard COVID-19 swab tests. At the very least, certain animals could be useful for identifying COVID-19 in places or countries in which high-tech laboratory equipment is scarce or inaccessible.

Wageningen scientists are working on a prototype of a machine that could automatically train multiple bees at once. Then bees can use their skills to test for coronavirus aerosols (气溶胶) in the surrounding environment.

My generation--people born after 1990 --are accustomed to “all-in-platform” life, where we use mobile apps of different platforms to do almost everything in life.

For instance, I ordered a cup of coffee on Monday using an online delivery app. Then, I called a taxi by tapping on the app of a ride-booking service. Next, I bought some necessities on shopping platform Taobao. That done, I moved on to various other online destinations to get my daily fix of music, reading, social networking and so forth.

Platforms now play an increasingly important role in almost all aspects of day-to-day life, not just in economic and political processes. Consumption and social interaction are closely linked to platforms now.

But, I began to get confused recently. I thought I was being treated differently. My friend and I called a taxi at the same time on a ride-hailing platform (打车平台) and found that for the same destination, the prices were different. The price indicated on my phone was higher. One of the potential reasons could have been that I regularly use the ride-hailing platform and have a higher ranking while my friend doesn’t use it that often. So, the ride-hailing platform offers discounts to newbies like her, to attract and have such customers.

China’s latest efforts in regulating monopolistic (垄断的) or improper market behavior are of great significance in protecting consumers’ lawful rights.

“The essence of platform-based monopoly (垄断) is that a large number of users are gathered on only a select few platform companies, leading to uneven data gathering different platforms. But in China some platforms use their own data and traffic (流量) to expand capital in a disorderly way,” said Wang Yong, deputy director of the Institute of Economics at Tinghua University.

Data monopoly also brought another inconvenience for consumers--platforms block links to each other. For instance, link to We Chat Pay of Tencent is not available on Alibuba’s Taobao while there is no Alipay link on JD app’s payment options.

“More efforts should also be made to strike a good balance between personal information protection and interconnection between platforms. Companies are being encouraged to further develop data safety technology so that the data are available but not visible.”