【推荐1】Imagine you can open your fridge, open an app on your phone and immediately know which items will go bad soon. This is one of the applications that a new technology developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego would enable.

The technology combines a chip (芯片) integrated into product packaging and a software update on your phone. The phone becomes capable of identifying objects based on signals the chip sends out from specific frequencies, in this case Bluetooth or WiFi. In an industrial setting, a smartphone equipped with the software update could be used as a radio frequency identification (RFID) reader.

The work uses breakthroughs in backscatter (反向散射) communication, which uses signals already generated by your smartphone and re-directs them back in a format your phone can understand. Effectively, this technique uses less power than the latest technology to generate WiFi signals.

The custom chip, which is roughly the size of a grain of sand and costs only a few pennies to produce, needs so little power that it can be entirely powered by LTE signals, a technique for wireless broadband communication for mobile devices. The chip turns Bluetooth signals into WiFi signals, which can in turn be detected by a smartphone with that specific software update.

The technology’s broader promise is the development of devices that do not need batteries because they can harvest power from LTE signals instead. This in turn would lead to devices that are significantly less expensive that last longer, said Dinesh Bharadia, one of the paper’s senior authors.

“E-waste, especially batteries, is one of the biggest problems the planet is facing, after climate change,” Bharadia said.

For future research, the team will integrate this technology into other projects to demonstrate its capabilities, and they also hope to commercialize it, either through a startup or through an industry partner.

【推荐2】As cultural symbols go, the American car is quite young. The Model T Ford was built at the Piquette Plant in Michigan a century ago, with the first rolling off the assembly line (装配线) on September 27, 1908. Only eleven cars were produced the next month. But eventually Henry Ford would build fifteen million of them.

Modern America was born on the road, behind a wheel. The car shaped some of the most lasting aspects of American culture: the roadside diner, the billboard, the motel, even the hamburger. For most of the last century, the car represented what it meant to be American—going forward at high speed to find new worlds. The road novel, the road movie, these are the most typical American ideas, born of abundant petrol, cheap cars and a never-ending interstate highway system, the largest public works project in history.

In 1928 Herbert Hoover imagined an America with “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” Since then, this society has moved onward, never looking back, as the car transformed America from a farm-based society into an industrial

The cars that drove the American Dream have helped to create a global ecological disaster. In America the demand for oil has grown by 22 percent since 1990.

The problems of excessive (过度的) energy consumption, climate change and population growth have been described in a book by the American writer Thomas L. Friedman. He fears the worst, but hopes for the best.

Friedman points out that the green economy (经济) is a chance to keep American strength. “The ability to design, build and export green technologies for producing clean water, clean air and healthy and abundant food is going to be the currency of power in the new century.”

Since the 1970s many new applications have been found for me. I have become very important in communication, finance and trade. I have also been put into robots and used to make mobile phones as well as help with medical operations. I have even been put into space rockets and sent to explore the Moon and Mars. Anyhow, my goal is to provide humans with a life of high quality. I am now truly filled with happiness that I am a devoted friend and helper of the human race!

【推荐2】In many countries of the world, people can confidently tell you the meaning of their town or city, but most people who live in Manchester, Oxford or Birmingham would not be able to explain what the name of their city means. The name of every British town and city, however, has a long history. Two thousand years ago, most people living in Britain were Celts........This is why there are so many place names in England which end in “-chester” or “-caster” –Manchester, for example. ..........The Romans never reached Wales or Scotland, and many place names there are Celtic.........After the Romans left Britain, it was attacked by tribes called the Anglo-Saxons who were from the area of Europe that is now Germany and Holland............Twelve hundred years ago, the Vikings came to England from Scandinavia. They traded with the Anglo-Saxons but lived in their own villages. ........Finally, in 1066, England became Norman — the Normans gave us the place name “grange”, which means farm.........

Which of the following shows the correct order of the arrival of inhabitants in Britain?

【推荐2】Now let us look at how we read. When we read a printed text, our eyes move across a page in short, rough movement. We recognize words usually when our eyes are still when they fixate (凝视). Each time they fixate, we see a group of words. This is known as the recognition span or the visual span. The length of time of which the eyes stop -the duration of the fixation — varies considerably from person to person. It also varies within one person according to his purpose in reading and his familiarity with the text. Furthermore, it can be affected by such factors as lighting and tiredness.

Unfortunately, in the past, many reading improvement courses have concentrated too much on how our eyes move across the printed page. As a result of this misleading emphasis on the purely visual aspects of reading, numerous exercises have been devised to train the eyes to see more words at one fixation. For instance, in some exercises, words are flashed on to a screen for, say, a tenth or a twentieth of a second. One of the exercises has required students to fix their eyes on some central point, taking in the words on either side. Such word patterns are often constructed in the shape of rather steep pyramids so the reader takes in more and more words at each successive fixation. All these exercises are very clever, but it’s one thing to improve a person’s ability to see words and quite another thing to improve his ability to read a text efficiently. Reading requires the ability to understand the relationship between words. Consequently, for these reasons, many experts have now begun to question the usefulness of eye training, especially since any approach which trains a person to read isolated words and phrases would seem unlikely to help him in reading a continuous text.