【推荐1】Disorders of the brain are a growing worry. Twelve mental-health conditions affect about 970 million people around the world according to the Global Burden of Disease Project: more than one in ten of the population. This figure could well be an underestimate. Neurological (神经学的) problems such as stroke, migraine (偏头痛), Parkinson’s and brain injury are collectively the leading global source of disability. Ageing populations with unhealthy ways of life are likely to make this problem much worse everywhere.

In an ideal world, science would be coming to the rescue. But the brain is a complex organ sometimes described as the most complex structure in the known universe. A private company spent an estimated $ 43 billion on research into therapies for Alzheimer's disease between 1998 and 2017 and came up empty-handed. That big failure is perhaps the biggest reason why, in the 2010s, many drug firms abandoned or cut back on neuroscience research.

Happily, there are signs of a change. In our Technology Quarterly this week we report on a renaissance in neuroscience, with many drug companies, some of them big ones, showing renewed interest in the field. This fresh energy is coming from a variety of techniques and ideas. More precise diagnosis and well-confirmed biomarkers which reveal the course of disease, are improving clinical trials. New kinds of treatment such as gene therapy, are expanding the range of diseases that can be tackled. Other advances are an increasing amount of data, which is proving critical to understanding the biological roots of neurological problems.

As hopes rise for tackling this final frontier of bio-medicine, it is worth remembering that the secrets to a healthy brain are not only going to come from a pill or psychotherapist's treatments. The health of the brain is influenced by what goes on outside it such as nutrition, exercise, the abuse of alcohol, education, social connections and pollution. None of this should be surprising: The health of the brain is tied to the health and the well-being of the body that it sits in. Efforts to ensure better brain health are an investment that will keep bringing advantages to individuals, and to societies, for decades to come.

【推荐2】Even if you aren’t into artificial intelligence, it’s time to pay attention to ChatGPT, because this one is a big deal. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot system that OpenAI released in November to show off and test what a very large, powerful AI system can accomplish.

ChatGPT is built on top of the OpenAI GPT-3 family of large language models. It lets you type in natural-language prompts and then offers conversational replies. It remembers the thread of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. It finds relevant information in its oceans of training data, and changes that into plausible-sounding(貌似有理的) paragraphs of text.

You can ask it countless questions and often will get an answer that’s useful. For example, you can ask it encyclopedia questions like, “Explain Newton’s laws(定律) of motion.” You can tell it, “Write me a poem.” and when it does, say, “Now make it more exciting.” You can ask it to write a computer program that’ll show you all the different ways you can arrange the letters of a word.

A few days after its launch, more than 1 million people were trying out ChatGPT. UBS analyst Lloyd Walmsley estimated in February 2023 that ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users in January, accomplishing in 2 months what took TikTok about 9 months and Instagram two and a half years.

Many people fear that ChatGPT might help students cheat better. But as with many other technology developments, it’s not a simple black-and-white situation. Decades ago, students could copy encyclopedia entries and use calculators, and more recently, they’ve been able to use search engines and Wikipedia. ChatGPT offers new abilities for everything from helping with research to doing your homework for you absolutely.

Dustin York, an associate professor of communication at Maryville University, hopes educators will learn to use ChatGPT as a tool and realize it can help students think critically.

“Educators thought that Google, Wikipedia, and the Internet itself would ruin education, but they did not.” York said, “what worries me most are educators who may actively try to discourage the acknowledgment of AI like ChatGPT. It is a tool, not a villain(恶棍).”

【推荐3】Everyone has probably seen a movie or two about robots going against man. As a kid it was interesting, but not a reality. But today. when we look at how far scientists have come, it's not just a funny thought but a real possibility.

Honda has already created a robot with eyes, legs, arms and hands and it can act just like a person. There is no end to what a robot could do in the future. Just think what we can do in twenty to thirty years. We're dealing with almost an entire new species of human-like robots that could be cleverer than us. Can we continue to use these robots in a way that they serve us, or will they become so wise that they will want independence?

I am really not sure just how far scientists are going to perfect robots. But once this type of robot is made，they will be able to think, make decisions, sense the movement of others and decide what it wants to do.

A new invention has led to the introduction of a female robot, which was introduced at an entertainment show in Vegas. The robot called Roxy sells for between seven and ten thousand dollars. It is built to accompany females. This female robot companion is called true companion md you can find such robots on the Internet. Robots used to have limited uses, but now they are almost in every field, This has opened the door many dangerous possibilities in the future.

【推荐1】You’ve probably heard that brick-and-mortar retail (实体零售) is in trouble. Even industry giants are closing hundreds of stores. Given retail’s gradual change to mobile and e-commerce (电子商务), you may be wondering, “What will retail look like in the future?” Nobody knows. But here are a few things you can expect to see based on current technology.

Ultrafast delivery is coming. Today, the normal practice is two-day delivery. But if you’ve been paying attention, you know that’s changing. In fact, a surprisingly high 25% of consumers said that they would abandon their orders if one-day delivery wasn’t available. Of course, that’s just the beginning. Two-hour delivery is coming in the foreseeable future, and Amazon has already been trying 30-minute delivery.

Your kitchen will resupply itself. You won’t have to worry about running out of essentials like coffee, pet food or snacks because your containers will sense stock (库存) levels and replace those items without you having to lift a finger. No more waking up to find your coffee store is empty or last-minute trips to the grocery store because you forgot to buy pet food.

Know exactly what’s in stock and where. Have you ever gone to a store hoping to buy something, only to learn that they were out of stock? A new feature from Google Home allows people to ask Google Assistants to find in-stock products at the closest store. For example: “Google, where can I find the Nintendo Switch console?” An assistant will tell you how many stores have it right then and how close they are. Of course, it isn’t currently available for all stores in all locations, but you can already see a future when it has become standard.

Convenience, experience, and options—retail will take on a new look.

【推荐2】Mutual cooperation in which humans cooperate with wild animals is extremely rare. One such system involves the greater honeyguide, a small African bird that leads humans to sources of honey. Once a nest is found, the human honey hunters break into it to obtain honey and bee worms, and the birds benefit from consuming beeswax in the now-exposed honey comb. Both the birds and the humans use specialized sounds to communicate their availability to participate in this cooperative interaction.

The two areas studied by Spottiswoode and Wood are northern Mozambique, where the honey hunters are from the Yao cultural group, and northern Tanzania, where the honey hunters are from the Hadza culture. The Yao communicate with honeyguides using a short and high-pitched sound followed by a low sound “brrrrhm”, whereas the Hadza use a melodic whistle. Thus, signal and response both vary geographically.

Spotiswoode and Wood propose that the geographic variation they have identified in this mutualism is the product of cultural codevelopment. To qualify as cultural, the cooperative behaviors would have to be acquired through social learning from individuals of the same species. Social learning, however, is less of a given on the honeyguide side. Instead, what is required of honeyguides is another form of vocal learning—comprehension learning—in which the meaning of a signal is learned. Comprehension learning is common in birds. Whether social learning is involved, however, is not so obvious.

Honeyguides put in considerable effort helping their human partners find food and are faithfully rewarded by being given food in return. In some human cultures, honey hunters purposefully leave out honeycomb to reward honeyeaters, but in others the hunters go, to great length to deny the birds any reward, by collecting, burying, or burning any honeycomb exposed when they destroy a nest. The reason given for these act s is that keeping the birds hungry causes them to continue guiding.

A promising question for future research is whether geographic differences in human cultural preferences for rewarding or not rewarding honeyguides affect the preferences of individual birds for guiding versus taking advantage of the guiding of others.

【推荐3】Given a wide range of available entertainment options and the way we consume information, visits to the library may seem like an old-fashioned entertainment. But according to a new Gallup poll(民意调查),Americans took more trips to the library than to the movie theater in 2019. The poll surveyed 1,025 adults throughout the United States who were asked how many times they participated in nine different leisure(休闲)activities, including visiting a library, watching a movie, or attending a sporting event. Library visits came out on top as the favorite, with those surveyed visiting an average of 10.5 times annually. Movies were second with respondents heading to the cinema an average of 5.3 times throughout the year. The zoo came in the last place with only 0.9 visits.

Although it’s not the only determining factor, cost appears to play a part. Activities at the bottom of the list such as theme parks and zoos are typically expensive. Libraries are free, as are many of their available services like Wi-Fi, in addition to the endless amounts of books. A Pew Research Center study indicated that although most people visit libraries to check out reading materials, 29% of surveyed Americans over the age of 16 use libraries for computers, Internet and public Wi-Fi.

People between ages 30-49 were most likely to engage in leisure activities, according to the Gallup poll. This was perhaps because of “their relative youth combined with mid-life stability” Gallup’s Justin McCarthy told Smithsonian. McCarthy also notes that libraries are typically visited most often by adults from low-income households and less often by adults from high-income households. In this poll, the youngest age group—those who are 18 to 29 years old—visited the library the most. This could be because college students are in that group.

Regardless of the reasons why people visit libraries, they’re far from outdated. Libraries have stood the test of time, which is good news for book lovers, those needing to drop in for Internet use, or anyone just looking for some quiet time. If there was ever any doubt that libraries would simply fade away, research suggests that they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.