Buildings with windows filled with water could save energy greatly, according to researchers backing the new technology.
Traditional glass windows increase the heat and temperature in the room in summers, and let the heat inside escape in winters, resulting in more electricity consumed for air-conditioners and more carbon emissions (排放). Now, researchers at Loughborough University (UK) have created a water-filled window that can overcome these problems.
The “water-filled glass” (WFG) system, designed by Dr. Matyas Gutai, involves a sheet of water being trapped between a panel (嵌板) of glass, and the water is practically invisible. The windows are connected to an indoor storage tank (箱) using pipes hidden in the walls, allowing water to flow easily between the windows and the tank.
This system allows the house to cool and reheat themselves automatically. When sunlight streams through the glass, the windows keep the buildings cool as the water takes in external and internal heat. This warm water then flows back to the tank. And when the outdoor temperature drops, the stored warm water is brought back to the walls to reheat the building using a monitoring system similar to central heating. The heated water can also be used for domestic (家用的) purposes. Although some electricity is required to pump the water back and forth, it uses much less energy than traditional air-conditioners or heaters.
Dr. Gutai claimed that WFG can save energy from 47% to 72% compared to when using traditional windows. Once launched into the market, the windows will surely make a real splash, appealing to a large crowd of environmentalists and contributing to reducing our carbon footprint. Currently, the inventor team is testing the windows in two areas with different weather conditions. The research reveals that WFG systems perform well in any inhabited climate—keeping buildings in hot climates cool and buildings in cool settings warm—without requiring an additional energy supply.
1. What’s the weakness of traditional glass windows?| A．They are easy to break into. | B．They release carbon dioxide. |
| C．They fail to trap the heat. | D．They lead to more energy consumption. |
| A．The structure of the WFG system. |
| B．The working process of the WFG system. |
| C．The advantages of water-filled windows. |
| D．The appearance of water-filled windows. |
| A．It is operated by man. |
| B．It needs no electricity at all. |
| C．It recycles the water in many ways. |
| D．It reheats the house via central heating. |
| A．Make a big fortune. | B．Draw lots of attention. |
| C．Form a huge waterfall. | D．Take immediate effect. |
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【推荐1】We are encountering real-world examples of how AI can harm human relations. As digital assistants such as Alexa or Siri become popular, we are becoming accustomed to talking to them as though they were alive; writing in these pages last year, Judith Shulevitz described how some of us are starting to treat them as friends and therapists. Shulevitz herself says she confesses things to Google Assistant that she wouldn’t tell her husband. If we grow more comfortable talking to our devices about our secrets, what happens to our human marriages and friendships? Designers and programmers typically create devices whose responses make us feel better—but may not help us be self-reflective or think over painful truths. As AI goes deeper into our lives, we must face the possibility that it will prevent our emotions and deep human connects.
Besides, we will fight with some other challenges. The age of driverless cars, after all, is upon us. These vehicles promise to substantially reduce the exhaustion and distraction that put human drivers in danger, thus preventing accidents. But what other effects might they have on people? Driving is a very modern kind of social interaction, requiring high levels of cooperation. I worry that driverless cars, by taking away from us an occasion to exercise this ability, could contribute to its decline.
Not only will these vehicles be programmed to take over driving duties and hence to remove from humans the power to make moral judgments (for example, about which pedestrian to hit when a crash is inevitable), they will also affect humans with whom they’ve had no direct contact. For instance, drivers who have steered awhile alongside an autonomous vehicle traveling at a steady, invariant speed might drive less attentively, thus increasing their likelihood of accidents once they’ve moved to a part of the highway occupied only by human drivers. Alternatively, experience may reveal that driving alongside autonomous vehicles travelling in perfect accordance with traffic laws actually improves human performance.
Either way, we should be careful to launch new forms of AI without first taking such social spillovers—or externalities, as they’re often called—into account. We must apply the same effort that we apply to the hardware and software that make self-driving cars possible to managing AI’s potential effects on those outside the car. After all, we install brake lights on the back of your car not just, or even primarily, for your benefit, but for the sake of the people behind you.
1. What can be inferred about human relationships from the first paragraph?| A．We will feel comfortable speaking to others online. |
| B．AI will lead to shallow inter-personal relationships. |
| C．AI will enable people to communicate more with others. |
| D．We will be more self-reflective in interaction thanks to AI. |
| A．drivers’ interaction with the cars |
| B．drivers’ exhaustion and distraction |
| C．our ability to cooperate with others while driving |
| D．our ability to deal with emergencies while driving |
| A．They may be better at making more judgments than human drivers. |
| B．They need to vary their speed to make contact with human drivers. |
| C．They may make human drivers in other cars drive more safely. |
| D．They need to force human drivers to concentrate in the car. |
| A．Brake lights on the back of our car are installed mainly to warn us of danger. |
| B．We should figure out how new technology affects people before developing it. |
| C．It is hard to say why social spillovers will work in terms of self-driving cars. |
| D．More effort should be made to advance the hardware and software of driverless cars. |
【推荐2】A person’s chances of falling ill from a new strain (菌株) of flu are at least partly determined by the first strain they ever met with, a study suggests.
Research in Science Journal looked at the 18 strains of influenza A ( 甲型流感) and the hemagglutinin protein (红血球凝集素蛋白) on its surface. They say there are only two types of this protein and people are protected from the one their body meets first, but at risk from the other one. A UK expert said that could explain different patterns in flu pandemics (流行病).The researchers, from University of Arizona in Tucson and the University of California, Los Angeles, suggest their findings could explain why some flu outbreaks cause more deaths and serious illnesses in younger people. The first time a person's immune system meets a flu virus, it makes antibodies targeting hemagglutinin protein that sticks out of the surface of the virus — like a lollipop (棒棒糖).
Even though there are 18 types of influenza A, there are only two versions of hemagglutinin. The researchers, led by Dr Michael Worobey, classed them as “blue” and “orange” lollipops. They said people born before the late 1960s were exposed to “blue lollipop” flu viruses — H1 or H2 — as children. In later life they rarely fell ill from another “blue lollipop” flu — H5N1 bird flu, but they died from “orange” H7N9. Those born in the late 1960s and exposed to “orange lollipop” flu — H3 — have the opposite pattern.
His team looked at cases of H5N1 and H7N9 — two kinds of bird flu which have affected hundreds of people, but have not developed into pandemics. The researchers found a 75% protection rate against severe disease and 80% protection rate against death if patients had been exposed to a virus with the same protein version when they were children.
Dr Worobey said the finding could explain the unusual effect of the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, which was more deadly among young adults. “Those young adults were killed by an H1 virus and from blood analysed many decades later there is a pretty strong indication that those individuals had been exposed to a mismatched H3 as children and were therefore not protected against H1. The fact that we are seeing exactly the same pattern with current H5N1 and H7N9 cases suggests that the same fundamental processes may govern both the historic 1918 pandemic and today’s contenders (斗争者) for the next big flu pandemic.”
Jonathan Ball, professor of University of Nottingham, said, “This is a really neat piece of work and provides a reason why human populations have been sensitive to different strains of bird influenza over the past 100 years or so. The findings are based on analysis of patient records and they certainly need further proof in the laboratory, but nonetheless the results are pretty amazing and inspiring.”
1. The findings, if proved, will help people .| A．protect themselves from flu attacks |
| B．analyze more clearly the records of a patient infected with a bird flu |
| C．find out who are easier to get infected with a bird flu than others |
| D．find new drugs to cure patients of flu infections |
| A．a good visual effect | B．a good logic effect |
| C．an effect of being abstract | D．an effect of being clear |
| A．the popularity of the research | B．challenges and current situation |
| C．summary and future plans | D．evaluation and influences |
| A．Cure for Bird Flu Not Far Away |
| B．First Flu Affects Lifetime Risk |
| C．New Classification of Flu Pandemics |
| D．How Bird Flu Affects People |
【推荐3】Google's new artificial intelligence can defeat both humans and other AIs. Fortunately, the only war zone where it fights and wins is the ancient board game Go（围棋）.
AlphaGo Zero, developed by Google-owned DeepMind, is the latest AI program. The original AlphaGo defeated Go master Lee Sedol last year, and AlphaGo Master, an updated version, went on to win 60 games against top human players. What's different about AlphaGo Zero is that it became potentially the world's best Go player without any help from humans.
The program AlphaGo Zero started off knowing only the basic rules and then played millions of games against itself in just a few days. After almost five million games played against itself, AlphaGo Zero could outplay humans and the original AlphaGo. After 40 days, it was capable of beating AlphaGo Master.
The program learned the strategies humans accumulated over thousands of years in a matter weeks and also developed nontraditional strategies and moves that beat the techniques of the human masters, leaving them astonished. "At each stage of the game, it seems to gain a bit here and lose a bit there, but somehow it ends up slightly ahead, as if by magic," said Andrew Jackson of the American Go Association
DeepMind says it has plans for the technology behind AlphaGo Zero beyond just defeating all over an ancient game board. "In the end, we want to apply these breakthroughs to helping solve all sorts of pressing real world problems like designing new materials," said Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, in a statement.
That sounds great, but just as a precaution, let's take the advice of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking and keep any super-fast learning AI away from the nuclear launch codes for now.
1. Which was probably the earliest AI program to play Go according to the text?| A．DeepMind. |
| B．AlphaGo. |
| C．AlphaGo Master. |
| D．AlphaGo Zero. |
| A．It teaches itself. |
| B．It beats AlphaGo Master. |
| C．It knows the basic rules of Go. |
| D．It plays against itself for a long time. |
| A．To design a new version. |
| B．To win all the ancient board games. |
| C．To beat human beings all over the world. |
| D．To inspire the world with solutions to global issues. |
| A．Negative. |
| B．Supportive. |
| C．Cautious. |
| D．Encouraging. |
【推荐1】Many people think that listening is a passive business. It is just the opposite. Listening well is an active exercise of our attention and hard work. It is because they do not realize this, or because they are not willing to do the work, that most people do not listen well.
Listening well also requires total concentration upon someone else. An essential part of listening well is the rule known as “bracketing”. Bracketing includes the temporary giving up or setting aside of your own prejudices and desires, to experience as far as possible someone else’s world from the inside, stepping into his or her shoes. Moreover, since listening well involves bracketing, it also involves a temporary acceptance of the other person. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will seem quite willing to open up the inner part of his or her mind to the listener. True communication is under way and the energy required for listening well is so great that it can be accomplished only by the will to extend oneself for mutual growth.
Most of the time we lack this energy. Even though we may feel in our business dealings or social relationships that we are listening well, what we are usually doing is listening selectively. Often we have a prepared list in mind and wonder, as we listen, how we can achieve certain desired results to get the conversation over as quickly as possible or redirected in ways more satisfactory to us. Many of us are far more interested in talking than in listening, or we simply refuse to listen to what we don’t want to hear.
It wasn’t until toward the end of my doctor career that I have found the knowledge that one is being truly listened to is frequently therapeutic. In about a quarter of the patients I saw, surprising improvement was shown during the first few months of psychotherapy, before any of the roots of problems had been uncovered or explained. There are several reasons for this phenomenon, but chief among them, I believe, was the patient’s sense that he or she was being truly listened to, often for the first time in years, and for some, perhaps for the first time ever.1. The phrase “stepping into his or her shoes” in paragraph 2 probably means _______.
| A．preparing a topic list first | B．focusing on one’s own mind |
| C．directing the talk to the desired results | D．experiencing the speaker’s inside world |
| A．How to listen well. | B．What to listen to. |
| C．Benefits of listening. | D．Problems in listening |
| A．listen actively | B．listen purposefully |
| C．set aside their prejudices | D．open up their inner mind |
| A．they were taken good care of. | B．they knew they were truly listened to. |
| C．they had partners to talk to. | D．they knew the roots of problems. |
| A．Science fiction | B．A news report. | C．A medical report. | D．Popular science |
【推荐2】It's surprising how much simple movement of the body can affect the way we think. Using expansive gestures with open arms makes us feel more powerful, crossing your arms makes you more determined and lying down can bring more insights(领悟).
So if moving the body can have these effects, what about the clothes we wear? We're all well aware of how dressing up in different ways can make us feel more attractive, sporty or professional, depending on the clothes we wear, but can the clothes actually change cognitive(认知) performance or is it just a feeling?
Adam and Galinsky tested the effect of simply wearing a white lab coat on people's powers of attention. The idea is that white coats are associated with scientists, who are in turn thought to have close attention to detail.
What they found was that people wearing white coats performed better than those who weren't. Indeed, they made only half as many errors as those wearing their own clothes on the Stroop Test(one way of measuing attention). The reserchrs call the effect "enclothed cognition," suggesting that all manner of different clothes probably affect our cognition in many differnt ways.
This opens the way for all sorts of clothes-based experiments. Is the writer who wears a fedora more creative? Is the psychologist wearing little round glasses and smoking a cigar more insightful? Does a chef's hat make the restaurant food taste better?
From now on I will only be editing articles for PsyBlog while wearing a white coat to help keep the typing error count low. Hopefully you will be doing your part by reading PsyBlog in a cap and gown(学位服).
1. What is the main idea of the text?| A．Body movements change the way people think. |
| B．How people dress has an influencee on their feelings. |
| C．What people wear can affect their cognitive performance. |
| D．People doing different jobs should wear different clothes. |
| A．insights | B．movements |
| C．attention | D．appearance |
| A．Academic. | B．Humorous. |
| C．Formal. | D．Hopeful. |
【推荐3】Many people think daydreaming is bad for their emotions and has negative effects on their life and those around them. It makes adapting to life very hard and brains work less effectively.
Contrary to common ideas, the brains of people who are daydreaming might not stop working, but may be working harder, new research has shown. Scientists scanned the brains of people lying inside magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, as they pushed buttons or rested in turn. The scans showed that the “default (默认的) network” deep inside a human brain becomes more active during daydreaming.
In a surprise finding, the scans also showed strong activity in the executive network, the outlying region of the brain associated with complex problem-solving, says Professor Kalina Christoff, who is a co-author of the study. “People assume that when the mind wanders away, it just gets turned off—but we show the opposite. When it wanders, it is turned on.” says Christoff.
The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest, “People who let themselves daydream might not think in the same focused way as when performing a goal-oriented task, but they bring in more mental and brain resources,” says Christoff.
F. Diane Barth said at Psychology Today that the more we daydream, the more our brain is able to hold onto the task when we are being bombarded (轰炸) from all sides by all kinds of noises, information input, and conflicting demands. You're not trying to escape the task at hand; rather, you're trying to get rid of all of the information and stimuli (刺激物) that could pose as bothers.
According to Christoff, people typically spend one third of their waking time daydreaming. “It is a big part of our lives, but it has been largely ignored by science,” she says. “The study is the first to use MRIs to study brain activity during spontaneous thoughts and subjective experiences. Until now the only way is to use self-reports that are not always reliable.”
1. What does the underlined word “they” in Paragraph 2 refer to?| A．Scientists. | B．Scans. | C．MRI machines. | D．Study subjects. |
| A．may help us get relaxed | B．may be beneficial to our health |
| C．may use less energy than focusing | D．may help us arrive at solutions faster |
| A．Daydreaming provides us with many stimuli. |
| B．Daydreaming is actually an act of concentration. |
| C．Daydreaming can make us forget unhappy things. |
| D．Daydreaming reminds us of more useful information. |
| A．MRIs are reliable to study brain activity. |
| B．People should spend more time daydreaming. |
| C．More studies about daydreaming need to be done. |
| D．People should make full use of daydreaming time. |
