Confessions of an annoying Mosquito

If you’re reading my confessions (自白), congratulations! You’ll have a safe and healthy summer.

We love when you work up a sweat. It’s really the carbon dioxide you breathe out that makes us beeline to ward you, not the fragrance of your “sweet blood.”

Love beer? So do some of us. They can tell when you’ve been drinking because your skin chemistry changes, and it attracts them

Pregnant? Yum. If you’re having a baby, you emit more carbon dioxide and your belly has a higher temperature, drawing some of us right to you. Sorry, baby.

Hate getting bitten up? Blame the ladies. Males do not eat human blood: They get all their nutrition from plants. After we have a blood meal, we can lay anywhere from 100 to 400 eggs

Smelly feet are simply delicious. Scientists have shown we find your toes ten times more inviting than Limburger cheese.

If your home’s landscaping is well tended, we won’t like it as much. We like to hang out in thick, overgrown vegetation. The darker and more damp, the better. And puddles (水沟) of smelly water is where we like to lay our eggs.

Got those CO₂-emitting traps in your yard? Great! You may think you’re outsmarting us with these devices, which emit carbon dioxide to lure (引诱) us into a trap. But they may attract more of us than they are able to trap, increasing our presence in your yard.

When it comes to West Nile, end-of-summer bites may do more harm. It’s simple logic: We bite birds with West Nile virus; then we bite humans and spread it. By summer’s end, we’ve had more chances to bite infected birds.

When I was young, my dad would always play music in the house. I’d dance to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Whenever he played Tritsch-Tratsch Polka, I’d grab my skipping ropes and skip to the beat. I’d request Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata when I was getting ready for bed. Listening to classical music was part of my daily routine. I eventually learned how to play the piano.

After I had my own daughter, I was excited to introduce her to classical music. However, this excitement soon led to disappointment as no matter what piece I chose, she would not listen.

Then one day in October, everything changed. My daughter came home and announced, “I want to dress up as a bumblebee (大黄蜂) for Halloween. Can you make me a costume, Mom?” Of course, I agreed to sew her a bumblebee costume. But at the same time, the bumblebee gave me an idea.

I worked all week on the costume. On Halloween night, my daughter put the costume on and looked in the mirror. Her eyes lit up.

She began making buzzing noises (嗡嗡声)— and I was ready. “Can you fly like a bumblebee?” I asked. As she began to buzz around the room, I quickly started playing Flight of the Bumblebee.

As the fast-paced violin music began, my daughter buzzed around to the music. She never stopped moving.

When the music came to its final bars, my daughter shouted, “Play it again, Mom!” So I played it again.

Since that night, classical music has become more prevalent (普遍的) in our household. Eventually, she learned how to play the violin and guitar.

I still have that costume stored away in a special box. I hope to pass it on to my grandchildren one day and see what happens.

In online meetings, it’s easy to keep people from talking over each other. Someone just hits the mute (静音) button. But for the most part, this ability doesn’t translate easily to recording in-person meetings. In a cafe, there are no buttons to silence the table beside you.

The ability to locate and manage sound —separating one person talking from a specific location in a crowded room, for example — has challenged researchers, especially without the help of cameras.

A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has developed a shape-changing smart speaker, which can divide rooms into speech areas and track the position s of individual speakers. With the help of the team’s deep-learning AI model, the system lets users mute certain areas or separate simultaneous (同时的) conversations, even if two people have similar voices. In a room meeting, such a system might be used instead of a central microphone, allowing better control of in-room sound.

“If I close my eyes and there are10 people talking in a room, I have no idea who’s saying what and where they are in the room exactly. That’s very intractable for the human brain to process. Until now, it’s also been hard for technology,” said co-lead author Malek Itani. “For the first time, we’re able to track the positions of different people talking in a room and separate their speech.” Early research has required using overhead cameras, projectors or special surfaces. The new system is the first to use only sound.

Instead of processing the sound in the cloud, as most smart speakers do, the new system processes all the sound locally. And even though some people’s first thoughts may be about observation, the system can be used for the opposite, the team says.

“It can actually benefit privacy, beyond what current smart speakers allow,” Itani said. “I can say, ‘Don’t record anything around my desk,’ and our system will create a bubble 3 feet around me. Nothing in this bubble would be recorded.”