【推荐2】How to Make and Keep a New Year’s Resolution

Are you making a resolution in the New Year? You’ll give yourself your best shot at success if your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).

•Specific. Your resolution should be absolutely clear. Making a concrete goal is really important rather than just vaguely(含糊地) saying “I want to lose weight.” You want to have a goal: How much weight do you want to lose and at what time interval?     1    

•Measurable. This may seem obvious if your goal is a fitness related one, but it’s also important if you’re trying to cut back on something, too. If, for example, you want to stop biting your nails, take pictures of your nails over time so you can track your progress in how those nails grow back out.     2    

•Achievable. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have big stretch goals.     3     So, for example, deciding to save enough money to retire in five years when you’re 30 years old is probably not realistic, but saving an extra $100 a month may be.

•Relevant.     4     If you do it out of a sense of self-hate or a strong passion in that moment, it doesn’t usually last long. But if you build up a process where you’re thinking harder about what’s good for you, then you have a fighting chance.

•Time-bound. Like “achievable”, the timeline toward reaching your goal should be realistic, too. That means giving yourself enough time to do it with lots of smaller goals set up along the way.     5    

If you’re building a habit, you’re planning for the next decade, not the next couple of months.

【推荐3】CHI’s Academic Year Program (AYP) is your chance to study in America and spend either an academic year or a semester living with a volunteer host family.

The requirements for studying in America

High school students who are aged 15 to 18

A score of at least 212 on the ELTiS exam

Contact a partner agency in your home or a nearby country. We can also send you a list of partners near you. They will set you up with an application and let you know what you need to submit in order to be considered.

Our Admissions Department reviews and accepts your application. We issue and send your agency the Form DS-2023, which is the official US Department of State document that allows you to apply for and receive your J-1 visa. Once you receive the DS-2023, you can make your visa appointment. When the visa is granted, you are all set to travel to America.

Meanwhile, our Field and Operations staff will work hard to find you the perfect family and school as soon as possible! Once we find the right host family for you, you can start to get to know your family by email.

Your agency will book your flight according to your school start date. When you arrive, we will give you a student orientation and introduce you to other exchange students and the surrounding community. When school starts, you will begin the process of cultural exchange!

Will Experimentation on Animals End?

One of the most debatable issues in science is the use of animals in research. Scientists experiment on animals for different reasons, including basic research to explore how organisms function, investigating potential treatments for human disease, and safety and quality control testing of drugs, devices and other products.

    1    However, opponents believe it is cruel and meaningless, as observations in animals often do not translate directly to humans.

In 1959, William Russell and Rex Burch proposed their “3Rs” guidelines for making the use of animals in scientific research more humane: restrict the use of animals; refine experiments to minimize distress; and replace tests with alternative techniques.     2     Around 29 million animals per year are currently used in experiments in the U.S. and Europeans Union countries. This is less than half the total in the mid-1970s —— a significant drop.

    3    Improvements in imaging methods that offer a look inside the bodies of animals allow scientists to get more and better data from each experiment than before.

For example, researchers previously had to do experiments with multiple mice at different stages of cancer development, but now they can watch the disease develop in a single living animal using a dye. Similarly, as brain-imaging techniques become more advanced, some questions that were addressed with experiments in monkeys before may be better answered by looking into the human brain now. “    4    ” says Larry Carbone, a senior veterinarian(兽医) at the University of California in San Francisco.

【推荐2】“Human activity has wiped out two-thirds of the world’s wildlife since 1970,” CNN reported on September 10, 2020. Later that month, the Guardian reported that “40 percent of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction”. Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and his colleagues argued that “the ongoing sixth mass extinction may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilization”. Around the same time, the Daily Mail warned that “human civilization stands a 90 percent chance of collapse within decades due to deforestation”.

These horrible calculations and projections come from authoritative-sounding reports issued by international agencies, conservation groups, and peer-reviewed scientific journals. But is the future of wild nature and human civilization really so poor?

Data from uncontroversial mainstream sources strongly indicate that both humanity and the natural world are likely to be flourishing rather than collapsing at the end of this century. Humanity is becoming an urban species, and that’s good for the environment, since urban dwellers generally use less electricity, produce less globe-warming carbon dioxide, and have smaller land footprints than people living in the countryside. By 2100, it is estimated that 85 percent of people will be city dwellers, which would leave only 1.2 billion still living in the countryside. That means more space for the wildlife and less pollution from the agriculture.

The global tree-covering area increased by 865,000 square miles between 1982 and 2016. The researchers found that gains in forest area in the mild, subtropical and northern climatic zones are offsetting declines in the tropics. The Maryland researchers owe much of that increase to “natural afforestation on abandoned agricultural land”. “Furthermore, forests in mountainous regions are expanding as climate warming enables trees to grow at higher altitudes,” they added.

Humanity does face big environmental challenges in the coming century. But the scientific and economic evidence shows that most of the trends are positive or can be turned in positive direction by human wisdom. Rather than an age of extinction, the 21st century promises to be an era of environmental renewal.

【推荐3】The future is coming! All over the world there are many new ideas for new places to live and work in. Some of them will be in the sea! They will be very big and lots of people will live and work in them.

The Americans are planning to build a town called Atlantis City. It will be in the sea, about five miles away from the land. But the most exciting idea comes from Japan. It is Aeropolis. Aeropolis will be a huge sea city, with parks, schools, a hospital and an airport(飞机场). And it will move(移动)! It will travel slowly around the world. There are just two problems. Aeropolis will cost a lot of money to make. And for people who get seasick, it won’t be much fun.

【推荐1】A deep neural (神经系统的) network trained to restore ancient Greek texts can do so with 72% accuracy when used by historians, suggests a Nature paper. The findings could assist with the restoration and sort of newly discovered or uncertain inscriptions (碑文) with improved speed and accuracy, advancing our understanding of ancient history.

To understand the history of ancient civilizations, historians study the inscriptions created by past individuals, written directly on materials- such as stone, pottery or metal- that have survived until today. However, many inscriptions have been damaged over the centuries. Their texts are now vague and their date of writing is uncertain. Specialists in the study of inscriptions can reconstruct missing texts, but their traditional methods are highly complex and time-consuming.

To overcome the restrictions of current epigraphic methods, Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield and their colleagues tested a deep neural network (named Ithaca), a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that was trained to restore, date and place ancient Greek inscriptions. The authors found that Ithaca could achieve 62% accuracy when used alone to restore damaged texts, and 72% accuracy when it is used by a historian. Additionally, Ithaca could also help to determine inscriptions’ place and date of writing; in their experiments, it attributed inscriptions to their original locations with 71% accuracy and dated them to less than 30 years from the date ranges proposed by historians.

The findings could unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, and improve our understanding of human history.

Common fields such as education, healthcare, catering, and industry have long been dominated by artificial intelligence, and this technology is now finding its way into relatively niche (小众) fields to more fully exploit its talents. Archaeology (考古学) is one of its latest fields.

【推荐3】At the beginning of the 21st century China had no high-speed railways. Slow and often uncomfortable trains plodded across this vast country, making journeys a test of travel endurance.

Today, it’s a completely different picture. The world’s most populous nation has — by some distance — the world’s largest network of high-speed railways. Half of that total has been completed in the last five years alone. By 2020, 75% of Chinese cities with a population of 500,000 or more had a high-speed rail ink. With maximum speeds of 350 kph (217 mph) on many lines, intercity travel has been transformed.

In contrast, the UK currently has just 107 kilometers while the United States has only one rail route that (just about) qualifies for high-speed status with top speed at 240 kph.

The size of China and its tremendous variations in terrain (地形), geology and climate have presented the country’s railway engineers with incredible challenges. From sometimes frozen Harbin in the far north to the near-tropical humidity of the Pearl River Delta megalopolis (特大都市), to the 1,776-km Lanzhou-Urumqi line crossing the Gobi Desert, China’s engineers have quickly developed extensive expertise in driving railways over, under and through whatever terrain lies in their path using overpasses, tunnels and bridges.

Chinese companies are among the first in the world to introduce new technology. The driverless “bullet trains” connecting Beijing and Zhangjiakou in northern Hebei province are capable of hitting speeds up to 350 kph, making them the world’s fastest autonomous trains. These trains are equipped with seats with 5G touchscreen control panels, intelligent lighting, thousands of safety sensors and removable seats for passengers in wheelchairs. Facial-recognition technology and robots are used in stations to assist travelers with navigation, luggage and check-in.

These new railways are a symbol of the country’s economic power, rapid modernization, growing technological prowess (高超造诣) and increasing prosperity. Moreover, they are also a powerful tool for social cohesion, political influence and the integration of disparate regions with distinct cultures into the mainstream.