【推荐1】The secret of success

The recipe for succeeding in any given field is hardly a mystery: good ideas, hard work, discipline, imagination, perseverance and maybe a little luck. Oh, and let’s not forget failure which Dashun Wang and his colleagues at Northwestern University call “the essential prerequisite (先决条件) for success” in a new paper.

But not every failure leads to success, he adds. And what eventually separates the winners from the losers, the research shows, certainly is not persistence. One of the more interesting findings in the paper, published last October in Nature, is that the people who eventually succeeded and the people who eventually failed tried basically the same number of times to achieve their goals.

It turns out that trying again and again only works if you learn from your previous failures. The idea is to work smart, not hard. “You have to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and then focus on what needs to be improved instead of struggling around and changing everything,” says Wang. “The people who failed didn’t necessarily work less than those who succeeded. They could actually have worked more: it’s just that they made more unnecessary changes.”

As they explored “the mechanisms governing the dynamics of failure” and built their model. Wang’s team identified what they describe as previously unknown statistical signatures that separate successful groups from unsuccessful groups, making it possible to predict their final outcomes.

One such key indicator (besides keeping the stuff that works and focusing on what doesn’t) is the time between consecutive (连续的) failed attempts, which should decrease steadily. In other words, the faster you fail, the better your chances of success, and the more time between attempts, the more likely you are to fail again. “If someone has applied for a grant and they are three failures in,” Wang says, “if we just look at the timing between the failures, we will be able to predict whether they will eventually succeed or not.”

Working with such large-scale data, Wang and his colleagues were able to identify a critical point that was common to each of the hundreds of thousands of undertakings they had analyzed, a fork in the road where one path leads to a development region and one leads to a stagnation region.

“This diverging pattern of performance increases with each new attempt,” says Wang. Although in some cases it is apparent which region a person is in as early as the second attempt.

Wang points out that the existence of the tipping point cuts against the traditional explanations for failure or success, such as luck or a person’s work habits. “What we’re showing here is that even in the absence of such differences, you can still have very different outcomes,” he says. What matters is how people fail, how they respond to failure and where those failures lead.

【推荐1】A little brain stimulation at night appears to help people remember what they learned the previous day, a study of 18 severe epilepsy (癫痫) patients has found.

During sleep, brain cells fire in rhythmic patterns. When two brain areas synchronize (同步) their firing patterns, they are able to communicate. During non-rapid eye movement sleep, the hippocampus, found deep in the brain, synchronizes its activity with the prefrontal cortex, which lies just behind the forehead. This helps transform memories from the day into memories that can last a lifetime.

Dr. Itzhak Fried at the University of California and his team gathered 18 epilepsy patients who already had electrodes (电极) in their brains for medical evaluation. This offered the scientists a way to both monitor and change a person’s brain rhythms. They used a “celebrity pet” test in which participants were shown images matching a particular celebrity with a specific animal. The goal was to remember which animal went with which celebrity.

Patients saw the images before going to bed. While sleeping, some of them got tiny electrical stimulation through the wires in their brains. In patients who got the stimulation, rhythms in the two brain areas became more synchronized. And when they woke up they scored higher on the test.

The experiment was based on decades of research done by scientists, including Dr. György Buzsáki, a neuroscientist at New York University. But changing rhythms in healthy peoples’ brains might not improve their memory, he says, because those communication channels are already in perfect condition. The epilepsy patients may have improved because they started out with sleep and memory problems caused by both the disorder and the drugs used to treat it.

Even so, he says, the approach has the potential to help millions of people with damaged memory. And brain rhythms probably play parts in many other problems. “They are not specific to memory. They are doing a lot of other things,” Buzsáki says, like regulating mood and emotion.

【推荐2】P. H. Hanes, founder of HanesBrands, came up with retail price in the 1920s. That allowed him to use ads in publications across America to discourage distributors from unfairly raising the price of his knitted underwear. Even today many American shopkeepers stick to manufacturers’ recommended prices, as much as they would love to raise them to offset the inflationary (通货膨胀) pressures on their other costs. A growing number, though, resort to more complicated pricing techniques.

Getting retail price right can be tricky. Set prices too high and you risk losing customers; set them too low and you leave money on the table. Retailers have historically used rules of thumb, such as adding a fixed margin (差额) on top of costs or matching what competitors charge. As energy, labour and other inputs go through the roof, they can no longer afford to treat pricing as an afterthought. To gain an edge, shopkeepers have been turning to price-optimisation systems.

At their core are mathematical models that use deal data to estimate price flexibility—how much demand increases as the price falls and vice versa—for thousands of products. Price-sensitive items can then be discounted and price-insensitive ones marked up. Merchants can fine-tune the algorithms (算法) to prevent undesirable outcomes.

These systems are becoming cleverer thanks to advances in artificial intelligence(AI). The latest crop of AI-powered ones can spot patterns and relationships between multiple items. Makers of pricing software are incorporating new data sources into their models, from customers’ tweets to online product reviews, says Doug Fuehne of Pricefx, one such firm. In February Starbucks, a chain of coffee shops, boasted about its use of analytics and AI to model pricing “on an ongoing basis”. US Foods, a food distributor, praised its pricing system’s ability to use “over a dozen different inputs” to boost sales and profits.

What pricing systems do not do is lead unavoidably to higher prices. Matt Pavich of Revionics, another pricing-software firm, calls this misconception “one of the biggest misunderstanding” about products like his. Sysco, a big food distributor which rolled out new pricing software last year, is a case in point. The firm says the system allows it to lower prices on “key value items”—as price-sensitive bestsellers are known in the trade—and raise them on other products. It can thus increase profits by expanding sales while maintaining margins.

【推荐3】Artificial cloud technology could soon be used in the fight against environmental damage. Researchers in Australia have used machines to spray salt water into the air, and noted that the reflective qualities of these artificial clouds helped protect the Great Barrier Reef from sun bleaching.

The so-called cloud brightening project works by thickening existing clouds and reducing sunlight exposure. No artificial chemicals make it into the clouds in the sky, and when water droplets steam they leave only small salt crystals that float up into the atmosphere. This provides a larger surface area for water vapor (水蒸气) to be liquids around them，forming thicker clouds.

Cloud manipulation (控制) is becoming more commonplace as climate change threatens to destroy our ecosystems. The past two years have seen unheard-of forest fires and droughts caused by the climate change emergency, meaning that widespread use of this technique may become more commonplace if carbon emissions are not controlled strictly.

Drones have also entered the cloud manipulation picture, being used in the United Arab Emeritus, a country desperately in need of more rainfall, to deliver electrical shocks to clouds in order to promote rainfall. Zapping (击打) clouds to produce a positive or negative charge within clouds can cause water droplets to form together. The greater the charge, the larger the droplets, vital for ensuring that as much rain as possible reaches the surface before steam gives off all the hard-won moisture (水分).

Even discounting climate change, global waterfall shortages are still an increasing concern, giving the planet’s booming population. More people means more mouths to feed, and the demand for water in agriculture for animals and crops further increases urgency for cloud manipulation technology. An increase in rain also leads to positive economic growth in many countries, as large harvests stabilize financial systems and living standards in all climates.

Increasingly, scientists are looking to our skies in providing solutions to protect our environment. Cloud manipulation technologies have promise; however, they can also be extremely expensive to run. For this field of science to become practical economically, more research needs to be done in making this process a practicable option in protecting our environment.