【推荐1】Singapore researchers say they have developed a form of electronic skin that can create a sense of touch. They hope their invention will give people with prosthetic hands (假肢手) the ability to identify different objects.

The skin device measures 1 square centimeter. The system contains 100 small sensors that attempt to recreate things like texture (质地), temperature and even pain. The researchers call the device Asynchronous Coded Electronic Skin, or ACES, which can process information faster than humans' nervous system. Machine learning methods trained the device to recognize 20 to 30 different textures. It can even correctly read Braille letters most of the time, the researchers say.

The system does not require the users' movement to work. Humans need to slide to feel texture. But in this case the skin, with just a single touch, is able to detect textures of different roughness.

A demonstration showed that the device could identify the difference between a soft ball and a solid plastic one. “When you lose your sense of touch, you essentially become numb and prosthetic users face that problem,” said Benjamin Tee, leader of the research team. “So by recreating an artificial version of the skin, for their prosthetic devices, they can hold a hand and feel the warmth and feel that it is soft.”

Tee said his idea for the device came from the movie Star Wars, when character Luke Skywalker loses his right hand and it is replaced with a robotic one. In the film, the new hand is able to experience touch sensations just like the real one.

The artificial skin technology is still going through experiments and development. But Tee said there had already been a lot of interest in the system, especially from the medical community. Tee said similar inventions that his team has developed include see-through skin that can repair itself when torn and a material for wearable electronic devices that gives off light.

【推荐1】In the far, far future, bicycles and perhaps skates may be run by jet power, and a new thing to ride may be a small flying saucer (飞碟). Imagine a race between them!

There may be telepathy helmets (心灵感应头盔) that send thought waves from your brain to that of your friend miles away. You just think a thought and your friend knows it! You can have secrets with each other that nobody else can turn in on!

What about the food of the future? Scientists think that much of it will be artificial—made in factories from such surprising things as coal, limestone, air and water. The artificial food will be healthful because all the things that you need to live a long and healthy life will be put into it.

The future hospitals will probably have “body banks” that can give you almost any new part you need to keep on living. People of the future may live to be a lot older than 100 years.

What about highways of the future? Well, a very small child probably will be able to drive a car. Electric signals will hold each car on the right road to get wherever the “driver” wants to go. And it probably will be impossible for cars to crash together. Controls that won’t even have to be touched will make all speeding cars miss each other or will put on the brakes. Driving cars will be as safe as being at home.

But maybe the most wonderful surprise in the future will be weather control. Cities may have giant plastic domes (圆顶罩) over them to keep out snow, rain, or storms. When you plan a picnic in a park, you won’t have to worry about rain. It will rain only when the “weatherman” thinks it is necessary to fresh the air inside the city. All other days will be fair and warm.

The future should be a wonderful time in which to live and the time we are living in now is also a wonderful future to the people who lived 100 years ago.

【推荐2】Science is finally beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens.

As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of separation. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choose to give up an immediate food reward for a slightly later (and better) one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when those friends die.

Pigs respond to human symbols. When a research team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignored the X carriers in favor of the O’s. Then the team switched from real-life objects to T-shirts printed with X or O symbols. Still, the pigs walked only toward the O-shirted people: they had transferred their knowledge to a two-dimensional format, a not inconsiderable feat of reasoning.

I’ve been guilty of prejudiced expectations, myself. At the start of my career almost four decades ago, I was firmly convinced that monkeys and apes out-think other animals. They’re other primates（灵长目动物）, after all, animals from our own mammalian class. Fairly soon, I came to see that along with our closest living relatives, whales too are masters of cultural learning, and that elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies on these mammals helped to fuel a viewpoint shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedure in laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks.

Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chickens, pigs, goats, and cows, 1 started to wonder: Will the new science of “food animals” bring an ethical (伦理的) revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will our ethics start to catch up with the development of our science?