【推荐1】Carmakers, including BMW, Fiat, Chrysler and Peugeot, warned that the worldwide semiconductor processor shortage will continue in 2021 and beyond. The shortage has affected both production and sales of automobiles.

Automobiles have become increasingly dependent on processors, also known as chips. They are needed for computers to help engines with better fuel economy and assist drivers in emergency braking. Without a good supply of chips, carmakers have centered production on higher-profit models. The higher prices keep their businesses going even though they are selling fewer cars.

Richard Palmer is the chief financial officer of Stellantis. The company sells cars, under 14 brands including Fiat, Chrysler and Peugeot. He said the company did not expect chip supply to improve before the last three months of the year. That would mean a production loss of around 1.4 million vehicles for 2021.

The German carmaker warned that there will be more problems during the second half of this year. "The longer the supply bottlenecks last, the more tense the situation is likely to become," BMW chief financial officer Nicolas Peter said in a statement. “We expect production restrictions to continue in the second half of the year. Those restrictions will cause a lower number of sales,” he added.

German chipmaker Infineon Technologies confirmed the shortage. The company said the latest wave of COVID-19 cases slows the production of materials in Asia. And the amounts of goods available have now hit all-time lows. Reinhard Ploss is the Chief Executive Officer of Infineon. He told economists that a sharp limit of supplies is hurting the recovery of worldwide car markets. He observed that "it will take time to get back" to a balance between supply and demand. "In our view, this will take until well into 2022," he added.

【推荐2】In 2019, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) reported that international travel had increased to a record 1.4 billion tourist arrivals. It predicted a 3% to 4% annual increase in coming years. That didn’t happen, of course. At the end of 2021, international tourist arrivals were 72% below pre-pandemic levels with 1 billion fewer arrivals than two years earlier. According to UNWTO’s executive director (执行长官), Zoritsa Urosevic, tourism has been seriously influenced by Covid-19 and, while countries such as China were able to switch to domestic(国内的)tourism, smaller nations such as Fiji, where tourism represents between 40% and 70% of GDP, did far worse. The pandemic put about 120 million tourism jobs at risk.

The organisation holds the opinion that by 2024 international tourism will have returned to pre-pandemic levels. If Covid’s impact improves as hoped, it will be replaced by a new virus — wanderlust. Millennials (千禧年一代), according to one survey, would rather travel than do any other thing.

Though the tourism may bring the economy back, the value of tourism depends on how you do it. In 2019, transport-related emissions (释放) from tourism were responsible for 5% of human-made global carbon dioxide emissions, according to UNWTO. Cruise ships produce 21,000 gallons of sewage (污水) per day per ship, much of it ending up in the sea.

【推荐1】Is climate candy set to be the next trend?

LA-based PurePlus says yes. The startup launched its first consumer product, Faven, two years ago. Today, each packet of chews contains one serving of fruits and vegetables and saves scores of produce from ending up in landfill.

According to PurePlus, every Faves packet uses six carrots, three heels, one sweet potato, half a squash and one-fourth of a pumpkin. A lot of the time the products are made with “imperfect” produce. The ultimate aim of the company is to tackle food waste in a meaningful and healthy way.

Co-founder and CEO Amy Keller knows sweets. She’s the granddaughter of Norman Spangler, a second-generation leader at Spangler, a second-generation leader at Spangler Candy Co. Instead of following in her family’s footsteps, she set up PurePlus in 2018. PurePlus works with farmers to secure unsold or unsellable produce to turn into plant-based powders that can be used in multiple food and drink applications.

Around 930 million tonnes of food is wasted every year, twice as much as previous estimates, with 61 percent coming from domestic households, 26 percent comes from food services and retail claims the last 13 percent.

The US Sustainable Development Goals initiative have laid out plans to reduce food waste by half by 2030. It is seeking to tackle the issue due to the increased burden on waste management systems, impact on climate change and food insecurity that it brings. Up to 10 percent of global carbon emissions are tied to waste produce.

PurePlus has so far launched two flavors of its fruit and vegetable chew: strawberry and grape. Developed using its special produce powder and sustainable oil, among other things, they are marketed as healthy alternatives to standard sweet chews.

“Faves has set out to solve the climate crisis by preventing food waste by upcycling perfectly good fruits and vegetables to create a candy that’s good for people and the planet, thus, making both healthy choices and climate impact more accessible,” Amy Keller said in a statement. “We don’t make a product unless it will deliver a real benefit and is truly sustainable. ”

【推荐2】When it comes to sitting properly, we all know the correct way even if we don' t do it to the letter. No crossed legs, bottoms touching the back of the chair and feet on the ground. But even if you' re doing it right, sitting for long periods is shockingly bad for you. It has been described as the new smoking, linked to heart disease and even cancer. There is no doubt we should all try to do less of it. But perhaps we could also do it better.

A classic survey, published in 1953, described 100 different sitting postures adopted by 480 cultures around the world. Among the most common were sitting cross-legged, kneeling and the deep squat (深蹲), with feet flat on the ground and bottoms resting on or just above it. Even in Western cultures, these are preferred sitting positions among young children. But Westerners tend to prefer chair use from an early age, insisting children sit on seats in school.

One big problem with this desire for chairs is that they make sitting so, well, sedentary (久坐不动的). Consider the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherer people in Tanzania. They spend around 9 hours a day sitting. However, they squat and sit on the ground in various positions, and this involves high levels of muscle activity. The supportive nature of chairs, with their high backs and armrests, removes this effort perhaps the reason that people love them.

So what' s the best way to sit? Josette Bettany-SaItikov at Teesside University, UK has found that kneeling can help keep the spine in a better position as does squatting. We might also take inspiration from traditional cultures like the Hadza. "Use a variety of postures and preferably not just still postures but some which allow movement," says Bettany-Saltikov.

Bettany-Saltikov believes that we should be rethinking what it means to do a desk job. "We still need to design workplaces that enable people to be productive while being lightly active, like with under-table cycling or walking desks," she says. For now, if your job is sedentary, don' t forget to stand up regularly and move around.

【推荐3】Researchers are training robots to perform an ever-growing number of tasks through trial-and-error reinforcement (强化) learning, which is often laborious and time-consuming. To help out, humans are now employing large language model (LLM) AI. A team at NVIDIA Research directed an AI protocol (协议) powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 to teach a simulation (模拟) of a robotic hand nearly 30 complex tasks, including throwing a ball, pushing blocks, pressing switches, and some other seriously impressive abilities.

NVIDIA’s new “AI agent” Eureka uses GPT-4 by asking the large language model to write its own reward-based reinforcement learning software code. According to the company, Eureka doesn’t need complicated reminders or even pre-written patterns; instead, it simply begins experimenting with a program, and then follows any external human feedback.

In the company’s announcement, Linxi “Jim” Fan, a senior research scientist at NVIDIA, described Eureka as a unique combination of LLMs and simulation programming. “We believe that Eureka will enable robots to control items flexibly and provide a new way to produce physically realistic animations for artists,” Fan added. After testing its training protocol within an advanced simulation program, Eureka then analyzes its collected data and directs the LLM to further improve upon its design. The result is a protocol capable of successfully numbering a variety of robotic hand designs to operate scissors, turn pens and open cupboards within a physics-accurate simulated environment.

Eureka’s alternatives to human-written trial-and-error learning programs aren’t just effective—in most cases, they’re actually better than those authored by humans. In the team’s open-source research paper findings, Eureka-designed reward programs outperformed humans’ code in over 80 percent of the tasks—amounting to an average performance improvement of over 50 percent in the robotic simulations.

“Reinforcement learning has contributed to impressive wins over the last decade, yet many challenges still exist, such as reward design, which remains a trial-and-error process,” said Anima Anandkumar, an AI researcher. “Eureka is the first step toward developing new algorithms (算法) that integrate generative and reinforcement learning methods to solve hard tasks.”