【推荐1】Chokwe Selassie, an eighth-grader at Blackburn Middle School, was inspired to create an app on a recent morning, when his mother was driving him to school. Their car was damaged as it went over a huge pothole (坑洞) in the middle of the street in their hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. “I wanted to do something about the pothole problem in my city,” Chokwe, 13, told TFK.

Chokwe developed the app with his friends Rodriguez Ratliff and Emmanuel Brooks. “When the app detects a pothole, it is highlighted in red,” Chokwe says. “And if you get close to the pothole, your phone will warn you with a beep sound.” Drivers can also use the app to report any potholes they come across, and to look for other routes they can take to avoid roads that have them.

The app relies on current available information about the streets of Jackson, according to Chokwe. “It works by using the city’s 311 call system, so it uses information already stored in a database,” he says. Through the call system, citizens dial 311 to report non-emergency problems — which include potholes.

To get some help in developing the app, the boys took part in a Minority Male Makers Program sponsored by Verizon (an American broadband and telecommunications company) and held at Jackson State University. The program provides nearly 1,000 American middle school boys across the country with training in advanced technology.

“The students were really excited to participate and learn new things,” says Valerie Bradley, Chokwe’s principal at Blackburn Middle School. Through the program, Chokwe says, he and his friends received encouragement and guidance.

Although the app isn’t yet available for sale, Chokwe is already looking for ways to improve it. The prototype (雏形) remains limited to 10 streets in Jackson, but he hopes to add more, so that it includes every street in the city. And then he wants to go even farther. “I want to keep working on the app until it’s nationwide,” Chokwe says.

【推荐2】Alibaba Cloud and the Hangzhou city government announced the launch of ET City Brain 2.0, a cloud-powered and AI-driven urban traffic-management system that aims to increase the city’s efficiency.

After over two years of testing in Alibaba’s home base, ET City Brain has become the new infrastructure (基础设施) for Hangzhou, with a total coverage of 420 square kilometers in area, including over 1,300 traffic lights. Over 200 traffic officers are connected via mobile phones, enabling them to receive real-time alerts on any traffic-related emergencies.

In version 2.0, the system will optimize the city’s firefighting abilities by providing key information to firefighters, such as water pressure, the number and position of fire hydrants (消防栓) in a given area, the location of gas pipes and other details they need to know. The information is instant, making the entire firefighting process faster, safer and more accurate.

City Brain gives meaning to data. By using AI and advanced algorithms (计算程序), City Brain is able to analyze a large amount of data and turn them into useful information in real-time speed.

As a result of City Brain’s ability to predict traffic flow, detect accidents and provide instant feedback, Hangzhou has dropped from 5th to the 57th on the list of China’s most congested cities. Hangzhou is probably the only city that can tell you how many cars are on the street at any given time.

In the case of medical emergencies, City Brain is able to change traffic lights, so emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks can head to the scene without interruption, accelerating their arrival time by 49%.

Dr. Wang Jian, head of Alibaba’s Technology Steering Committee who invented the term “City Brain”，said the system is designed to empower a city to act quickly and directly. It is more than just about traffic management. It’s really about how to make city more livable at a time of shrinking natural resources around the globe. “It is a matter of sustainability, while using as little natural resources as possible,” Wang said, “This is just the beginning.”

【推荐3】What will people die of 100 years from now? If you think that is a simple question, you have not been paying attention to the revolution that is taking place in bio-technology(生物科技). With the help of new medicine, the human body will last a very long time. Death will come mainly from accidents, murder and war. Today’s leading killers, such as heart disease, cancer, and aging itself, will become distant memories.

In discussion of technological changes, the Internet gets most of attention these days. But the change in medicine can be the real technological event of our times. How long can humans live? Human brains were known to decide the final death. Cells are the basic units of all living things, and until recently, scientists were sure that the life of cells could not go much beyond 120 years because the basic materials of cells, such as those of brain cells, would not last forever. But the upper limits will be broken by new medicine. Sometime between 2050 and 2100, medicine will have advanced to the point at which every 10 years or so, people will be able to take medicine to repair their organs. The medicine, made up of the basic building materials of life, will build new brain cells, heart cells and so on, in much the same way our bodies make new skin cells to take the place of old ones.

It is exciting to imagine that the advance in technology may be changing the most basic condition of human existence, but many technical problems still must be cleared up on the way to this wonderful future.

【推荐1】Goldfish have pretty boring lives, so maybe it’s a good thing that they can only concentrate for nine seconds! But according to a new research, humans are becoming like goldfish. Our attention span (时长) is getting shorter and it’s all because of technology.

“We move quickly from one site to another on the web,” says Doctor Ted Selker, a computer scientist from Massachusetts, “and we are losing the ability to concentrate.” With millions of websites to choose from, the attention span of the average Internet user is just seconds. There are other digital distractions (分心) too: e-mail, instant messaging and quickie movies on websites.

Some people are worried about the effect on young people. “You need time to understand and think about what you read”, says Julia Wood, from London. “Young people search the net all the time and their brains become full of useless information but there is no time to make sense of it. I am trying to persuade my pupils to read more books, so that they concentrate on one subject for longer.”

Other teachers are trying more unusual methods to improve students’ concentration. Anne Savan, from Wales, was so worried about her students that she started playing Mozart during her science lessons. She says that it had an amazing effect, “The music made them calmer, and their concentration was much better.”

But not everyone believes that there is a problem. Ray Cole, an educational psychologist says, “On the web, young people learn to make quick decisions about what is and isn’t worth reading. They might look at five unhelpful websites very quickly, before stopping and reading a sixth useful website more carefully. In a world with so much information available, this is an important skill.”

【推荐2】Although Facebook offers various privacy settings that can be improved, there is no way to guarantee that your photos will not be seen by people you didn't intend to share with. While the risk of sexual predators stalking(跟踪)children after seeing their Facebook photos is small, it cannot be completely discounted. Posting photos of your children also sets a bad example to them about privacy and opens them up to other dangers, such as identity theft.

Posting photos of your children on Facebook could bring them to the attention of sexual predators, even if you set the privacy settings so that only friends and family are able to see the photos. Well-meaning relatives can republish the photos, with less strict privacy settings. This practice can be dangerous if there are easily recognizable landmarks or information that can pinpoint the location of the child in the photo. Many Facebook games and apps encourage you to increase the size of your friend list, but doing so can expose your personal information to unwanted strangers. This information, in tune with status updates revealing your whereabouts and photos of your children, can make it all too easy for someone to stalk your family.

Young children should be taught from an early age about the dangers of revealing too much information to strangers. With smartphones and other electronic devices making it easy to post photos online, it is important that children understand the dangers of uploading the wrong kind of pictures. If you upload lots of photos of your children to Facebook. they may draw the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with sharing images online. For example, many parents post photos of their children in the bath or in their swimwear. Unless children are taught boundaries about sharing personal photos such as these, it can have a negative effect on them later in life.

After you post photos of your children online on sites such as Facebook, you no longer have any control over what the images are used for. Even with strict privacy settings these photos can be viewed, downloaded, modified and uploaded elsewhere by other people if they are determined enough. Photos of your child could be used for advertising, as many website owners use photos they find on the Internet to promote their sites. Someone could even use photos of your child to create a fake profile on a teen site with the intention of getting close to other teens.

While posting embarrassing photos of your children on Facebook might seem like harmless fun, it can expose them to bullying and intimidation. If someone distributes these photos to online forums and websites as a joke it can cause a lot of emotional trauma for your child. In some severe cases, teens have committed suicide after threats and bullying online.

【推荐1】If you’re walking through Boston during a downpour, you might see a poem appear before your eyes.

Titled “Raining Poetry”, this art installation was a collaboration, which needs efforts between the nonprofit Mass Poetry and the city of Boston. The first poems were installed to honour the start of National Poetry Month. Several more were added since then. The poems are invisible during dry and sunny weather, but they appear like magic once raindrops start falling from the sky.

“We want to bring poetry to the people,” said Sara Siegel, program director for Mass Poetry. The poems were selected by Danielle Legros Georges, Boston’s poet laureate (桂冠诗人). Scattered throughout the city, Georges selected the poems mainly based on their relationship to Boston. Another factor was their general themes of water and rain.

The poems were installed by members of the Mayor’s Mural Crew,an organization that introduces young artists to the process of creating public art. The poems can be fixed to the sidewalk in minutes. It will wear away in six to eight weeks. However, the city of Boston and Mass Poetry plan on carpeting city sidewalks with more poems. “It’s a public art project, as the poems are and will be installed in public sites in Boston, and meant for everyone,” Georges said. “I think this is a wonderful way to bring poetry to the people.”

The poems appear throughout the city. While all of the poems currently installed are written in English, Siegel hopes to add new ones in the many languages. “Our hope is in the next two years everyone in the state will encounter a poem in their daily lives at least once or twice a month,” Siegel tells Guerra. “This is a fun and unusual way to bring poetry to the people.”

【推荐2】A Beijing-based gene firm on Monday announced the world’s first cloned wild arctic wolf, which is listed as endangered in the Red List of Threatened Species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or the IUCN. Experts said its birth pioneers the breeding of more rare and endangered animals through cloning technology.

“We started the research cooperation with Harbin Polarland on cloning the arctic wolf in 2020. After two years of painstaking efforts, the arctic wolf was cloned successfully. It is the first case of its kind in the world,” Mi Jidong, the company’s general manager of the Beijing-based Sinogene Biotechnology Co said at a press conference in Beijing.

The birth of the world’s first cloned wild arctic wolf is a milestone for the application of cloning technology, which is of great significance to the conservation of rare and endangered animals and biodiversity, experts believe.

He Zhengming, the head of Chinese Experimental Animal Resources Research Institute for Food and Drug Control said that the cloned animals still have the ability to reproduce if they have intact fertilized eggs (受精卵). The cloning technology can copy all genetic information for selective reproduction.

From the world’s first mammal clone “Dolly”, cloning technology has provided the possibility to diversify the populations of some species such as cattle, pigs and horses. When endangered species in some places are identified, cloning of cells preserved from freezing technologies could also generate new life, experts said.

As part of a more concrete step to boost the breeding of more rare and endangered animals through cloning technology, the Sinogene Biotechnology Co and Beijing Wildlife Park built a partnership on gene seed preservation cloning technology applications in rare and endangered wild animals. Enhanced efforts for the protection of endangered wildlife species and their habitats are part of the goals of the country’s national development plan for the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25), according to the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.