【推荐1】You’ve put on your nice clothes, your hair comes out just right, and someone tells you how great you look. But instead of enjoying the praise, you find it difficult to give a response. So, why can a compliment be so hard to accept?

“Many people have trouble accepting compliments. Sometimes, it’s tied to social anxiety. It can also be caused by feelings of low self-esteem, or by going through life without experiencing positive feelings of being grateful,” explains Lisa Schuman, a New York-based social worker. “Besides, if you’re feeling anger towards someone and they give you a compliment, you may find it hard to believe.”

Have you ever met a person who couldn’t respond well to someone’s well-meaning, kind words and had to escape from the conversation? Social anxiety disorder is not just a catch-all phrase; it’s an actual condition. People with it can really struggle with both giving and getting compliments. They may cast off kind words about themselves because they don’t feel worthy of getting them. This leads to a bad cycle of reducing self-esteem and even more social anxiety.

Even for people who don’t suffer from this disorder, compliments can sometimes lead to embarrassment, especially if you’re feeling unsure of yourself in the moment. And it’s a very rare person who never feels uncomfortable some of the time, either at parties or during close conversations. But learning how to accept compliments is an important social skill that everyone can benefit from, whether they experience social anxiety occasionally or often.

Studies have shown that self-knowledge and self-esteem are the two main influences on our social interactions. We actually bring our own feelings about ourselves into each conversation we have. Everyone has a poor self-esteem day every now and then. If we get a compliment on such a day, it’s hard to believe —— and pretty much impossible to accept. So even a pure-hearted, well-meaning and honest compliment is going to land on us like a lie. Then how can we properly deal with others’ compliments in that case?

【推荐2】At the start of the 20th century, an American engineer named John Elfreth Watkins made predictions about life today. His predictions about slowing population growth, mobile phones and increasing height were close to the mark. But he was wrong in one prediction: that everybody would walk 10 miles a day.

The decline is not because we have all become lazy. Families are pressed for time, many with both parents working to pay for their house, often working hours not of their choosing, living in car-dependent neighborhoods with limited public transport.

The other side of the coin is equally a deprivation: for health and well-being, as well as lost opportunities (机会) for children to get to know their local surroundings. And for parents there are lost opportunities to walk and talk with their young scholar about their day.

【推荐2】Choosing the right college for you is not so easy. You should have a general idea of what you want and don’t want. The idea can guide you to find what fits your needs best.    1    

Think about what major you want to study in college. If you know that, just look at colleges that have your major.    2    So think carefully about your major and interests before choosing one.

Where the college is located matters. Anyone who tells you the location isn’t important is lying.    3    If you look forward to working in the publishing industry, New York may be your best bet. If your parents want you to stay close to home, please don’t consider anywhere that requires a plane ticket to get to.

Think about how much you can afford. Are your parents paying for your education? If so, how much are they willing to spend? Do you have to contribute anything? Financial aid and scholarship exist, but don’t count on anything.    4    These are all things to consider before you fall in love with a college.

Make sure you’re going to spend time with the right people.The cool thing about college is that each different one attracts different kinds of people. For the first thing in your life, you get to choose where you get to spend your time and who you get to spend it with.    5    Make sure that the people you’re with for four years are your kind of people.

【推荐1】Machine learning is a way of teaching computers to do tasks. In the past, to do anything computers depended on detailed, step-by-step instructions written by a person. But with machine learning, computers pick up new skills on their own, using examples or experience. This makes machine learning a powerful form of artificial intelligence, or Al. AI is the ability of a machine to think or learn like a person. AI systems power many kinds of machines — from smartphones to robots.

There are a few types of machine learning. The most common is supervised (监督) learning. In this method, a computer is fed lots of labeled training data. For instance, it may look at many photos of dogs. Each photo might be labeled with the dog’s breed (品种). By studying those photos, the computer learns what each breed looks like. Then, the computer can pick out dog breeds in new, unlabeled photos. The more data the computer studies, the better it gets at its task.

Another important kind of machine learning is reinforcement (强化) learning. Using this type of learning is sort of like training your dog to do a trick. The computer learns to achieve some goal by interacting with its environment. When the computer makes a choice that brings it closer to its goal, it gets a virtual reward. Through trial and error, the computer learns to make better choices. This type of machine learning has helped computers master difficult games like Go and StarCraft II. It has also been used to teach self-driving cars how to get around.

Machine learning has helped create technology all around us. It powers language translators and search engines. When your streaming services recommend new shows you might like, that’s machine learning at work. Machine learning systems also organise posts in social media feeds. They even help diagnose diseases. In many ways, the problem-solving power of machine learning is reshaping the world.

【推荐2】Arizona State University mathematician Sebastien Motsch and his colleagues wanted to know if ants on the move could also get jammed like humans. So they conducted an experiment on ants to see what would happen to the ants when there were too many of them at the same time.

They controlled the density of the ants by constructing bridges of various widths between their colony and the source of food. When the ants went through a bridge, the density of them did increase initially but the flow never slowed down, even when more and more ants filled the bridge. And then the flow leveled off at high densities.

Motsch and his team found that when the ants sensed overcrowding, they adjusted their speeds and avoided entering high-density areas. These behaviors may be made with some chemicals that told other ants where an available road was. The ants also managed to avoided colliding （碰撞）with each other at high densities,

"The goal was to try to find out at what point they were going to have a traffic jam. But it seemed that it never happened. They never, at one point, just stopped. They always managed to avoid traffic jams.” Said Sebastien Motsch.

Can ants help us solve our own traffic problems? Not likely, according to Sebastien Motsch. That's because when it comes to getting from point A to point B as fast as possible, human drivers put their own goals first. Individual ant has to be more cooperative in order to feed the colony. But the research could be useful in improving traffic flow for automatic driving cars, which can be designed to be less like selfish humans, but more like ants.

【推荐3】Israeli company Watergen has produced a device that generates clean, drinkable water out of air. The device called GENNY is small enough to be used in a home or office but can generate up to 30 liters of water a day. The water that GENNY produces is not only clean enough to drink, it’s also often cleaner than tap water.

GENNY takes air in and passes it through a filter (过滤器) to remove dust and dirt. The filter is powerful enough to work even in areas with high air pollution. The air then passes through a chamber where heating and cooling cause water vapor in the air to condense (凝结). This water is then passed through several more filters and minerals are added to make it healthier and taste better. Finally, the water is stored in a tank where it is continually circulated to keep it fresh.

A larger model, called the GEN-350, can produce up to 900 liters of water per day. The GEN-350 is now being used in hospitals that previously did not have a reliable source of fresh, clean water. Watergen has also developed an emergency response vehicle (ERV) that can carry a GEN-350 unit wherever it is needed. In addition to the GEN-350, the ERV carries a portable generator that supplies electricity for the GEN-350.

Watergen’s ERV is designed to bring water to people suffering from the effects of a serious earthquake, fire, flood or other situations. Once such an incident occurred in California in 2018. A fire started at a camp site and spread quickly over a wide area, destroying many thousands of acres of trees and many homes. One of Watergen’s ERVs was driven there and it provided water for its citizens and rescue workers. Besides, they also provided clean safe water for the residents of Texas and Florida in the aftermath of the devastation caused by hurricane’s Harvey and Irma.