【推荐3】A computer programme can identify breast cancer from routine scans with greater accuracy than human experts. Researchers said they hoped this could prove a breakthrough in the fight against the global killer.

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in women all over the world, with more than 2 million new diagnoses last year alone. Whether breast cancer is severe is closely related to the time of diagnosis. Therefore, the regular examination is vital in detecting the earliest signs of the disease in patients who show no obvious symptoms.

In Britain, women over 50 are advised to get a mammogram(乳房X光检查) every three years, the results of which are interpreted by two independent experts in order to reduce errors in diagnosis. But interpreting the scans leaves room for error, and a small percentage of all mammograms either return a false positive—misdiagnosing a healthy patient as having cancer or false negative—missing the disease as it spreads.

Now researchers at Google Health have trained an artificial intelligence model to detect cancer in breast scans from thousands of women in Britain and the United States. The images had already been reviewed by doctors in real life but unlike in a clinical setting, the machine had no patient history to inform its diagnoses.

The team found that their AI model could predict breast cancer from the scans with a similar accuracy level to expert radiographers, who are trained to take X-rays. Further, the AI showed a reduction in the percentage of cases where cancer was incorrectly identified—5.7 percent in the US and 1.2 percent in Britain, respectively. It also reduced the percentage of missed diagnoses by 9.4 percent among US patients and by 2.7 percent in Britain.

“The earlier you identify a breast cancer, the better it is for the patient.” Dominic King, UK leading scientist at Google Health, told AFP. “We think about this technology in a way that supports and enables an expert, or a patient ultimately, to get the best outcome from whatever diagnostics(诊断法) they’ve had.”

【推荐1】Fire Capt Kevin Lloyd arrived at the scene of a car accident in West Point, Utah, north of Salt Lake City. A pregnant woman and her screaming 2-year-old daughter were trapped in the car.

While his partner, Allen Hadley, was tending to the driver,Lloyd couldn’t get the frightened girl to calm down. He saw she was holding several bottles of nail polish, and then he had a better idea. He asked her if she wanted to paint his nails. Soon her eyes lit up. At the same time, Hadley showed up to check on the scene.

Lloyd had calmed her down and was in the process of getting his fingers painted. Then Hadley just put his hand in there. The girl began to color his nails pink. By this time, she was not only calm, but she was also happy.

The girl’s mother was not injured. She thanked them for helping her daughter feel better, and they all chuckled, looking at the nails, and took some photos.

The firefighters brought the photos back to the headquarters and showed them around. The department put them up on the social media, and thousands of people responded, with many thanking the firefighters for going out of their way to calm down a frightened girl.

Fire Chief Mark Becraft said he had been surprised at all the attention. He said he was proud of his firefighters, and added that he had known members of the department who had done many things that weren’t part of the job.

After the fact, Lloyd and Hadley had a small matter to tend to: the layers of polish on their nails. They bought a bottle of nail polish remover and used almost all of it.

【推荐2】The pupils of Grangetown High have been busy getting to know their newest and tallest classmate—a 7­meter­tall giraffe outside their school.

The giraffe is a huge sculpture (雕像). The school’s headmaster noticed it in an artist’s garden as he drove past one day, and thought it would be perfect for his school.“I knew everyone would love it,” he said,“Because our basketball team is known as the Grangetown Giraffes, and they wear giraffes on their shirts. So I asked them to write to the artist, asking how much it would cost to buy the giraffe. He was very kind and got it ready to deliver (递送) in six weeks—all for nothing! It was expected to arrive one Sunday morning, so that the pupils would see it when they got to school on Monday at that time they had no idea that we were getting it.”

The artist, Tom Bennett was a university professor of chemistry before he retired in 2012 and only took up metalwork a couple of years ago.“I’ve always drawn pictures,” he said.“I can even remember doing it on my first day at school—I drew a horse. I wanted it to be the best horse picture ever, but I don’t think I succeeded.”Tom’s first metalwork was a bicycle on which he and his wife could go cycling together.“It was the most uncomfortable bike ever created,” he said, “So I gave up making bicycles and went into sculpture instead.”

Meanwhile the pupils at Grangetown High are very happy with their new classmate.“We’re going to hold a competition to give it a proper name,” said one girl. “Everyone likes the expression on its face, so perhaps that will give us some ideas.”

【推荐1】As a person born with impaired eyesight, Cai Dongyue usually stays at home as he has to rely on the help of friends and family members to go outside.

Over the past year, the 76-year-old from Pudong district, Shanghai, has spent far more time outside thanks to a volunteer service launched by the Disabled Persons’ Federation in Pudong New Area in December 2017.

The service allows the blind and visually impaired to make a call with volunteers through an app called Pudong Sunshine World. Working like an online car-hailing app, the service enables users to order volunteer help through the app, reserving a time and location.

Yao Huiqian, deputy researcherat the new area federation, said the app is the only official online platform designed to meet the daily demands of people with sight drsabihty in Shanghai.

Over 200 people with visual disabilities have registered for the service, and the platform has received 950 orders since December 2017. The project was recognized as that voluntary project in Pudong New Area in 2018.

On the app, over 1, 000 volunteers, including university students and retirees, have registered to provide service in their spare time in Pudong New Area.

To guarantee users’ safety, volunteers go through a fairly strict screening process and get trained at schools for the blind before starting the work. The app also records the route of every order and users can comment on the service quality.

“We hope to extend the service to help all disabled people in Pudong New Area in the near future, and we may promote the idea to the whole city or the nation if everything works well,” Yao said.

Shen Liang, director of the Pudong Sunshine World service center, said the main challenge is to perfectly match the location and availability of volunteers with the requests of the disabled.

“We expect more people to join our team to care for the disabled,” he said.

【推荐2】Salad plants have already been grown in old shelters and tunnels. Urban farming is a regular topic of interest at places like the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, where leaders consider whether the world's food system, blamed for causing both obesity and malnutrition, can be fixed. There are already plenty of urban farming projects around the world, particularly in the US, Japan and the Netherlands, from urban fish and plant farms to vertical farming.

“It's becoming an expanding industry,” said Richard Ballard, one of the founders of the farm Growing Underground. “There're several other businesses starting up in London in containers, and there are other vertical farms around the country now.”

Growing Underground is not a standard farm. The rows of crops could be in almost any tunnel, but these plants are 100 feet below Clapham High Street and show that urban agriculture is, in some cases at least, not a fad. The underground farm has occupied a part of the Second World War air-raid shelters for nearly five years, and Ballard is planning to expand into the rest of the space later this year.

Growing Underground supplies herb and salad mixes to grocery shops, supermarkets and restaurants. Being in London creates an advantage, Ballard says, as they can harvest and deliver in an hour.

He adds other advantages. Being underground means temperatures never go below 15℃ surface greenhouses need to be heated. They can do more harvests: 60 crops a year, compared with about seven in a traditional farm. Electricity to power the lights is a major cost, but the company believes renewable energy will become cheaper.

Similar British companies include the Jones Food Company in Lincolnshire, while in the US AeroFarms has several projects in New Jersey, and Edenworks in Brooklyn.

【推荐3】For most kids, back-to-school time is usually bitter-sweet. The bitter part is saying goodbye to carefree, unscheduled summer days. The sweet part is saying hello to a new school year and school friends.

This exciting time is filled with smells of new books, paper and pencils. Children might wear a new set of clothes. And, of course, there are the first-day-of-school pictures that parents share with family and friends.

However, going back to school can also be a stressful time for children and families. Every kid must make the transition from easy summer life to routines, schedules and homework. Families will have financial concerns. Parents often need to pay school fees or to buy new school clothes, sports equipment, musical instruments and school supplies.

Back-to-school stress is different for different ages. Younger children may feel scared to leave their families. Making new friends and dealing with bullying can also cause stress for them. Older students may be stressed about their appearances, grades and getting into a good college.

However, parents, teachers and children can all help to make the transition back to school easier. Mary Anne Aidala, an award-winning teacher, advises parents to focus on the basics — let kids get enough sleep, eat healthy foods, and turn off electronics before bedtime.

Lori Bambina has been a teacher for 22 years. She teaches first grade in NY now. According to her, routines and knowing what a teacher wants in the classroom help to reduce stress in kids. So, she focuses on the class routine during the start of the new school year. “Well, for the students, I have my classroom set up with a very clear system. So, I will introduce the system. Then I will revisit the system because at this young age they enjoy routines. And that routine is very comforting and will not cause them stress if they know exactly where things are located and what type of behavior is expected of them.”

【推荐1】More than a billion people around the world have smart phones, almost all of which come with some kind of navigation（导航） app such as Apple Maps or Amap. This raises the age﹣old question we meet with any technology： What abilities is our brain losing to these apps？ But also, importantly： What abilities are we gaining？

Talking with people who are good at finding their way around or good at using paper maps, I often hear a lot of annoyance with digital maps. North/south direction gets messed up, and you can see only a small section at a time. I can really understand that it may be quite disturbing for the already skilled to be limited to a small phone screen.

But consider what digital navigation aids have meant for someone like me. Although being a frequent traveler, I'm so terrible at finding my way that I still use Apple Maps almost every day in the small town where I have lived for many years.

In many developed nations, street names and house numbers can be meaningful, and instructions such as "go north for three blocks and ---then west" make sense to those familiar with these rules. In Istanbul, however, where I grew up none of those hold true. For one thing, the locals seldom use street names. Besides, the city is full of winding and ancient alleys（小巷） that cross with newer streets at many angles.In such places, you'd better turn to the locals. In the American countryside, however, there is often nobody outside to ask, In fact, along came Apple Maps, like a fairy grandmother whispering directions in my ear. Since then, I travel with a lot more confidence, and my world has opened up.

Which brings me back to my original question： While we often lose some skills after depending on new technology, this new equipment may also allow us to gain new abilities. Maybe when technology closes door, we should also look for the doors it opens.

【推荐2】Compared to dogs, cats are often considered to be aloof (冷漠的)with respect to their human owners. It is usual for them to be indifferent (无动于衷的)when humans call their names. Are we sure that they don’t understand human voices at all?

A recent study published in the journal of Scientific Reports suggests that we’ve been fooled. Japanese scientists found that cats can recognize their names if their owners regularly use them. In the study, scientists recruited 78 domestic cats. They played recordings of voices of their owners saying five words: the first four words were random nouns that sounded similar to their names while the final word was the cat’s name. Then they observed the cats’ responses, if there were any.

Most of cats moved their ears or heads when they heard their names, while they made no response to other words. That suggested, “cats were paying attention to you, what you say and what you do,” John Bradshaw, an expert on human-animal interactions (互动) at the University of Bristol, UK, told The Times. “And cats were just as good as dogs at learning,” she added.

In the study, when people called their names, cats often associated   (联系)   the words with rewards, such as food or play, or with “punishments” such as having a bath or going to the vet . This made cats sensitive (敏感的) to words. After the cats had been called several times, they could respond to the words. But the scientists added that while dogs have evolved (进化) to follow their owners’ orders, cats have not. Although cats appear to be aloof, they do have special relationships with their owners.

According to study co-author Atsuko Saito, cats have evolved not to show their emotions as a survival method. One example is illness, which they tend to hide because “in the wild, no one can rescue them” and predators (捕食性动物) are more likely to pay attention to them, Saito explained.

However, technology may help bridge the communication gap between cats and us. There are now mobile apps available to explain what their meows mean. So, the next time you hear “meow, meow”, your cat may be telling you: “Hi, you haven’t cleaned my litter box recently.”