The three astronauts who completed China's first spacewalk mission are scheduled to visit Macao today.

Zhai Zhigang, the first Chinese astronaut who conducted a spacewalk, and fellow astronauts Liu Boming and Jing Haipeng, will attend a session on Tuesday where they will speak with Macau students about their adventures in space.

The three astronauts are also scheduled to attend a welcoming performance on Tuesday evening as well as meet the press before leaving Macau on Wednesday.

The delegation, to be led by the Deputy Chief Commander of the Shenzhou VII Mission, Zhang Jianqi, is visiting Macao at the invitation of the special administrative region. They have just concluded a four-day visit to Hong Kong.

Zhang says he hopes astronauts from Hong Kong or Macao will some day participate in the mainland's space missions.

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The world's longest high-speed rail line, connecting Beijing and Shanghai, is nearing completion.

The Ministry of Railways spokesman Wang Yongping said yesterday that 91 percent of the track length, or 1,203 kilometres, has been completed.

Remaining major tasks to be completed include building bridges over the Huaihe and Yangtze rivers and the main terminal in Shanghai. More than 110,000 workers are busy with the remainder of the project.

Trains will take less than five hours to make the run, which is now at least 11 hours.

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Researchers have concluded that happiness is contagious.

The same team that demonstrated obesity and smoking spread in networks has shown that the more happy people you know, the more likely you are yourself to be happy.

They reported in the British Medical Journal that getting connected to happy people improves a person's own happiness. "Each additional happy person makes you happier."

Christakis and James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, have been using data from 4,700 children of volunteers in the Framingham Heart Study, a giant health study begun in Framingham, Massachusetts in 1948.

They have been analyzing a trove of facts from tracking sheets dating back to 1971, following births, marriages, death, and divorces. Volunteers also listed contact information for their closest friends, co-workers, and neighbours.

They assessed happiness using a simple, four-question test--"People are asked how often during the past week, one, I enjoyed life, two, I was happy, three, I felt hopeful about the future, and four, I felt that I was just as good as other people."

The 60 percent of people who scored highly on all four questions were rated as happy, while the rest were designated unhappy.

These researchers added that people with the most social connections -- friends, spouses, neighbours, relatives -- were also the happiest.