Get cold hands, but hate wearing gloves? There might soon be a technology that can help you. The US scientists are developing an arm heater that allows people to go glove free in freezing conditions, helping them to carry out mechanical repairs or first aid.
In cold weather, wearing gloves might be a good choice because they can keep your hands at a comfortable temperature, but they often reduce flexibility. Take off your gloves, though, and numbing cold has an equally damaging effect on your fine motor skills, as well as being extremely uncomfortable.
John Castellani, an American physiologist who specializes in cold weather, and his team are attempting to solve the problem with a pair of electrically heated armbands worn around the forearms.
Dr. Castellani says that much of the problem is due to the body shutting down blood flow to surrounding areas. “Through research, we find keeping the forearms warm can prevent this,” he says.
A previous study showed that heating the torso (躯干) also keeps the hands warm, but that approach requires too much power for a portable device. Castellani’s team has found that warming just the forearm with a battery-powered gadget improves both finger temperature and ability in tasks requiring manual skill, such as putting pegs in a peg board. In a series of tests, the device reduced flexibility loss by 50 percent and finger strength loss by 90 percent compared with wearing no gloves at 0.5 ℃. The electric forearm heater helps by a combination of delivering warmer blood to the fingers and reducing blood vessel constriction (血管收缩). Even if the wearer can’t go glove free, it could allow them to wear thinner gloves.
1. Why is the electric forearm heater being developed?| A．To deliver warmer blood to the fingers in cold weather. |
| B．To reduce blood vessel constriction in cold weather. |
| C．To have the wearer go without gloves in cold weather. |
| D．To keep hands warm and skillful in cold weather. |
| A．They are difficult to carry around. |
| B．They have been on sale in the market. |
| C．They use less power comparatively. |
| D．They can heat the body together. |
| A．The wearer. | B．The arm heater |
| C．The blood vessel | D．The warmer blood |
| A．To inform. | B．To entertain. |
| C．To advertise. | D．To educate. |
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【推荐1】Have you ever lost something in a hard-to-reach space, like behind a sofa or under the bed? Wouldn’t it be nice to just squeeze (挤) in and out to get it? New robots will soon make this happen.
In a study, scientists from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Carnegie Mellon University in the US have invented small robots that can quickly change into liquid (液体) states. They melted (熔化) into liquid and managed to get out of a locked cage (笼子) during the tests, shocking the whole scientific community.
According to the website Mashable, the scientists got the idea from sea cucumbers (海参), which can change the softness of their bodies and easily enter any place .The robots in the study were made from a soft metal, which has a low melting point of only 30°C.The scientists firstly place the robot in a magnetic field (磁场). Thanks to the magnetic field, the robot can then be heated into a liquid form, allowing it to enter some hard-to-reach places. After that, by controlling the strength or direction of the magnetic field, the robot can be moved around in a controlled manner.
Hopefully, these liquid robots can be widely used in different fields and will not disappoint us. They can help take out a foreign object from a model human stomach. Scientists can use them to repair a TV set by squeezing them into hard-to-reach areas inside the TV set. To prevent humans from being harmed, these robots can perform dangerous tasks in hard-to-reach environments, such as cleaning in nuclear power plants (核能发电).
“What we’re showing are just ideas that need to be developed further,“ said Carmel Majidi of Carnegie Mellon University. “The goal of our future research is to put these liquid robots to use in real-life situations more quickly. We are very confident about achieving this goal.”
1. The writer started the passage by .| A．asking questions | B．telling stories |
| C．giving examples | D．comparing facts |
a. It is heated into a liquid form.
b. It is put in a magnetic field.
c. The magnetic field is used to move robots.
d. It enters some hard-to-reach places.
| A．a-c-d-b | B．b-a-d-c | C．a-b-c-d | D．d-b-a-c |
| A．Why scientists invented liquid robots | B．How liquid robots work in a magnetic field |
| C．Where small liquid robots are invented | D．What liquid robots can do now and in the future |
| A．disappointed | B．humorous | C．angry | D．confident |
【推荐2】The world's best largest bicycle park
Ector Hoogstad Architecten has completed a three-storey bicycle park to store 12,656 bikes below Utrecht Central Station in the Netherlands.
The project begins as part of a wider redevelopment of the area surrounding the city's railway station, and is designed to enable cyclists to ride from the street level to the bike store, from which they can quickly access the station. It is hoped that the project will encourage locals to commute (通勤) using bikes and public transport instead of cars and make Utrecht a more sustainable(可持续的) city.
''Our comfortable bicycle parking is the answer to a major problem in the inner cities worldwide：pollution,'' explained the Rotterdam architecture studio. ''We created such a park that favors cyclists and pedestrians and make scar useless attractive.''
Ector Hoogstad Architecten won a competition to design the bike park at Utrecht Central Station in 2011.The first phase was finished in August of 2017, opening with space for 6,000 bikes. Now completed, the bike park accommodates three levels of underground stores for 12,656 bicycles-overtaking the world's former largest bike parking lot in Tokyo that houses 9,000.
Besides the storage, the project has a repair service and a bicycle hire shop. It also relies on a digital system to guide cyclists to a parking spot that provides the quickest access to the platforms.
The three-storey bike parking sits directly below Utrecht Central Station, accessed by pink cycle lanes(车道) that continue down inside and wraparound the edges of the structure.
The bike lanes connect to the parking across three levels. They are also color-coded(用颜色区分的) to guide cyclists through the space and to their parking lot.
Each parking spot branches off from the cycle paths, designed to provide plenty of space for people to dismount from their bikes without getting in the way of other cyclists. The concept is about speed and safety.
''The building is more than just the basic service system,'' added Ector Hoogstad Architecten. ''It adds an exciting and surprising architectural aspect to the city. Cycling through the garage has become a unique experience-not just another part of everyday life in the city, but almost an attraction in its own right. ''
1. Why do the Netherlands build the bicycle park?| A．To cut down on car use. |
| B．To promote sales of bikes. |
| C．To create more public parks. |
| D．To provide unique public services. |
| A．It guides cyclists to a parking lot. |
| B．It offers easy access to bike repair service. |
| C．It enables people to hire a bicycle. |
| D．It provides plenty of space for car drivers. |
| A．Get on. | B．Get off. |
| C．Keep from. | D．Remove from. |
| A．There are three large bike stores below the station. |
| B．Cyclists can park their bikes wherever they like. |
| C．Each parking spot forks off from the bike paths. |
| D．The bike park opened with space for 6,000 bikes in 2011. |
【推荐3】Brown cows may not actually make chocolate milk, but pink silkworms（蚕）do produce pink silk, a team of scientists has discovered. To see if they could produce pre-dyed silk-silk that comes colored, straight from the source-the team fed ordinary silkworms mulberry（桑树）leaves that had been sprayed（喷洒）with fabric（织物）dyes（染色剂）. Out of seven tested dyes, only one worked, producing a thread that reminded me of pink-dyed hair.
And yes, the worms themselves take on some color before they produce silk. Their colorful diets did not affect their growth, the team, which included engineers and biologists from the CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory in India, reports in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. (The researchers didn't look too deeply into how the dyes affected the silkworms' health. After all, silkworms die when people harvest their silk.)
The team made dyeing silk this way because coloring fabric normally uses large amounts of fresh water. The water gets polluted with dangerous chemicals in the process, requiring costly treatment before factories can send it back into waterways. Dyeing silk directly by feeding silkworms would avoid those water-washing steps. Scientists are just starting to study this idea. However, it remains to be seen if it's commercially successful. In this experiment, the Indian team tested seven dyes, which are cheap and popular in the industry.
The scientists found different dyes moved through silkworms' bodies differently. Some never made it into the worms' silk at all. Others colored the worms and their silk, but the color disappears before the silk is turned into fabric. Only one dye, named "direct acid fast red", showed up in the final, washed silk threads. By the time it made it there, it was a pleasant, light pink.
1. The text is most probably a(n) ________.| A．science report | B．tourist guide |
| C．animal experiment | D．fashion advertisement |
| A．they are born pink | B．they are dyed pink |
| C．they grow in pink water | D．they are fed dyed food |
| A．In America. | B．In India. | C．In Israel. | D．In China. |
| A．One. | B．Three. | C．Five. | D．Seven. |
【推荐1】California start-up OpenAI has released a chatbot (chat robot) able to answer a variety of questions, but its impressive performance has reopened the debate on the risks linked to AI technologies.
Posted on Twitter by fascinated users, the conversations with the chatbot called ChatGPT show a kind of omniscient (无所不知的) machine, from explaining scientific concepts to writing scenes for a play, university essays or even functional lines of computer code.
“Its answer to the question ‘what to do if someone has a heart attack’ was incredibly clear and relevant,” Claude de Loupy, an expert in automatic text generation told AFP. “When you start asking very specific questions, ChatGPT’s response can be off the mark, but its overall performance remains ‘really impressive’ with a ‘high level’.” he said.
A few years ago, chatbots had the vocabulary of a dictionary and the memory of a goldfish. Now Chatbots are getting much better at the “history problem” where they act in a manner consistent with the history of responses. The chatbots have graduated from goldfish status.
However, like other programs relying on deep learning, ChatGPT has one major weakness: it doesn’t have access to meaning. The software cannot justify its choices, such as explaining why it picked the words that make up its responses.
AI technologies able to communicate are increasingly worrying some observers. They voice concern that these technologies could be misused to trick people. What does ChatGPT think of the risk? “There are potential dangers in building highly complex chatbots, particularly if they are designed to be indistinguishable from humans in their language and behavior.” the chatbot said.
Open AI CEO Sam Altman shared his ideas on the debates surrounding AI. “Interesting watching people start to debate whether powerful AI systems should behave in the way users want or their creators intend,” he wrote, “The question of whose values we adjust these systems to will be one of the most important debates society ever has.”
1. How does paragraph 2 show ChatGPT’s wonderful performance?| A．By using figures. | B．By listing examples. |
| C．By giving definitions. | D．By making comparisons. |
| A．Creative. | B．Inaccurate. | C．Immediate. | D．Objective. |
| A．It has poor memory. | B．It has limited vocabularies. |
| C．It fails to account for its choices. | D．It lacks power to stick to its responses. |
| A．The value that AI follows remains to be discussed. |
| B．Advanced AI should go after creators’ intention. |
| C．The function of AI relies entirely on users. |
| D．Debates on the application of AI are unnecessary. |
【推荐2】Politicians and the public tend to worry about carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (排放) but neglect the effects of cutting methane (甲烷). Actually, dealing with the gas would have a large effect rapidly and at relatively low cost.
Human activity emits far less methane than carbon dioxide, but methane has a heavier impact. Over the course of 20 years, a ton of the gas will warm the atmosphere about 86 times more than a ton of CO2. As a result, methane is responsible for 23% of the rise in temperatures since preindustrial times. Carbon dioxide gets most of the attention, but unless methane emissions are limited, there is little hope of controlling the climate.
By how much do methane emissions need to fall? Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, making it hard to reduce its atmospheric concentrations (浓度). By contrast, methane has a half-life of roughly ten years, which means that it degrades quickly. If new emissions can be cut to below the rate at which old emissions reduce, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere will soon fall, slowing global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that, to keep temperatures between 1.5℃ and 2℃ above preindustrial levels, human methane emissions must drop to 35% below where they stood in 2010 by midcentury.
That is entirely possible. A big step would be to stop millions of tons of methane from leaking out of fossil-fuel infrastructure each year, through pipes with holes, leaky valves and carelessness. The International Energy Agency, a global forecaster, estimates that 40% of methane emissions from fossil fuels, equal to 9% of all human methane emissions, can be got rid of at no net cost for firms. The harder task is to reduce emissions from agriculture, but even here farmers can make use of new ideas, including developing new forms of food for farm animals, and changing how rice is watered.
1. What does the underlined word “neglect” in paragraph 1 probably mean?| A．Ignore. | B．Blame. | C．Value. | D．Delay. |
| A．A less serious threat to global warming. |
| B．The little hope of controlling the climate. |
| C．People’s more attention on carbon dioxide. |
| D．The urgent need to reduce methane emissions. |
| A．They are the only hope of controlling the climate. |
| B．Their atmospheric concentrations are hard to reduce. |
| C．Their impact on the climate is huge but manageable. |
| D．They stay in the atmosphere longer than carbon dioxide. |
| A．Coal mining. | B．Rice farming. | C．Fuel burning. | D．Oil leaking. |
【推荐3】Scientists say they’ve developed a system using machine learning to predict when and where lightning will strike. The research was led by engineers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland.
European researchers have estimated between 6,000 and 24,000 people are killed by lightning worldwide each year. The strikes can also cause power outages (停电), destroyed property, damage electrical equipment and start forest fires. For these reasons, climate scientists have long sought to develop methods to predict and control lightning. But no system has been created to effectively predict lightning.
The system tested in the experiments used a combination of data from weather stations and machine learning methods. The researchers developed a prediction model that was trained to recognized weather conditions that were likely to cause lightning.
The model was created with data collected over 12-year period from 12 Swiss weather stations in cities and mountain areas. The data related to four main surface conditions: air pressure, air temperature, relative humidity (湿度) and wind speed.
The atmospheric data was placed into a machine learning algorithm (算法), which compared it to records of lightning strikes. Researchers say the algorithm was then able to learn the conditions under which lightning happens.
Amirhossein Mostajabi is a PhD student at the institute who led the development of the method. He said, “current systems for gathering such data are slow and complex and require costly collection equipment like radar or satellites.”
“Our method uses data that can be obtained from any weather station,” Mostajabi said. “This will improve data collection in very remote areas not covered by radar and satellites or in places where communication systems have been cut,” he added.
1. Why have climate scientists tried to predict and control lightning?| A．To collect relative data. |
| B．To create a scientific system. |
| C．To do research in relation to machine learning. |
| D．To reduce the destruction lightning has been caused. |
| A．wind speed | B．air pollution |
| C．relative humidity | D．air temperature |
| A．Lightning. | B．The system being tested. |
| C．The atmospheric data. | D．The machine learning algorithm. |
| A．He developed the method and the system by himself. |
| B．He thinks the current systems are too slow and simple. |
| C．He is a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. |
| D．He believes their system does much better in data collection. |
