From our listeners: can AI understand beauty?

Beijing is crawling with a problem you cannot ignore. American white moth caterpillars are raining down from trees, blanketing sidewalks, and turning a simple walk into something close to a nightmare. The city's answer sounds like science fiction. Release hundreds of millions of parasitic wasps and let them do the work. Why has this year's infestation exploded and can this tiny-winged counterattack can actually work? On the show: Steve, Fei Fei & Yushan

The fishing boats are back and the ports are buzzing with fresh seafood heading to market. What you will not see on your dinner plate is the millions of tonnes of aquatic food lost or wasted every year. On September 29, the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, we follow the catch from ocean to table and ask how much of the fish we pull from the sea never actually makes it to our forks. On the show: Steve, Fei Fei & Yushan

Have you ever cried at a song whose words you never understood? That wordless pull toward beauty feels deeply human, yet AI now writes poetry, scores films, and paints portraits that move people to tears. So does it truly feel beauty, or simply mimic everything we've always called beautiful? On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun

What if the job you'll hold next doesn't exist on any official list yet? In China, that list just grew to include robot trainers, sustainability planners, and even incense-making artisans. Work you never knew existed is now being formally recognized as a legitimate career. The line between a passion project and a profession is thinner than it looks. On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun

There is something comforting about knowing the moon on September 25th is the same one that has watched over this festival for generations. It will shine down on family dinners and quiet apartments, on people coming home and people who cannot. Life moves, cities change, and we scatter further from where we started, but the moon keeps showing up. So what still makes a Mid-Autumn celebration feel like home, even when home looks different now? On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun

Living on campus has long been a standard part of university life in China, but that is now starting to change. Instead of staying within campus walls, many students are moving into residential buildings, as universities across the country buy or lease existing apartments and convert them into student dorms. For the students, it means perks like balconies and round the clock hot water. For the people already living in those neighborhoods, it is a different story, and the feelings are mixed. So what actually happens when a wave of university students moves in next door? On the show: Fei Fei, Steve & Yushan

In Shanghai this week, the WorldSkills Competition has brought together around 1,400 young competitors from 68 countries. They are repairing cars, programming drones, and working with a level of precision that comes down to half a millimeter. It is the biggest celebration of vocational skills on the planet, and the energy is electric. On the show: Fei Fei, Steve & Yushan

Deep in the Italian Alps lies a course so punishing that it has broken some of the world's best athletes. This year, it was conquered by Zhao Jiaju, a Chinese runner who once delivered takeout for a living. A year earlier, the same mountains handed him his worst defeat. This time, he did not simply finish the race. He rewrote the record book and became the first non-European ever to win. On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun

China is pushing harder to remove phones from classrooms, and a new Chongqing regulation marks a notable escalation. Schools there can now ban smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches, but this measure sits inside a juvenile crime prevention law rather than an education policy. That raises difficult questions about the link between screen habits and criminal behavior, and whether real evidence justifies the connection. On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun

Every text you send, every search you run, every question you ask an AI passes through the same quiet piece of software beneath your fingertips, and it is watching all of it. In 2026, China's biggest tech companies are fighting to control that software, and the stakes go far beyond convenience. The battle to reinvent the keyboard may be the fiercest front in the AI competition, hiding in the one place nobody thinks to look. On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun