【推荐3】To have a comfortable and functional living room, it is important that it should be designed simply. A typical 3D design software gives you options to decide the layout, floor plan and overall appearance of your living room.

    1     Once you have started using a 3D interior design software, you need to ask yourself a few basic questions. Do you want to remodel an existing living room, or are you designing a living room for a house that is yet to be constructed? In each case, the challenges and opportunities will be different.

The next thing you need to do is to come up with a floor plan. To do this, enter the measurements of the floor and walls of your living room into the program, which becomes the basic blueprint for your creative living room design.     2     With some information about electrical points, lighting sources, doors and windows entered, the workable space can be clearly defined.

    3     Simply select the furniture type and specify its measurements by selecting the required size option. The image will increase or decrease and show you how much space it will occupy in your living room. There is no end of how many versions you can create at this stage since there is no need to physically move your couch or TV set.     4     Within minutes, you can see your revamped (翻新的) living room taking shape right before your eyes.

In the fourth step, add a personal creative touch. You can experiment with different types of customization (定制) to achieve the overall look you want. For example, you can try multiple colors for the walls and different types of flooring and lighting.     5    

【推荐1】For most ordinary purposes, machine translation (MT) has got a lot better in the past years. The biggest source of improvement has been the adoption of “deep learning” in training translating systems. But improvement has also come about through the expansion of clever companies solving individual tasks. Some have created specialist dictionaries so that important terms can be translated accurately and consistently. Other inventions combine MT with a human translator’s editing tools, which means translators spend most of their time checking and perfecting MT output, rather than doing the work of the translating themselves.

For some translators, being a machine’s editor may sound depressing. This can be seen the other way around, however. A human repeatedly translating identical formulae can get bored. Allowing the machine to do these boring jobs frees the translator to apply specialized knowledge, solving more intellectually satisfying problems.

What are those problems? One Madrid-based translator for a big law firm describes a recent task. It involved making a critical distinction in a legal document: a Spanish word (dolo) that’s properly translated as “wilful misconduct” was translated only as “misconduct” by software. Since the law requires considerably severer punishment when the misconduct is “wilful”, the omission (省略) was potentially disastrous.

Today, many translation firms are proud of using MT, not as a crutch (依赖) but as a means to cut costs and turnaround times. Part of their job becomes knowing what can be automated and what cannot. Instruction manuals can be left to MT while others like a novel legal argument cannot.

The bad news for some translators is that a tap of repeatable, easy work is being turned off. The good news is that what remains will be brain-challenging stuff for people who know a language and something else. Tales of artificial intelligence usually test humans against machines. But the translators of the future will be neither entirely human nor machine. They will be human beings with mechanical enhancements.

【推荐3】Over the past 50 years, scientists have been attempting to understand one of the most pressing iss ues in biology — understanding how proteins fold. Recently, DeepMind, a leader in AI, demonstrated their project AlphaFold which won first place in a contest that encourages teams to accurately predict protein structures.

Proteins are one of the main building blocks of life — they help us maintain our health and fuel our bodies with energy. Each protein is made up of one-dimensional-strings of amino acids (氨基酸), and the folding process occurs when the chains fold into a three-dimensional shape to create an active protein. Protein folding is important as the structure of the protein determines its function. However, issues may arise during the folding process as proteins can become unfolded or misfolded, resulting in diseases and life-threatening conditions, such as Parkinsons disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and more.

Being able to predict a proteins shape is incredibly important. It will allow scientists to develop the right medicines and drug molecules (分子) that can join to the protein and possibly fix, or alleviate the consequences. Fixing damaged proteins is the key to solving a wide variety of diseases

DeepMind takes inspiration from the human brain and its pattern-matching abilities, known as neural networks. To train the algorithm (算法), scientists feed it several amino acid chains and the final protein structure. The machine gradually learns by observing the patterns, until it is ready to start making predictions.

Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist in Germany, had been trying to understand a protein structure for a decade. Alpha Fold solved the problem in just thirty minutes!

There are some who question AlphaFold’s abilities, claiming that the algorithm may not work as well in real-life settings where amino acid strings are more complex. But despite this DeepMind’s achievement is definitely a milestone in biology. Not only is DeepMind in the process of applying this to the current COVID-19 pandemic and what proteins are affected but future pandemics and viruses could also be fought with ease!

【推荐1】Growing at high speed and absorbing huge amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide, could seaweeds be the key to fighting climate change? Scientists in Australia think so. In Australia, scientists are taking advantage of the power of seaweeds to absorb CO₂ at a rate that equals to the Amazon rainforest!

Kelp (巨藻) is one of the most common seaweeds. It has many types and grows at great speed. Giant kelp, for example, can grow up to 50 cm per day. Seaweeds use photosynthesis (光合作用) to absorb CO₂, and grow biomass. Seaweeds are thought to absorb nearly 200 million tonnes of our globe’s CO₂ per year.

Pia Winberg, founder of Australia’s first land-based commercial seaweed farm, suggests that growing more seaweeds could be an essential tool in the fight against climate change. “If we used the infrastructure we have in the ocean and created seaweed islands, we would actually remove many climate change issues we have today,” she said.

The Great Southern Reef is an 8,000-km network of reefs in Australia. Golden kelp forms the backbone of the network. With many other species, including giant kelp and bull kelp, growing there, it is a good place for series of relevant projects. The Great Southern Reef project managed by an independent team of seience professionals is working to promote the recognition and management of Australia’s kelp forests. The project estimates that if these kelp forests were cultivated in just 0.001% of the ocean’s surface, the amounts of the CO₂: they absorb could offset (抵消) the carbon emissions of the global aquaculture (水产养殖) industry.

Of seaweeds’ potential, there’s a long chain of wins with this.

【推荐3】Next to a tall building, the Muziekplein forest is one of seven such special and very small forests in the Dutch city of Utrecht, and 144 tiny forests across the Netherlands. It's about the size of a basketball court. Before it was planted, the area was a parking lot.

By the end of this year, according to IVN Nature Education, an organization leading the country's plan, there will be 200 such small forests in the Netherlands. In many other countries, communities are creating such small-area and native forests as positive responses to big environmental challenges. The forests can be any shape, but must be at least four meters wide based on IVN's instructions. A tiny forest can be built under a year. And it generally includes between 20 and 40 different tree species.

Since the first forest was planted in the Netherlands in 2015, the idea has become popular. Daan Bleichrodt launched IVN's Tiny Forest plan with the goal of making it easier for children to know the significance of protecting environment. He thinks it is popular because people are becoming more and more aware of major environmental challenges. It's a very practical way for people to do something positive considering climate change and loss of biodiversity.

Data released by Wageningen University researchers in April shows that the forests hold a range of animal and plant species. Across the 11 tiny forests in a study, volunteers observed 636 animal species. They also recognized 298 plant species in addition to the original species planted in the areas. Daily maintenance of the forests sometimes involves obliterating unwanted weeds, but in general, new plant species, such as wildflowers, are allowed to grow, according to Bleichrodt.

Suzanne Valkman, head of the World Wildlife Fund(WWF) Netherlands forests unit, said, “I was just amazed to see how many total species were recognized.” A WWF report in 2020 found that wildlife populations in the Netherlands decreased by half over the last three decades. Butterflies, birds and reptile species were particularly hard hit. Valkman said, “The Tiny Forest data shows that the small project can improve that biodiversity in cities.”