【推荐1】With fifteen years Britain and other nations should be well on with the building of huge industrial complexes for the recycling of waste. The word “rubbish” could lose its meaning because everything which goes into the dumps would be made into something useful. Even the most dangerous and unpleasant wastes would provide energy if nothing else.

The latest project is to take a city of around half a million inhabitants and discover exactly what raw materials go into it and what go out. The aim is to find out how much of these raw materials could be provided if a plant for recycling waste were built just outside the city. This plant would recycle not only metal such as steel, lead and copper, but also paper and rubber as well.

Another new project is being set up to discover the best ways of sorting and separating the rubbish. When this project is complete, the rubbish will be processed like this: First, it will pass through sharp metal bars (金属条) which will tear open the plastic bags in which rubbish is usually packed; then it will pass through a powerful fan to separate the lightest elements from the heavy solids; after that founders and rollers will break up everything that can be broken. Finally, the rubbish will pass under magnets (磁铁), which will remove the bits of iron and steel; the rubber and plastic will then be sorted out in the final stage.

The first full-scale giant recycling plants are perhaps fifteen years away. Indeed, with the growing cost of transporting rubbish to more distant dumps (垃圾场), some big cities will be forced to build their own recycling plants before long.

【推荐2】With their pipes and lids to avoid spills, coffee cups have long been the substitute for adults. Now Starbucks is going all in on the concept by swearing to get rid of straws by 2020—and it’s all for a very good reason. This move is an answer to our own partners about what we can do to reduce the need for straws. Not using a straw is the best thing we can do for the environment.

In place of plastic straws, Starbucks plans to offer recyclable lids for all iced drinks and paper straws for coffee. The transition is already taking place in Starbucks’ hometown of Seattle, where a ban on plastic straws went into place on July 1. By rolling his in 28,00 of her ors by 2020, e comp says they are annually removing more than one billion straws from going into circulation—and potentially the ocean.

Starbucks’decision to gradually stop using single-use plastic straws is a shining example of the important role that companies can play in stopping the tide of ocean plastic. With eight million metric tons of plastic entering the ocean every year, we cannot afford to let industry sit on the sidelines. Marine life has a 50% death rate when it swallows plastic yet researchers believe there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by the year 2050 if this rate of litter continues. That means there can be an immediate positive impact if we swap plastic straws for environmentally friendly alternatives.

The smart design on the cup for cold drinks comes from Starbucks’ in-house team of designers and has been in development for two years. However, the announcement comes as outcry （倒彩） increases over the dangers that plastic straws can cause to marine life. Other companies making the eco-friendly swap also announced plans last month to test alternatives to plastic straws.

【推荐1】Fairy tales perform many functions. They entertain, encourage imagination, and teach problem -solving skills. They can also provide moral lessons, highlighting the dangers of failing to follow the social rules that let human beings coexist in harmony. Such moral lessons may not mean much to a robot, but a team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) believes it has found a way to turn the instructive fable (寓言) into a moral lesson that artificial intelligence (AI) can take to its cold, mechanical heart.

This, the researchers hope, will help prevent the intelligent robots from harming or even killing humanity, which is predicted and feared by some of the biggest names in technology, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Cates.

Mark Riedl, an associate professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech believes that the collected stories of different cultures not only teach children how to behave well but also teach robots how to get rid of violent or dangerous behaviour and help them make choices that won't harm humans and still achieve the intended purpose.

The system is called “Quixote”. The experiment involves going to a chemist to buy some medicine for a human who needs it as soon as possible. The robot has three choices. It can wait in line; it can communicate with the chemist politely and buy the medicine; it can steal the medicine. Without any further instructions, the robot will come to the conclusion that the most efficient means of getting the medicine is to steal it. Quixote offers a reward signal for waiting in line and politely buying the medicine and a punishment signal for taking it without permission. In this way, it learns the “moral” way to behave in that situation.

Quixote would work best on a robot that has a very limited function. It's a baby step in the direction of teaching more moral lessons into robots. We believe that AI has to be trained to adopt the values of a particular society, and in doing so, it will strive to avoid unacceptable behavior. Giving robots the ability to read and understand our stories may be the most efficient means.

【推荐2】Using more wood for construction has been praised as a lower-emission alternative to carbon-intensive steel and concrete but it may not be as carbon friendly as thought.

“It would be very convenient if wood were a better solution,” says Tim Searchinger atPrinceton University. Wood is, in theory, a renewable resource and any wood used in buildings acts as long-term carbon storage. Research has found that using wood for construction instead of concrete and steel can reduce emissions.

But Searchinger says many of these studies are based on the false assumption that harvesting wood is carbon neutral (中和的). “Only a small percentage of the wood gets into a timber (木材) product, and a fraction (小部分) of that gets into a timber product that can replace concrete and steel in a building,” he says. Efficiencies vary in different countries, but much of a harvested tree is left to rot and used for short-lived products like paper or burned for energy, all of which generate emissions.

In a report for the World Resources Institute, Searchinger and his colleagues have modeled how using more wood for construction would affect emissions between 2010 and 2050, accounting for the emissions from harvesting the wood. They considered various types of forests and fractions of wood going towards construction. They also factored in the emissions savings from replacing concrete and steel. In general, they found a large increase in global demand for wood would probably lead to rising emissions for decades.

The researchers report in a related paper that increasing forest harvests between 2010 and 2050 would add emissions equal to about 10 percent of total yearly emissions. William Moomaw at Tufts University in Massachusetts says the works show that harvesting timber, even when done sustainably, isn’t a carbon neutral activity.

Ali Amiri at Aalto University in Finland says the report’s conclusions about emissions from rising demand are probably correct, but the story is different for wood we have already harvested. Boosting the efficiency of current harvests and using more wood for longer-lived purposes than paper would cut emissions, he says. “We cannot just say we should stop using wood.”

【推荐2】A small device no bigger than a toaster has generated oxygen on the surface of Mars, bringing the chances of surviving on the red planet a step closer.

The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, better known as Moxie, has been generating oxygen from the atmosphere on Mars, as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover (漫游者) mission.

Moxie produced breathable oxygen in seven hour-long tests conducted in various weather and atmosphere conditions since landing. During each test, the device produced six grams of oxygen, about the same as a small tree and enough to sustain an astronaut for 15 minutes. It’s also found that even in extreme temperatures and after a Martian dust storm, Moxie continued to produce high-purity oxygen.

“This is the first demonstration of actually using resources on the surface of another planet and transforming them chemically into something that would be useful for a human mission,” said Jeff Hoffinan, a retired astronaut and professor at MIT.

NASA and the MIT team are planning to build a bigger version of Moxie, as they hope advanced models will produce enough oxygen to support a crewed mission to Mars. “We have to bring a lot of stuff from Earth to support a human mission, but oxygen is a big problem. If you can make it there, go for it and you’re way ahead of the game,” Hoffinan said.

The device uses pumps that absorb in carbon dioxide which is heated to 800℃and processed to separate the carbon and oxygen. Carbon monoxide (一氧化碳) is emitted as waste while the pure oxygen is left behind.

Expanding the device to support a human mission to Mars presents challenges. It is needed to run continuously for 400 days, a leap from the one-hour tests and its inner temperature should be controlled stably. Moxie has proved to endure the extreme conditions on Mars, however, and the team plans to assess the machine’s limits in the coming months when atmosphere is thick and carbon dioxide levels are high. They say they just want to set everything as high as they dare and make as much oxygen as they can.