【推荐2】Singapore’s government has approved the sale of a laboratory-grown chicken meat. The American company that invented the product, Eat Just, says it is the first time lab-grown meat has received such approval anywhere in the world. Lab-grown meat — also called clean or cultured meat — is created from animal cells in a laboratory. The product is made without harming animals. The cells grow directly into the meat, outside of any animal.

The Eat Just product is to be sold as small pieces, called nuggets. The product is set to launch at a Singapore restaurant “in the very near term,” the company’s CEO Josh Tetrick told Reuters news agency.

Demand for alternatives to animal meat is rising across the world because of public concerns about health, animal welfare and the environment. Plant-based products — popularized by companies like Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and Quorn — are selling in a growing number of stores and restaurants. But the development of lab-grown meat has been much slower than that of plant-based versions. The main reason for the delay is money. Lab-grown meat costs a lot more to produce.

Tetrick said the San Francisco-based company is also seeking approvals from U. S. government agencies. But he added that Singapore was a “good bit” ahead of the United States. The Singapore Food Agency said it examined data from processing, production control and safety testing before approving Eat Just sales. Tetrick said it is likely that the U. S. and countries in Europe and elsewhere will examine Singapore’s approval system and will attempt to create a similar process.

Eat Just was founded in 2011 and has raised more than $300 million, Tetrick said. The company is valued at around $1. 2 billion. Worldwide, more than 24 companies are testing lab-grown fish, cow and chicken meat. They are hoping to break into a new part of the alternative meat market. Financial experts at Barclays Bank have estimated the market could be worth up to $140 billion by 2029. Competitors in the market have also been able to raise large amounts of money and win support from well-known investors.

【推荐3】When we long live together, we quickly learn to foresee the near-term behaviors of our co-workers or family members. Our ability to predict the actions of others makes it easier to successfully live and work together. In contrast, even the most intelligent and advanced robots have remained inept at this sort of communication. This may be about to change.

The study, conducted by Mechanical Engineering Professor Hod Lipson, is part of a broader effort to provide robots with the ability to understand and predict what others want. The researchers first built a subject robot and placed it in a playpen. They programmed the robot to seek and move towards any green circle it could see. But there was a hidden difficulty: Sometimes the robot could see a green circle in its camera and move directly towards it. But other times, the green circle would be blocked by a tall red cardboard box, in which case the robot would move towards a different green circle, or not at all.

After “researching” its partner on screen long, the new robot was eventually able to get its partner’s goal and path 98 out of 100 times, across varying situations. When starting the experiment, the researchers expected the robot might learn to make predictions about the subject robot’s near-term actions. What the researchers didn’t expect, however, was how accurately it could foresee the moves with only a few seconds of video.

“Our initial results are very exciting, showing how robots can see the world from another robot’s view,” says Lipson. “The understanding ability of the new robot is perhaps a primitive form of sensing others’ feelings, which we all can do.”

Meanwhile, he acknowledges there’re many moral questions. The technology will make robot more adaptable and useful and no longer passive instruction-following machines, but when robots ca predict how humans think, they may also learn to control or influence those thoughts.

【推荐2】Nearly every nation is coming up short — most of them far short — in their efforts to fight climate change, and the world is unlikely to hold warning to the internationally agreed-upon limit, according to a new scientific report.

Gambia, a tiny country in Africa, is the only nation that is cutting emissions (排放) and taking up its share of actions to keep the world from exceeding the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5℃ above preindustrial times, according to the report. Only one industrialized nation — the United Kingdom—is even close to doing what it should to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and finance clean energy for poorer nations, the Climate Action Tracker(CAT)reported.

Enough nations promised big enough carbon pollution cuts that the CAT said the “emissions gap” — the difference between emissions projections (预测) with the promises and what’s required to meet the 1.5-degree goal — dropped by 11%.

“That momentum (势头) has not been maintained,” said Bill Hare, report co-author and CEO of Climate Analytics. “We’re running short of countries stepping up with additional emission commitments to close the gap.”

Unlike its previous reports, which just looked at promises to cut carbon pollution and policy changes, the new ratings include money issues. Finance is critical to climate negotiations this fall in Scotland, so the report examined commitments by rich nations to help pay for clean energy for poor nations, according to Hare.

That hurt the United States and European Union rankings. The report called efforts by the United States, the European Union, Germany and Japan “insufficient” and more in line with global warming of 3℃ since the late 19th century. The world has already warmed by 1.1℃ since that time, so these countries will make the world 1.9℃ warmer than it is now.

Hare said Brazil and Mexico “went backwards” on their fight to control warming. The report lists Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Thailand at the bottom.