【推荐1】Is an electric vehicle right for you?

Many people will ask themselves that question for the first time this year. Prices are falling, battery range is rising and mainstream brands are adding new EVs at a breakneck pace.

Here are three things anybody seriously considering buying an EV should know:

1. The price to install a 240v charger

Anybody who owns an electric vehicle needs a 240-volt charger at home. With one, you can recharge overnight, so you start every day with the equivalent of a full tank.

Just a few years ago, home 240v EV chargers cost $2,500-$3,000, including installation, but prices have declined as competition grows with the number of EVs on the road.

2. The time it takes to charge

About 80% of miles driven in EVs are powered by electricity charged at home, but you’ll need to charge elsewhere occasionally. That’s when charging time becomes a big deal, but how long it takes depends on a couple of factors.

First, voltage from the charger. Getting 250 miles of range in seven hours from a 240v charger is fine when you’re charging overnight at home, but it’s a deal breaker if you’re going 300 miles for a weekend getaway. In that case, you’ll want to look for a 400v DC fast charger. They’re not as common as 240v public chargers yet, but they’re becoming more widespread.

There’s another factor: the on-board charger. It regulates how fast the battery can accept electricity. A vehicle with a higher-capacity on-board charger accepts electricity faster.

3. Where to charge

Good route-planning apps will help you find chargers on a road trip.

“Most people have no idea how many public charging stations are within, say, a 10-or 15-mile radius(半径) because they’re small, people don’t look for them or even don’t know what to look for, and they’re rarely signposted,” said journalist John Voelcker, who has studied EVs and charging exhaustively.

4. On the horizon

If an EV doesn’t meet your needs now, watch this space. They’re coming closer, but large numbers of gasoline vehicles will remain in production for years. Beyond that, companies will keep making spare parts for oil-burners for decades.

【推荐2】Have you ever taken a selfie (自拍照) and thought, “Why do I look so weird (奇怪的)?” The reason may be because photos show us the reverse (相反) of what we see in the mirror. When we take a photo of ourselves using the front-facing camera on a phone, the resulting image captures our face as others see it. This can be a little weird because our faces are not perfectly symmetrical, and certain features don’t line up in photos the same way they do in the mirror.

In addition to the reverse image issue, our tendency to like what we’re familiar with also plays a role. We are most familiar with our faces as we see them in the mirror, so we come to prefer that mirror image. According to the mere exposure theory, repeatedly encountering something makes us like it more. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we tend to focus on what we consider our good side, or the angle that seems most attractive to us.

“You have that familiarity, which breeds liking. You’ve established a preference for that look of your face,” said Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center.

New York-based photographer Michael Levy expanded on Rutledge’s point. He noted that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we tend to focus on what we consider our good side — that is, the angle that seems most attractive to us.

Furthermore, when we see our faces in the mirror, we are looking at ourselves in motion, as opposed to completely still in a photo. We tend to notice a lot more details in a still photo, and different camera lenses and a person’s distance to the camera can also change the way people look in photos.

But ultimately, the way we appear in photos is the way we look to the rest of the world, and studies have shown that other people generally like the version of us they see, as opposed to the image we see of ourselves. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. So go forth and selfie.

【推荐1】Human experts spend years roasting and tasting coffee from many places to learn about the beans. They might then combine a coffee bean from Africa with another one from South America to come up with a new blend. But, a coffee roasting company in Helsinki, Finland is hoping that artificial intelligence, or AI, can help ease the workload.

Kaffa Roastery recently launched its “AI-conic” blend at the Helsinki Coffee Festival. The blend is a mixture of four kinds of beans, including Fazenda Pinhal from Brazil. It is the result of a joint project by Kaffa and Elev, a local AI business. Elev told The Associated Press that its computer models, similar to ChatGPT and Copilot, created a blend that would “push the boundaries of conventional flavor combinations. ”

Svante Hampf is the founder of Kaffa Roastery. He and his partners wanted to do an experiment to see what blend the computer would produce. “We basically gave descriptions of all our coffee types and their flavors to AI and instructed it to create a new exciting blend, ” Hampf said. The “AI-conic” blend combined beans from Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia and Guatemala. It is described as “a well-balanced blend of sweetness and ripe fruit”.

Hampf said he thought the combination was “somewhat weird. ” He was surprised that the AI program chose to make the blend out of four different kinds of beans. Most humans choose only two or three beans. However, after the first blind test of the new blend, Kaffa’s coffee experts agreed that the AI-assisted blend was perfect. There was no need to change.

Elev’s Antti Merilehto said “AI-conic” is an example of “how AI can introduce new perspectives to seasoned professionals.” And the roasters at Kaffa said they hope the AI project will help to bring more things to the strong coffee culture in the country.

【推荐2】Time is running out for coral reefs as the climate gets hotter. So scientists are searching the globe for corals that are better at enduring heat, Now, new research shows how those “super corals” can survive: less roommate drama.

Reefs depend on a crucial partnership between the corals and the algae (海藻) that live in the corals’ tissue, The algae make food for the corals using sunlight and in exchange, get a nice spot to live. But when oceans heat up, that relationship goes bad, and the corals kick the algae out, Without their roommates, corals can die, turning a ghostly white, bleached (白化) color.

Still, some corals seem to resist bleaching better than others, A new study shows that those corals depend on algae that are better at tolerating heat. Researchers hope that pinpointing these abilities will help develop new conservation tools to preserve the world’s reefs as temperatures rise. About 1/4 of all marine life rely on coral reefs in some way, along with half 1 billion people around the world also depend on reefs for their food and livelihoods.

“Heat stress can kill a lot of corals really fast,” says Kate Quigley, a research scientist at James Cook University and the Minderoo Foundation in Australia. “I hope that nature does have some mechanisms to get us through the next few years while we get our act together.”

While the hope is that those algae could also aid in reef conservation in the future, researcher Patrick Buerger says it’s likely that it wouldn’t help all coral species. And even the toughest corals can only endure so much. Currently, the world is on track for just under 3degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, a level that would wipe out nearly all coral reefs.

“The action has to be on climate change,” he says. “This is a short-term solution that might buy some time for corals to adapt. But the main focus has to be on climate. There’s not a silver bullet to the problem.”