【推荐1】The Mandarin（普通话）-speaking figure spins around a 360-degree restaurant scene in an artificial intelligence-driven instruction program that looks like a giant video game. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students testing the technology move inside the 12-foot-high projection（投影）to order virtual bean curd from the panda waiter, chat with Beijing market sellers and practice Tai chi by mirroring moves of a watchful teacher.

“Definitely less anxiety than messing it up with a real human being,” says Rahul Divekar, a computer science graduate student. “So compared to that anxiety, this is a lot more easy.”

The Mandarin Project is a joint enterprise of RPI and IBM. Cognitive and Immersive Systems Laboratory researchers are developing a sort of smart room that can understand students’ words, answer their questions and observe their gestures. Lessons are presented as games or tasks, like ordering a meal.

Divekar orders Peking duck-“Beijing kaoya”-and the panda fetches the virtual dish. Divekar says the food is good-“Cai hen hao chi”--but he can’t pay the bill. No problem, the panda replies-“Ni keyi xi pan zi”-you can wash the dishes.

Other scenes include an outdoor market and a garden, each a high-tech twist on cultural immersion.

“Our plan is to complete several scenes of real life in China, to let the student be able to have a virtual trip over there,” says Hui Su, director of the lab at RPI.

Tests on the room with students studying Mandarin will continue this school year as they work on additional scenes, including an airport. A six-week course is being readied for the summer.

The Mandarin Project is notable for its scale and complexity. Computers interpret speech and gesture to keep a dialogue going. When a student points to a picture and asks “What’s that?” computers can come up with an answer. Still, language teachers need not fear for their jobs just yet. Developers of the Mandarin Project say it isn’t advanced enough right now to completely replace classroom instruction.

RPI president Shirley Ann Jackson foresees the same type of technology being applied to other spaces, such as corporate boardrooms. “We’re not at the end of the line,” Jackson says, “but closer to the beginning.”

①China successfully launched Mengtian into space, getting a step closer to completing the country’s Tiangong Space Station by the end of this year.

②Mengtian is the second lab module(模块)and the last major component of the country’s space station. The first lab module is Wentian which is already docked (对接)with the Tianhe core module. The three modules will form a T-shaped complex in space.

③Mengtian weighs about 23 tons. It is 17.9 meters long and has a maximum diameter of 4.2 meters. It can be further subdivided into work, resource, payload and cargo airlock cabins.While Wentian is used for biological and space life science projects, such as observing the growth of various kinds of plants, animals and microbesin space, Mengtian will be used for in-orbit experiments dedicated to physics and material sciences and will focus on micro-gravity experiments. Mengtian will also act as a backup(备份)for the core module when it is undergoing maintenance(维修). And with Mengtian in place, the space station will be able to hold more taikonauts.

④Until now, space lectures(天宫课堂), Tiangong Class”, in China’s Tiangong space station have been broadcasting live to the world, attracting much attention in society. The public, especially the youth, are looking forward to the next space lecture. There are three taikonauts on board the space station at the moment. When Shenzhou-15 arrives with a change of crew, scheduled for early December, there will be six Chinese taikonauts living and working on the space station for a time until the return of the Shenzhou-14 mission crew members.

⑤China plans to complete the in-orbit construction of the space station by the end of this year. After that, the country’s space program will enter a new decade-long development and application stage. The original plan is to send two crewed spaceships and two cargo spaceships into space every year. Meanwhile, taikonauts will stay in orbit for extended periods to maintain the station and carry out scientific and technological experiments. And in 2023,China will also develop next-generation carrier rockets and crewed spaceships to significantly enhance(提高)its space program’s overall technological capabilities.

⑥China has expressed on many occasions that it accepts international cooperation and foreign astronauts to conduct research aboard its space station. So, let’s expect to unlock more mysteries of the universe through joint global efforts.

【推荐1】If you’re not ready to keep a dog or a cat, Panasonic has introduced yet another companion robot that dutifully pays attention to you just like a real pet.

Nicobo isn’t easy to describe; it’s as if someone flipped a bowl over, gave it some lively eyes, a wagging tail, and then wrapped in an old sock. It has no ability to locomote—it won’t come when you call it-but it’s attached to a moving base so that it can turn from side to side and look up and down. Co-developed by robotics researchers from the Toyohashi University of Technology, Nicobo also includes a camera for recognizing faces, multiple directional microphones for recognizing voices and turning to pay attention, touch sensors (传感器)so it knows when it’s being touched or hugged, and a light sensor so that like a cat, it can enjoy a nap in bright sunlight.

Instead of picking up laundry or cleaning your floors, Nicobo is all about providing simple companionship. So when someone pets it, the robot’s tail starts wagging in appreciation. But it can also have days when its mood isn’t so cheerful and that’s probably when it won’t think twice about farting (放屁)around you.

Nicobo can also talk, but in the beginning, it only speaks a single word. But eventually, it can speak full sentences in katakoto-the Japanese word for broken language, or baby talk. You’re never going to have a long conversation with Nicobo, but is simple sentences will help reinforce (加强) the feeling that it’s truly attentive and listening to your feelings, even if it can’t do anything about them. Sometimes that’s all a human needs.

Getting your hands on Nicobo is a little complicated. For starters, Panasonic is only planning to initially(起初) make 320 units of the little robot, with a price tag of around $ 360. But it’s handing preorders through its own crowdfunding(众筹)platform with the goal of raising 10,000,000 YEN(about $ 95,000)before production actually happens. And it looks like all the preorders for Nicobo are already claimed.

【推荐3】European Union scientists said on Wednesday that 2023 would be the warmest year on record. The average world temperature for the first 11 months of the year hit the highest level on record, 1.46 degrees Celsius above the 1850 to 1900 average.

The record comes as governments are in negotiations at the COP28 meeting in Dubai. Governments are deciding whether to gradually stop the use of coal, oil and gas, the main source of warming emissions.

The 2015 Paris climate agreement set a goal of limiting worldwide temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times. Above that limit, scientists warn of severe effects on weather, health and agriculture.

Diplomats, scientists, activists and others have been meeting in Dubai to find ways to limit warming to those levels. But the planet is not cooperating. They say Earth is on its way to reach 2.7 to 2.9 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. C3S records go back to 1940. United States government records go back to 1850. Using information from ice cores, tree rings and corals, scientists have said this is the warmest 10-year period Earth has seen in about 125,000 years. That dates back to the time before human civilization.

Scientists say there are two driving forces behind the six straight months of record hot temperatures. One is human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas. And El Nino, the natural warming of surface waters in the Pacific, is making it worse.

Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S, said in a statement that “the November temperatures, including two days warmer than 2C above preindustrial, mean that 2023 is the warmest year in recorded history, which is very likely to be a cool year in the future unless we do something about our dependence on fossil fuels.”

【推荐3】Seaweed farming, which has a long history in Asia, is spreading around the globe. Over the past 30 years, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, world production of seaweed has boomed more than six times to over 35 million tonnes, with emerging markets in the Americas, Europe and Africa. The most recent numbers, from 2019, show that North America produces some 23,000 tonnes of wet seaweed per year.

Cascadia, which was founded in 2019, claims to be the largest cultivator in North America, with a harvest of 200 wet tonnes so far this year. Farms, small and large, are popping up fast. Many see this expansion as a good news story. The Global Seaweed Coalition (GSC)—a research and industry group—says humanity could, and should, be harvesting 15 times more seaweed by 2050. Coalition member Vincent Doumeizel is a senior adviser on oceans to a United Nations program working toward corporate sustainability. He talks about a “seaweed revolution” to feed the growing global population—a transformation as dramatic as the ancient shift to land-based agriculture. “In the ocean, we are still hunter-gatherers,” he says.

The Global Seaweed Coalition estimates that seaweed (high in protein and other nutrients) could add 10 percent to the world’s food supply using just 0.03 percent of the ocean surface. One recent study concluded that substituting 10 percent of human food with seaweed by 2050 could spare 110 million hectares of land for purposes other than agriculture. That’s about two percent of all farmland today.

Advocates like Doumeizel cast seaweed as the solution to many social and environmental problems: The industry requires no fresh water, pesticides or fertilizers; it doesn’t take up any land; it can overlap (重叠) with other uses of the ocean like offshore wind farms; it can help to decrease poverty in the developing world; and some companies, including Cascadia, are collaborating with local communities.

Seaweed creates a rich habitat for sea life, soaks up carbon dioxide, counter-acts acid and absorbs run-off nutrients, although evidence quantifying how farms, specifically, help with such things remains scarce.