【推荐3】Artists everywhere are getting “understandably nervous” about recent advances in artificial intelligence. Last month, a winner of an art prize at the Colorado State Fair “sparked a violent protest” when he posted the news and explained that he’d created his image using an AI program. Critics quickly accused 39-year-old Lance Allen of cheating. To be fair, Allen had won in the digital art category and made no secret of how the image had been produced. But the rules of art making are clearly changing.

Allen’s creative process, to be clear, “was not a push-button operation, ”said Jason Blain in Forbes. He claims to have spent 80 hours on his entry, first on fine-tuning his text prompts (提示), then by touching up the final image using Photoshop and similar tools, then arranging to print the image on canvas. He made the finished product using AI much as a photographer creates an image using a camera.

But Allen, a tabletop game developer, is awed by AI’s capabilities and urges artists and illustrators to welcome the technology rather than fight it. “Art is dead,” he says. “AI won. Humans lost.” A more inspiring lesson to take from his victory, though, is that image generators are likely to “expand the appreciation for and creation of art” by opening the field to people, like him, who could never draw anything as detailed as his award-winning image. “If anything, we will have more artists,” and as the technology progresses, “we might see the emergence of art styles that none have seen before.”

You can’t blame traditional artists if they’re unhappy. Image generators work their magic, after all, by analyzing the aesthetics (美学) of millions of pre-existing images. One of the most complicated image generators “makes crystal clear just how destructive this technology will be,” said Loz Eliot in New Atlas. Given a specific prompt, it can produce an image of just about anything you can imagine and even follow the style of a favorite artist’s work. Its arrival marks “an incredible popularization of visual creativity” while aiming “a knife to the heart of anyone who’s spent decades improving their artistic techniques hoping to make a living from them.”

【推荐1】Being an early bird, or the opposite night owl (夜猫子), is usually not something that is thought of as being highly under our control. Some people seem to sleep early while others get a second wind and tend to sleep late. This internal clock is a person’s unique internal timekeeper and the body’s own master controller of many functions. Most obvious is our sleep patterns; however, it also plays a role in our eating patterns, hormone levels, and maybe even our mood.

A recent study looked at whether the body clock is related to levels of physical activity. Using a watch-like device that measures movement, over 5,000 participants’ activity levels were collected for two weeks. After considering some factors that may explain differences, such as education or background health conditions, they found that night owls, as compared to morning types, had up to 60 to 90 fewer minutes per day of activity.

For those with a more of an “eveningness” type, jobs or other demands on time may mean that a morning alarm is sounding well before their natural wake time. As a result, a night owl type may be starting the day relatively “jet lagged” (有时差感的) —feeling out of step with their body due to being awake when the body would prefer to be asleep.

We should emphasize that this study does not tell us that being a night owl is the cause of lower physical activity. It only shows a connection between being an early bird or night owl and certain conditions. In this study, we only considered two factors —sleep patterns and activity. Using your eat-sleep cycle to your advantage as much as possible to be active is probably the best advice. Are you someone who feels ready and clear first thing in the morning? That may be the best time to get those steps in. More energy in the evening? Then scheduling that walk for after dinner may be best.

【推荐3】How many different emotions do you think you can communicate to people with your face? Do you have the same facial expressions as the people from different cultures? Read this passage to find out what scientists have just discovered about this topic.

New research suggests that there are only four basic facial expressions of emotion. However, how these expressions are interpreted (解释) might depend on where you are from. Research by scientists from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow has challenged the traditional view of how the face expresses emotions. It was widely believed that six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust) were expressed and recognized across different cultures. However, the University of Glasgow’s work now suggests that the human face only has four basic expressions of emotion. This is because some pairs of emotions are impossible to distinguish(辨别). Fear and surprise, for example, both share wide open eyes. The facial expressions for anger and disgust also look the same.

So if our faces are only able to express four basic emotions, how do we communicate a much more complex kind of feeling? The study found that the way expressions are interpreted is different in different cultures. However, while looking at how people from the East and West look at different parts of the face during facial expression recognition, scientists found that although there are some common features across cultures, the six basic facial expressions of emotion are not recognized universally.

What interests people about the cross-cultural aspect of the research? This work leads to understanding which emotions we share and appreciating our differences.