【推荐1】What are your retirement plans? Keep working? Get more exercise? Or learn something new? You may put them on hold. There's a chance that, sooner or later, you might have to move further than you were thinking, as far as Mars.

On Thursday,National Geographic will show the first-ever Mars show home, giving earthlings an idea of what their life could look like on the Red Planet. In the not-so-distant year of 2037, the igloo-shaped structure could be the home of your future.

It shows a house built using recycled spacecraft parts and Martian soil, called regolith, which has been microwaved into bricks. Some parts of the home are recognizable-a kitchen, a bedroom-but there are fundamental differences that are important to human survival.

As the Martian atmosphere is around one hundredth as thick as the Earth's, people will need permanent shelter from the sun; society will move largely indoors. Most buildings will be connected by underground passages and the houses won't have windows. The homes will have simulated solar lighting, or natural light that has been bent several times.

Walls will need to be 10 to 12 feet thick to protect people from dangerous rays that can pass through six feet of steel, and a double air-locked entrance to keep the home under proper pressure.

“We don't think of our houses as things that keep us alive, but on Mars your house will be a survival centre,”says Stephen Petranek, author of How We'll Live on Mars. This is not just the stuff of sci-fi. “10 to 20 years from now there will certainly be people on Mars,” Petranek says.

“We've had the technology for 30 years to land people on Mars, but we haven't had the will,” Petranek says. But two main factors have “completely swung public attitudes”.

The private companies' participation has forced government agencies to speed up their game, and influential films such as Gravity and The Martian have caught society's eye.

【推荐3】What if we had the power to control time, instead of moving from the past to the present to the future? What if we could jump, loop and travel through time in a machine? What if we could go wherever and whenever we pleased?

This ability would allow us to witness historic wonders, change decisions and   see people from the past. We could right wrongs and stop wars from starting.

The mysterious puzzle of time has kept people debating its nature for hundreds of years. Science fiction writers have turned it into imaginative stories. Some scientists have even attempted to explain it using math. This math tries to make the dream of time travel come true.

The scientist Albert Einstein said that time and space are one thing. He called it “spacetime.” Einstein said that there are three dimensions in space: height, width and depth. A scientist named Hermann Minkowski added time as a fourth dimension.

Einstein introduced two ideas that have led to theories about the possibility of time travel. The first is relativity. The idea of relativity is that the force of gravity causes space to bend, which causes time to twist. The second idea focuses on special relativity. The idea is that a traveler moving super-fast through flat spacetime will enter the future. Einstein considered time “relative” because it is measured based on where we are on Earth or in space.

Stephen Hawking is a famous scientist. He believes that a time machine will never be built. If it were possible, he thinks we would already know. If a time   machine could be built, how come no one from the future has invaded us?

The first science fiction story with this theme is The Clock That Went Backward by Edward P. Mitchell, which was published in 1881. Since then, thousands of books, films and television shows have explored the idea of time travel, in which some tools such as phones, watches, photographs and old books take travelers backward and forward.

Will time travel ever happen? Who knows? Most important is to keep your eyes open and have a sense of wonder.

【推荐2】A robot designed to carry things moves quickly across a field to gather equipment at a sports event. Such equipment, like javelins(标枪) and discuses, has been thrown by competitors. Another robot moves a human-sized screen on wheels. It is designed to permit joining in the event. And then there are the robots designed to look like the smiling, friendly human beings or mascots(吉祥物)that act as the Olympic Games’ representatives.

All these robots are part of preparations for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan. Japanese carmaker Toyota Motor Corporation presented the machines to reporters earlier this week. Toyota is major supporter of the 2020 Olympic Games.

The “field support robot” is a small bus-shaped machine based on a Toyota ride-sharing vehicle that is still in development. The field support robot can travel as fast as 20 kilometers per hour. It holds three cameras and one special sensor that lets it “see” its surroundings. Around the top of its body are special lights that brighten when the vehicle is active. Its artificial intelligence（AI）helps it avoid barriers(障碍). It is also able to change its path in order to protect areas of grass. However, it cannot find the objects, which can weigh up to eight kilograms, or pick them up on its own. A person has to travel with the device, pick up the objects and put them in it. Then, with a press of a button, the vehicle carries the equipment to where it needs to go.

Takeshi Kuwabara took charge of the robot’s development. He said it was designed to team robots and humans. “Our aim was to make good use of the strengths of both humans and robots” , he said.

The carmaker plans to use the games to present its new vehicle technologies. These include buses powered by special kind of battery, and self-driving taxis. Toyota is competing with other carmakers and technology companies to develop low cost, robot-controlled cars and electric vehicles.