【推荐1】After building some standard cargo bikes,    1    , this time with something very special. I wanted to build an ideal cargo bike combining the stability of a three-wheeler with the possibility to change directions like being on two wheels.

The first step was to do extensive research.    2    . An incredible source of technical inspiration was the online Tilting Group. Although primarily concerned with tilting concepts of engine driven constructions, the group is surely the best place to find information about constructing a tilter.

After researching and outlining a few ideas, I grabbed some parts and started with a very simple prototype. Building such a vehicle needs a high degree of accuracy, which was not the case with my prolotype.     3    . So I made a few more sketches, which led to an improved version of the driving and tilting mechanism.

Then I started building the tricycle. Building the structure was quite straightforward. As usual I took an old bike apart for the back triangle and then added the front part. After adding a cargo basket to the structure,     4    .

Now came the hard part the driving mechanism. I started with the usual design used for two-wheel cargo bikes, but it took me quite some time to figure out how to pass the driving force to both wheels without allowing the whole thing to lock itself in any angle.

    5    , but I’m sure I can use the knowledge I gained one way or another.

【推荐3】John Goodenough shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his crucial role in developing the revolutionary lithium-ion (锂离子) battery, the rechargeable power pack that is ubiquitous in today’s wireless electronic devices and electric and hybrid vehicles.

He was the unwanted child of a Yale University professor of religion and a mother with whom he never bonded. Friendless except for three siblings, a family dog and a maid, he grew up lonely in an emotionally distant household. He was sent to a private boarding school at 12 and rarely heard from his parents.

With patience, counseling and intense struggles for self-improvement, he overcame his reading disabilities. He studied Latin and Greek in the boarding school and mastered mathematics at Yale and meteorology in the Army Air Forces after graduation.

At M. I. T.’s laboratory in the 1950s, he was a member of teams that helped lay the groundwork for random access memory (RAM) in computers and developed plans for the first air defense system. In 1976, as federal funding for his work ended, he moved to Oxford to teach and manage a chemistry lab, where he began his research on batteries.

Seeking to improve on the traditional design, Dr. Goodenough crafted the cathode with layers of lithium and cobalt oxide. The arrangement also produced a higher voltage and made the battery far more stable. He succeeded after four years. It was the first lithium-ion battery with the capacity to power both compact and relatively large devices, a quality that would make it far superior to anything on the market.

However, there was little interest in his discovery at first, and Oxford declined to patent it. In 1991, Sony, recognizing the commercial potential of the emerging technology, combined Dr. Goodenough’s cathode (阴极) and a carbon anode (阳极) to produce the world’s first safe rechargeable lithium-ion battery for the marketplace. A revolution in wireless mobile devices thus exploded, populating the planet with smartphones, laptop and tablet computers and clean, quiet plug-in vehicles.

In 2019, when he was 97 and still active in research, Dr. Goodenough became the oldest Nobel Prize winner in history. He received no royalties (技术使用费) for his work on the battery, only his salary for six decades as a scientist and professor at three prestigious colleges. Caring little for money, he signed away most of his rights. He shared patents with colleagues and donated incomes that came with his awards to research and scholarships.

“Goodenough’s original cathode structure is still used in the batteries found in almost all personal electronics,” Helen Gregg wrote in The University of Chicago Magazine. “When he was tinkering with cathodes back at Oxford, Goodenough had no idea of the impact his battery would have, but in fact, he was changing the world.”

【推荐1】It seems that friends often have similar body odor. Dogs greet other dogs using their noses first, as they are sniffing each other. People are not quite so open about the process of sniffing each other out.

    1     There is also evidence that human beings can infer kinship, deduce emotional states and even detect disease via the sense of smell.     2     They think they have shown, admittedly in a fairly small sample of individuals, that friends actually smell alike.

They have also shown that this is probably the case from the get-go, with people picking friends at least partly on the basis of body odor, rather than the body odor of people who become friends subsequently converging.

As they report in Science Advances, these scientists started their research by testing the odors of 20 pairs of established, non-romantic, same-sex friends.     3     The e-nose used a set of metal-oxide gas sensors to assess T-shirts worn by participants.     4     Those in the other group were asked to rate the odors of individual T-shirts on five subjective dimensions: pleasantness, intensity, sexual attractiveness, competence and warmth.

The e-nose results and the opinions of the second group of smellers were then subjected to a bit of multidimensional mathematical analysis, emerging as simple, comparable numbers.

All three approaches yielded the same result. The T-shirts of friends smelt more similar to each other than did the T-shirts of strangers.     5    

【推荐2】Researchers have 3D printed a heart using a patient's cells, providing hope that the technique could be used to heal hearts or engineer new ones for transplants.

“This is the first time anyone anywhere has successfully engineered and printed an entire heart,” Professor Tal Dvir said in a statement. Dvir is the senior author of the research, published on Monday in the journal Advanced Science.

The cells that made the heart came from a donor's fat tissue. Researchers separated the cells in the tissue from the rest of the contents. The cells were reprogrammed to become stem cells with the ability into heart cells. The cells and hydrogel were first used to create heart patches with blood vessels (血管) and, from there, an entire heart.

At this stage, our 3D heart is small, the size of a rabbit's heart,” Dvir said. “But larger human require the same technology.” Previously, scientists had been able to print only simple tissues without blood vessels.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the developing world. Heart transplantation is the only way to treat end-stage heart failure, highlighting the importance of developing techniques such as 3D printing, according to the authors.

Dvir also explained that using the patient's own cells is key to engineering the tissues and organs. “It's important because it prevents the possibility of rejection,” he said.

Next, the researchers plan to train the hearts to behave like real ones. Dvir explained, “The cells need to form a pumping ability; they can contract, but we need them to work together.”

If researchers are successful, they plan to transplant the 3D-printed heart in animal models and, after that, humans. “Maybe, in ten years ,there will be organ printers in the finest hospitals around the world ,and these procedures will be conducted routinely,” Dvir said.

【推荐2】Coca-Cola announced on Wednesday that it will begin transitioning (转变) from green to clear plastic on Aug. I to increase the material’s likelihood of being remade into new beverage (饮料) bottles. The beverage giant is committed to making 100% of its packaging recyclable by 2025 and using at least 50% recycled material in its packaging by 2030.

Sprite, an important brand of Coca-Cola, currently uses plastic bottles containg a green additive called Polyethylene Telephthalate (PET). These bottles are commonly changed into single-use items like clothing and carpeting that can’t be recycled into new PET bottles.

“Taking colors out of bottles improves the quality of the recycled material,” said Julian Ochoa, CEO of R3CYCLE, which is working with Coca-Cola to improve bottle-to-bottle recycling. “When recycled, clear PET Sprite bottles can be remade into bottles, helping drive a circular economy for plastic.”

Sprite, the popular lemon-flavored soft drink, which first hit shelves in 1961, is also getting a new logo and packaging design. Sprite’s packaging will keep the brand’s recognizable green colour and include noticeable “Recycle Me” message. Other drinks that use green bottles, including Fresca, Seagram’s, and Mello Yello, will also transition to clear packaging in the coming months.

Both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have been criticized for contributing to the world’s plastic pollution. In 2021, both companies ranked as the world’s top plastic polluters for the 4th consecutive (连续的) year by the environmental organization Break Free From Plastic. Global beach cleanups were carried out by more than 11,000 volunteers in 45 countries to identify the most common plastic polluters. Break Free From Plastic found that 20,000 Coca-Cola branded products were picked up, representing more pollution than the next two top polluters combined.

Coca-Cola announced its “World Without Waste” sustainable packaging program in 2018, in which it promised to make all of its packaging recyclable — excluding the caps and labels — as well as have at least 25% of its beverages sold in refillable packaging by 2030.

【推荐1】In recent years, the number of young adults returning to their parents’ homes after leaving has risen. This is the Boomerang Generation, becoming independent only to return to their parents’ homes like boomerangs. A boomerang is a curved(呈弯曲状的) stick that, when thrown in a particular way, comes back to the person who threw it.

One of our family members had a college roommate who dropped out(辍学) and went back to her parents because she was unable to wash her clothes. This is quite a funny example, but stories like these are plentiful. The dropout and many other young adults are often short of basic life skills, so they move out of the family home for a time and then boomerang right back.

We believe having more real-life learning in high school may solve young adults’ inability to become independent. This can be achieved through simply including extra Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills requirements for life skills. The TEKS would include learning about taxes(税), banking, health, voting(选举), job interviews, cooking, and many other important skills.

These areas of study happen to go with required courses. For learning how to do taxes, we would want to include a TEKS in math classes. In an economics class, we would require students to learn about banking and housing. In history class, students would have to learn about the importance of voting. In English class, students could learn about jobs. Cooking would be added to health class.

If in high school we can teach these skills, graduates going to college or trade school won’t need to worry about their living skills and can focus on their education. More students can finish their studies and get degrees. And once out of college or trade school, young people can focus on their jobs and responsibilities as adults. Thus jobs will be done better, people will better understand their role in society and be better rounded as both students and individuals(个人).

【推荐2】Libraries have been bastions of knowledge for millennia, and little has changed during the ages in how they operate on a basic level. Only in the past few decades have computer databases made logging books and academic papers more efficient. From virtual AI voices that can help you choose your next novel, to physical machines that archive (归档), retrieve (检索), and log books of all kinds, technology is stealthily influencing our quiet reading zones.

Robots are steadily emerging in libraries around the world, too. Robots that can search through the shelves and scan them for misplaced books may soon be the future for every school and community learning facility. Books have, in recent years, been fitted with radio frequency tags, similar to those used in keycards and for unlocking cars. These can be scanned by autonomous machines, and flagged up to librarians if a book happens not to be found.   

Reality technologies that superimpose (叠加) data onto the surroundings of a user are also fast becoming popular in education sectors and in libraries. Subjects such as history, science, and technology are all benefiting from such immersive visual “textbooks”, which may slowly come to replace existing physical paper books.

Apps can now show users what their area looked like in ancient times, as a user looks around, or highlight environmental damage in specific areas with data and analysis in real time as users walk.

The popular use of these programs, especially in university libraries, means that significant facility upgrades will be seen universally in the coming years.