Pinxian Wang: no place for a 'gold rush' in the exploration of the deep sea.

Prof. Pinxian Wang () of Tongji University, born in 1936, is one of the leading deep-sea scientists in China. As the first co-chief scientist of Chinese nationality in the international Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), he co-led ODP Leg 184 in 1999; and in 2018, at 82 years old, he dived to a depth of 1400 meters in the South China Sea (SCS) in China's manned submersible 'Deep Sea Warrior'. In recent years, he has also become a star of science popularization in China-he has more than 1.7 million followers on China's video-sharing platform bilibili, and his popular science book Deep Sea in Simple Words is a best seller. In September 2022, Prof. Wang was interviewed by NSR's Associate Editor-in-Chief, Zhonghe Zhou. In this interview, Prof. Wang summarized his six-decade-long scientific career, talked about the past and future of China's deep-sea research efforts, and explained his opinion on how to promote scientific culture in China.

John Hopcroft's views on China's education.

Professor John Hopcroft at Cornell University is a Turing Prize winner (1986) and an educator with more than 55 years of teaching experience. For the past 10 years, Hopcroft has been coming to China to give courses to undergraduate students at Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) and has helped SJTU to improve the quality of computer-science education. He also chairs the Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies at Peking University (PKU), the Turing Class at PKU and the Hopcroft Center at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in Wuhan, and is engaged in many other projects aiming to upgrade China's computer-science undergraduate education. Recently, NSR talked with Professor Hopcroft to learn his views on education in China.

Pas de deux of electricity and magnetism: an interview with Sang-Wook Cheong.

Materials can be ferroelectric, having a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reversed by an external electric field, or they can be ferromagnetic, exhibiting spontaneous magnetization that is switchable by an applied magnetic field. However, until the 1960s, scientists did not expect that these two ferroic properties could co-exist in a single material. Today, materials exhibiting more than one of the primary ferroic properties are called multiferroics. Here, the primary ferroic properties can be ferroelectricity, ferromagnetism, antiferromagnetism, ferroelasticity, ferrotoroidicity or others. Basically, the multiferroic effect originates from the simultaneous breaking of space inversion and time-reversal symmetries. Multiferroics can be imagined as a pas de deux of electricity and magnetism. Recently, National Science Review interviewed Professor Sang-Wook Cheong from Rutgers University, who is one of the pioneering scientists in this field. Cheong talked about the multiferroics field, which has been fast developing since the early 2000s. His introductions and opinions on diverse multiferroic materials and potential multiferroic devices, as well as future research directions, may provide a useful resource for researchers both inside and outside the multiferroic research field.