【推荐2】In 2018, a severe drought brought Cape Town close to “Day Zero”, when it could have become the world’s first major city to run out of water. Dam levels in South Africa’s Western Cape fell to below a fifth of capacity and the province suffered its worst water crisis in 100 years.

“The water supply was dwindling and it just wasn’t raining,” recalls Thinus Booysen, a professor at Stellenbosch University, who had created a device in 2015 designed to help homeowners cut their power usage. Seeking to reduce water waste, Booysen figured he could adapt the device to measure water usage instead of electricity use.

Soon, Booysen launched a start-up, Bridging the Internet of Things (BridgloT), to develop his idea. Called Count Droputa, the device reports water usage once a minute while many conventional devices only record data once an hour. The system uses an app in the user’s cellphone and sends short messages in real time. “Within minutes, we would be able to tell the user, ‘Something has burst, or something is leaking,’” he says.

Then Booysen discovered that a key issue was maintenance (维修), with the poorest schools using by far the most water. Leaking toilets could waste 1, 000 liters of water per day. “We found that the biggest problems are things like children not closing taps properly, but often that would be because the taps just don’t close,” Booysen explains. During the test, the invention saved one school more than three million liters of water in three months. Another reduced its water usage 55 percent in four months.

Businesses including Cape Talk radio station and Africa’s largest food company, Shoprite, became sponsors, partnering with the Western Cape Education Department to install (安装) test devices in 350 schools. They saved more than 2.7 million and almost 550 million liters of water in 17 months. Booysen has looked at expanding to government buildings, hospitals and hotels. There are plans to roll out the device across Africa.

【推荐3】Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have created a device that can hear silent speech, called AlterEgo. It’s similar to a virtual assistant like Siri or Alexa, which you can ask questions of and get answers from, but completely silent. The device was invented by a graduate student Arnav Kapur and his professor Patti Maes, as a way to increase human intelligence by bringing humans and machines closer together.

The first model looks like a headset, but instead of having a microphone, it attaches to the face. AlterEgo does not read thoughts. What it does read are called “subvocalizations,” While speaking silently, the mouth area makes some tiny movements that can’t be seen. The device has a set of sensors placed along the side of the face to pick up on the movements made by subvocalizations. These are fed into a machine that matches specific movements with their words. Then, instead of earbuds, the device talks back to the user by transmitting sound through the bones of the face into the inner ear, allowing the user to receive silent feedback. Thus the user can ask and receive answers to questions completely silently.

AlterEgo was first tested with a group of 10 subjects who subvocalized math equations for AlterEgo to solve. At the time it had 92 percent accuracy. Since then, the inventors have been working to increase its accuracy. Its current uses include browsing on Roku, solving equations, recommending chess moves, and other basic tasks.

There are many potential advantages of AlterEgo over a cell phone. Being hands-free and completely silent, it allows users to ask a question without interrupting their conversations. It would also allow a user who is in a very noisy environment (such as an airport runway or a factory with loud machinery) to communicate easily, or for someone who must stay silent (such as a military agent) to communicate freely. Perhaps most importantly, it has potential for people with disabilities who are unable to speak normally.

【推荐2】What Is Your Next Destination?

One of the oldest cultural landscapes in China is chosen to become one of the country’s newest UNESCO World Heritage sites in 2022. The Ancient Tea Plantations of Jingmai Mountain in Pu’er features about 1.13 million tea trees. Located in China’s Yunnan Province, the region was a sating point of the legendary Ancient Tea Horse Road. Many of the region’s tea plantations remain, as do the four local ethnic minority groups — the Blang, Dai, Hani, and Wa people — who preserve their own languages, customs, and festivals.

When you arrive here, the stamp in your passport will include the Palau Pledge (誓约), which all visitors must sign, promising that “the only footprints I shall leave are those that will wash away.” The eco-pledge was drafted by and for the children of these remote western Pacific islands to help preserve Palau’s culture and environment from the negative impacts of tourism. Eighty percent of the nation’s waters is preserved as the Palau National Marine Sanctuary.

Green shoots of regeneration are appearing in Australia, of which some 72,000 square miles were, burned during the 2019-2020 bushfires, leading to the deaths of nearly three dozen people and more than a billion animals. Drive the Great Ocean Road, in Victoria’s Otways region, and then take a hike at Wildlife Wonders, an educational ancient forest and waterfalls. Wandering through bushes gives a chance to spot koalas unique to this ecosystem.

Mining and steel production once dominated the crowded Ruhr Valley, in Germany’s western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Today, the region is repurposing previous industrial sites as parks and open air cultural spaces. The most famous is the UNESCO Word Heritage site of Zeche Zollverein, now home to an outdoor swimming pool, ice rink, and walking tails. You can rent a bike in Essen for a car-free Ruhr Valley trip along cycling routes.

【推荐3】Many Americans pay little attention to science. Even people who regularly watch broadcast television news or cable news channels receive only pieces of science information in their media diet. Yet humor can reach viewers who would never watch NOVA or National Geographic.

Misunderstandings about vaccine (疫苗) safety have contributed to new outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles (麻疹) in 2014-2015 in California and in 2019 Washington state. Last year, I partnered with my colleagues Emily Moyer-Gusé and Melissa Robinson to test how a video of “The Daily Show” influenced parents’   concerns about vaccines.

We randomly split study participants into two groups and gave one a joke-free version of a pro-vaccine video. The other group got a funny version in which host Jon Stewart mixed humor with information about the seriousness of measles virus. One of steward’s jokes, “The United States has been hit with an outbreak of terrible disease. I’m not going to tell you which one. I’m going to tell you this. It rhymes with Vin Diesel. ” He also mocks the parents who avoid vaccinating their children as “science-denying freedom admirers”.

Study results showed that viewing the funny version of the message lowered vaccine safety concerns among the participants, especially those who previously had doubts about vaccine safety. For the audience members with strongest doubts, the funny version reduced vaccine safety concerns by 7 percent.

Traditional Vaccine messages often spark a negative influence in which showing doubters pro-vaccine data only hardens their suspicion. Our findings suggest that humor offers a unique opportunity to address mistaken science beliefs without triggering that sort of resistance.