What if your smartphone or laptop starts charging as soon as you walk in the door? Scientists have developed a specially-built room that can conduct energy to a variety of electronic devices within it without plugs or batteries.
It’s a custom test room of about 18 cubic meters, built from conductive aluminum(铝) panels with a metal pole running down the middle. When the scientists ran an electric current through the walls and pole following a set pattern, it generated two separate magnetic (磁的) fields: one that fills the center of the room and the other that covers the corners, thus allowing any devices within the space to charge.
By carrying out tests, scientists found their method could deliver 50 watts of power throughout the room. firing up all devices they tested. Without safeguards, running currents through the room's metal walls would typically fill it with two types of waves: electric and magnetic. This presents a problem, because electric fields can produce heat in biological tissues and pose a danger to humans. So the team built capacitors, devices that store electric energy, in the walls. “It limits the safe magnetic fields to the room volume while limiting risky parts to all the components built in the walls.” lead author Takuya Sasatani explains.
The scientists also tested the room’s safety, and the result showed the absorption of energy would remain well below acceptable limits. “We’re not saying this technology is safe under all circumstances—we’re still exploring,” says study co-author Alanson Sample. “But it shows us that there's still much area to explore.”
But applying the technology is still far in the future. It’s just too burdensome to put aluminum sheets all over the walls-that benefit doesn't make sense yet. “We’ve just developed a brand-new technique. Now we have to figure out how to make it practical,” Sample says. Meanwhile, scientists hope to improve the efficiency of power conduction and remove spots that the charge does not reach.
1. What does paragraph 2 mainly talk about?| A．What the room looks like. | B．How electric currents are generated. |
| C．How the special room works. | D．What the technology was developed for. |
| A．Produce electric power. | B．Measure magnetic field. |
| C．Stop devices from heating. | D．Protect people from harm. |
| A．Optimistic. | B．Cautious. | C．Doubtful. | D．Content. |
| A．The cost. | B．The safety. | C．The effectiveness. | D．The material. |
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【推荐1】Google announced this week that its building 100 self-driving car prototypes and Lloyd wrote a great piece discussing various city and planning implications, questions, and suggestions.
It’s electric!
Google didn’t make a big point of this, but the self-driving cars will be 100% electric.
Their small size would further help on the green front, but one commenter noted to me that the aerodynamics could be much better. Indeed. However, my understanding is that the shape of the vehicle is centered around the laser and radar sensors, maximizing their view.
You can summon the car!
As The Guardian puts it,” the car is summoned by a smartphone for pickup at the user’s location with the destination set.”
A key point that was very quickly mentioned in Lloyd’s post is that the cars only contain “two seats, a space for passengers’ belongings, buttons to start and stop, and a screen that shows the route — and that’s about it".
The car will have a range of 100 miles.
| A．It has no pedals, no steering wheel. |
| B．Confused? Don’t worry, this isn’t just for fun. |
| C．The car doesn’t want you to feel too at home. |
| D．That would certainly make them much greener than typical cars. |
| E．I know that’s what we all think of, but I thought that step of the technology was still a long way off. |
| F．On a full charge, the car will have a range of 100 miles, which is a lot for a non-Tesla 100% electric car. |
| G．Here are a few more points about the self-driving cars themselves that we thought were pretty interesting. |
【推荐2】About five years ago, an American electrical engineer named Scott Brusaw and his wife Julie came up with the idea of putting solar panels on the ground rather than the roof. Then they began to develop the Solar Roadway specially for a new type of cars-eco-cars. The Solar Roadway is an intelligent road that provides clean renewable energy using power from the sun while providing safer driving conditions, along with power and data delivery. They predict that the Solar Roadway will pay for itself through the generation of electricity along with other forms of income and that the same amount of money that is being used to build and resurface current roads can be used to build the Solar Roadways.
Each Solar Road Panel measures roughly 4 meters and contains a microprocessor（微处理器）that monitors and controls the panel, while communicating with neighboring panels and the vehicles traveling overhead. The inventors suggest that this provides a communication device every 4 meters on every road which could be used for example to warn drivers of cars which are moving across a centre line and various other speed control problems. The top of the Solar Road panels is made of super-strong glass that would offer vehicles the tractions(抓地力) they need.
According to the inventors, the Solar Roadway creates and carries clean renewable electricity and therefore electric vehicles can be recharged at any conveniently located rest stop, or at any business that has paved Solar Road Panels in their parking lots.
The inventors say their Solar Roadway has many functions and advantages from main roads to driveways, parking lots, bike paths, sidewalks and runways. The Federal Highway Administration has given Brusaw $100,000 to develop the invention and Brusaw hopes to build a smart-road parking lot in the coming spring.
1. In the inventors’ opinion, the Solar Roadway ________.| A．is too expensive to build at present |
| B．costs no more money than current roads |
| C．can provide as many data as present computers |
| D．will bring them a large sum of money |
| A．the panels | B．the inventors | C．the researchers | D．the vehicles |
| A．providing safer driving conditions |
| B．helping drivers communicate with each other while driving |
| C．creating and carrying clean renewable electricity |
| D．warning drivers of various speed control problems |
| A．Solar-powered smart road of the future |
| B．The great changes on the roadway |
| C．The influence the Solar Roadway has on people |
| D．The Solar Road—a much faster road |
【推荐3】The San Diego County Water Authority has an unusual plan to use the city’s scenic San Vicente Reservoir (水库) to store solar power so it’s available after sunset. The project could help unlock America’s clean energy future.
Perhaps ten years from now, if all goes smoothly, large underground pipes will connect this lake to a new reservoir, a much smaller one, built in a nearby valley about 1100 feet higher. When the sun is high in the sky, California’s abundant solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir. It’s a way to store the electricity. When the sun goes down and solar power disappears, operators would open a valve (阀门) and the force of 8 million tons of water, falling back downhill through those same pipes, would drive machines capable of producing 500 megawatts of electricity for up to eight hours. That’s enough to power 130, 000 typical homes.
“It’s a water battery!” says Neena Kuzmich, Deputy Director of Engineering for the water authority. She says energy storage facilities like these will be increasingly important as California starts to rely more on energy from wind and solar, which produce electricity on their own schedules, without considering the demands of consumers.
Californians learned this during a heat wave this past summer. “Everybody in the state of California got a text message at 5:30 in the evening to turn off their appliances,” Kuzmich says. The sun was going down, solar generation was disappearing, and the remaining power plants, many of them burning gas, couldn’t keep up with demand. The reminder worked:People stopped using so much power, and the grid (电网) survived.
Yet earlier on that same day, there was so much solar power available that the grid couldn’t take it all. Grid operators turned away more than 2000 megawatt hours of electricity that solar generators could have delivered, enough to power a small city. That electricity was wasted. There was no way to store it for later, when operators desperately needed it.
1. What is the function of Paragraph 2?| A．To present the importance of a reservoir. | B．To recall a situation in recent ten years. |
| C．To introduce the usage of solar energy. | D．To explain a way to store electricity. |
| A．The reservoir serves to store energy. | B．Californians need little solar energy. |
| C．People used to waste too much energy. | D．New storage ways are environmentally friendly. |
| A．To stop people working. | B．To warn people of danger. |
| C．To tell people the sunset time. | D．To remind people of lack of energy. |
| A．Scenic San Vicente Reservoir | B．San Diego County Energy Plan |
| C．Water Batteries to Store Solar Power | D．Machines to Store Water in California |
【推荐1】Whether they’re speeding in to deliver packages or spotting victims in disaster zones, clouds of flying robots could have a range of important functions in the future, a new study found. The robots can change from driving to flying without hitting each other and could offer benefits beyond the traditional flying-car concepts of science fiction, the study said.
The ability to both fly and walk is common in nature. For instance, many birds, insects and other animals can do both. Robots with similar features could fly over obstacles on the ground or drive under overhead obstacles. But currently, robots that are good at one mode(模式) of transportation are usually bad at others, study lead author Brandon Araki and his colleagues said in their new study. The researchers previously developed a robot named the “flying monkey” that could run and fly, as well as grasp items. However, the researchers had to program the paths the flying monkey would take; in other words, it could not find safe routes by itself.
Now, these scientists have developed flying cars that can both fly and drive through a simulated(模拟) city-like setting that has parking spots, landing pads and no-fly zones. Moreover, these drones(无人机) can move autonomously without hitting each other, the researchers said. “Our vehicles can find their own safe paths”, Araki told Live Science.
“The most important meaning of our research is that vehicles that combine flying and driving have the potential to be both much more efficient and much more useful than vehicles that can only drive or only fly”, Araki said.
The scientists warned that automated flying taxis are likely not coming anytime soon. “Our current system of drones certainly isn’t powerful enough to actually carry people right now.” The scientists detailed their findings on June I at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore.
1. Which of the following is true about the research on flying vehicles?| A．It focuses on two- mode creatures. |
| B．It has made functional breakthroughs. |
| C．It will come to an end in vain. |
| D．It is based on the traditional concepts. |
| A．It could avoid obstacles. | B．It could both run and fly. |
| C．It knew how to catch things. | D．It followed the set routes. |
| A．No More Flying Robots. |
| B．Let Go Of Flying Monkey. |
| C．Here Come Autonomous Flying Cars. |
| D．No Flying Taxi on The Way. |
【推荐2】For several decades, there has been an organized campaign intended to produce distrust in science, funded by those whose interests are threatened by the findings of modern science. In response, scientists have tended to stress the success of science. After all, scientists have been right about most things, from the structure of the universe to the relativity of time and space.
Stressing successes isn’t wrong, but for many people it’s not persuasive. An alternative answer to the question “Why trust science?” is that scientists use the so-called scientific method. But what is called the scientific method isn’t what scientists actually do. Science is dynamic: new methods get invented; old ones get abandoned; and at any particular point, scientists can be found doing many different things. False theories sometimes lead to true results, so even if an experiment works, it doesn’t prove that the theory it was designed to test is true.
If there is no specific scientific method, then what is the basis for trust in science? The answer is the methods by which those claims are evaluated. A scientific claim is never accepted as true until it has gone through a long process of examination by fellow scientists. Scientists draft the initial version of a paper and then send it to colleagues for suggestions. Until this point, scientific feedback is typically fairly friendly. But the next step is different: the revised paper is submitted to a scientific journal, where things get a whole lot tougher. Editors deliberately send scientific papers to people who are not friends or colleagues of the authors, and the job of the reviewer is to find errors or other faults. We call this process “peer review” because the reviewers are scientific peers—experts in the same field—but they act in the role of a superior who has both the right and the responsibility to find fault. It is only after the reviewers and the editor are satisfied that any problems have been fixed that the paper will be printed in the journal and enters the body of “science.”
Some people argue that we should not trust science because scientists are “always changing their minds.” While examples of truly settled science being overturned are far fewer than is sometimes claimed, they do exist. But the beauty of this scientific process is that science produces both creativity and stability. New observations, ideas, explanations and attempts to combine competing claims introduce creativity; transformative questioning leads to collective decisions and the stability of scientific knowledge. Scientists do change their minds in the face of new evidence, but this is a strength of science, not a weakness.
1. Scientists stress the success of science in order to ________.| A．promote basic knowledge of science |
| B．remind people of scientific achievements |
| C．remove possible doubts about science |
| D．show their attitude towards the campaign |
| A．It’s an easy job to prove its existence. |
| B．It usually agrees with scientists’ ideas. |
| C．It hardly gets mixed with false theories. |
| D．It constantly changes and progresses. |
| A．It seldom gives negative evaluation of a paper. |
| B．It is usually conducted by unfriendly experts. |
| C．It aims to perfect the paper to be published. |
| D．It happens at the beginning of the evaluation process. |
| A．it is not uncommon for science to be overturned |
| B．scientists are very strong in changing their minds |
| C．people lose faith in those changeable scientists |
| D．changes bring creativity and stability to science |
【推荐3】 Earthquake rescue robots have experienced their final tests in Beijing. Their designers say with these robots, rescuers will be able to save lives during an earthquake. This robot looking like a helicopter, is called the detector-bot. It’s about 4 meters long, and it took about 4 years to develop the model. Its main functions (作用) are to collect information from the air, and send goods of up to 30 kilos, to people trapped by an earthquake.
This robot has a high definition 360 degree panoramic (全景) camera. It can work day and night and will also be able to send the latest pictures from the quake area.
Dr. Qi Juntong, Chinese Academy of Science, said, “The most important feature of this robot is that it doesn’t need a distant control. We just set the destination (目的地) information on it, and then it takes off, and lands by itself. It flies as high as 3,000 meters, and as fast as 100 kilometers per hour.”
This robot has a different function — it can change as the environment changes. Its main job is to search for any signs of life in places where human rescuers are unable to go.
As well as a detector (探测器) that finds victims and detects poisonous gas, a camera is placed in the 40 centimeter long robot, which can work in the dark.
Another use for the rescuers is the supply part, with its 10 meter long pipe. People who are trapped in the ruins, will be able to get supplies including oxygen and liquids.
Experts have said that the robots will enter production, and serve as part of the national earth-quake rescue team as soon as next year.
1. According to the passage, this robot________.| A．is carried by the helicopter | B．weighs about 30 kilos |
| C．is a machine with a length of 10 meters | D．hasn’t been put into production so far |
| A．a camera | B．a robot | C．a rescuer | D．a detector |
| A．It is designed to prevent the earthquake. | B．It is unable to send goods. |
| C．It can take and send pictures even in the dark. | D．It can be used to take in poisonous gas. |
| A．what the robot looks like | B．an introduction to the robot |
| C．how the robot is made | D．information about earthquakes |
【推荐1】What do you do at the end of the day when you’ve finished your work and finally have some time for yourself? How you spend your free time can have a big influence on your mental health. Hobbies can help you relax and ease pent-up (被压抑的) stress caused by all that time in the office or in front of the computer.
But, interestingly, how you spend your free time can also influence your work performance. Researchers at the University of Sheffield’s Institute of Work Psychology in the U. K. found that pursuing hobbies can increase your confidence about how well you perform your job. But there’s one warning: Your hobby has to be significantly different from what you do from 9 to 5.
To study the connection between work and activities in spare time, researchers hired 129 people who worked and were actively involved in hobbies like rock climbing, playing football and singing. They had them complete surveys to see how serious and devoted they were to their hobbies and how demanding their jobs were. Then, each month for seven months, participants were asked how many hours they spent on their hobbies and how they rated their ability to perform at work. Researchers found that if people have hobbies similar to what they do at work, their on-the-job confidence can suffer. It’s likely because their work and spare time have the same mental and physical demands, so they’re always feeling tired.
Those playful pastimes act as a barrier between their professional and personal lives, giving them downtime to “recharge their batteries”, said the lead researcher Ciara Kelly. “When we feel like we have the confidence to deal with challenges in our jobs, we are more likely to be able to build a sustainable (可持续的) job and remain healthy, productive, happy over our lifetimes. It’s important to consider how our spare activities might play a role in that process. So it’s important that you should make the best of your spare time and choose a hobby that benefits your job.”
1. What hobbies may improve people’s working performance?| A．Hobbies requiring physical strength. | B．Hobbies demanding computer skills. |
| C．Hobbies closely connected with your majors. | D．Hobbies having nothing to do with your work. |
| A．Those who had a job and was active in hobbies. | B．Those who had as many hobbies as possible. |
| C．Those who greatly enjoyed working actively. | D．Those who would complete their surveys seriously. |
| A．Hobbies prevent people from concentrating on their work. | B．People gain energy through their hobbies. |
| C．Hobbies help people choose a good job. | D．People receive confidence from challenges. |
| A．Personal Hobbies That Are Good for Your Jobs | B．The Best Method to Choose Hobbies and Jobs |
| C．The Relationship Between Hobbies and Jobs | D．The Secret of Being Excellent in Your Jobs |
【推荐2】Why can’t you remember being a baby? Will that trip to Dreamworld be wasted on your toddler (学步的幼儿)? Scientists explain how the brain changes from infancy (婴儿期) through to early childhood, and what this means for your child’s memories.
While some people can remember memories from as early as age two, as adults most of us rarely remember things that happen to us before the age of three, due to a phenomenon called “infantile amnesia (婴儿健忘症)”. Generally, we tend to have vague (模糊的) memories of events that occur between the ages of three and seven.
So why is it that we can’t remember being a baby, or a toddler? The answer lies in the way that our brain’s ability to store memories changes as we grow. At birth, a baby’s brain is only a quarter of its adult size, growing to three-quarters the size of an adult brain by age two. This increase correlates with a growth in the number of brain cells—called neurons (神经元)一and the connections between these cells.
A part of the brain that is important in forming memories is the hippocampus (海马体), says Dr Dhanisha Jhaveri, a researcher at the Queensland Brain Institute at The University of Queensland. “In the hippocampus, new neurons are constantly being created. In adulthood, new cells are still being produced, but the rate of production in the hippocampus slows down,” says Dr Jhaveri.
Neuroscientists believe that the rapid rate at which brain cells are being produced in childhood could be the cause of infantile amnesia. Because so many new neurons are being produced and form connections with each other in memory circuits (记忆电路), they might disturb existing networks of memories that have already formed.
But it turns out that a child’s ability to remember things for long periods of time improves gradually throughout childhood. For example, in studies in which young kids were taught to imitate an action, six-month-olds could remember what to do for 24 (but not 48) hours, while nine-month-olds could remember what to do one month (but not three months) later.
Despite this memory loss, childhood experiences have been found to influence adult behaviour years later, which suggests that traces of these memories could be stored somewhere in the brain that isn’t easy to access.
So while your kids might not recall their major milestones or be too young to remember a trip to Disneyland, positive experiences as toddlers or in infancy may continue to affect their behaviour long after they’ve forgotten them.
1. What can be inferred from paragraph 3?| A．Our brain’s ability to store memories remains unchanged as we grow. |
| B．The size of the child’s brain by age two is twice the size at birth. |
| C．The growth in the number of neurons will influence the size of the child’s brain. |
| D．Neurons have nothing to do with a person’s memory. |
| A．The rapid rate of brain cells being produced. |
| B．The existing networks of memories. |
| C．The way of our brain storing memories. |
| D．The memory circuits of our brain. |
| A．Childhood experiences will influence adult behaviour years later. |
| B．Traces of these memories could be stored somewhere in the brain. |
| C．A child’s ability to remember things improves gradually over time. |
| D．The younger a baby is, the better its memory is. |
| A．Subjective. | B．Objective. | C．Pessimistic. | D．Uncaring. |
Block printing existed long before Gutenberg. The Chinese had been using wood blocks to print books as early as 868, but a new set of woodcuts(木刻印版) had to be made for each book. Producing one book was not easy; producing all kinds of books was more difficult.
Writing ink dates from about 2500 BC in Egypt and China. Johann Gutenberg use an oil-base printing ink that would last longer than other inks used in his time. We don’t know much about Gutenberg because he was not famous during his lifetime. He was born in Germany about 1400. In 1448, Gutenberg developed signatures for each number, letter, and punctuation mark(标点符号). He then built the molds (模型) to hold the signatures in place. Johann Gutenberg published the first mass-produced book: a 1,282 page Bible. To this day, more copies of the Bible have been printed the any other book.
Copies of Gutenberg’s invention spread throughout Europe, but the German goldsmith did not get rich from his invention. Some officials denounced the invention of printing because they feared that it would spread bad ideas. By 1500 there 1,700 printing presses in Europe. The presses had already produced about 20 million volumes of 40,000 different books.
1. What happened after Johann Gutenberg’s invention?
| A．People could afford to read books. |
| B．People became interested in inventing. |
| C．It was still difficult to print all kinds of books. |
| D．Punctuation mark began to be used in printing. |
| A．was difficult to run. | B．needed harder paper |
| C．used a new kind of ink | D．was put into use earlier |
| A．fought against | B．accepted | C．laughed at | D．supported |
| A．A famous 1,282 page Bible |
| B．The life of a famous inventor |
| C．An invention that changed history |
| D．The development of printing |
