【推荐3】If you have a smartphone, you probably use its front-facing camera for selfies (自拍) and the occasional video call. You might use your next smartphone’s front camera for the same thing, but there’s a chance that the camera won’t completely turn off once you’re done with it.

This week, chipmaker Qualcomm revealed its latest Snapdragon processor (处理器), which will power many of the high-end Android smartphones that you’ll see in stores in 2022, including models from Motorola, Sony and OnePlus. And a new feature built into that chip could allow smartphone makers to keep those front-facing cameras on all the time in a sort of low-power mode, waiting and watching for a face to appear in front of it.

The idea of a camera that stays on as long as your phone does seems deeply unsettling, even in an age where people are convinced that smartphones are already overheard (偷听) on our conversations. So why is a company responsible for building the brains of our smartphones trying to make “always-on” cameras a common feature?

In time, a phone using this new chip could actually unlock itself when it sees your face, and automatically lock itself again when you’re not looking at it anymore. Or, if it sees someone else’s face next to yours, the phone could automatically hide notifications (通知) so no one else can see what your incoming emails or Slack messages are about. The benefit of a phone is that it knows to act differently when you’re not looking back.

As it turns out, the Qualcomm tech that could make such features possible is conceptually pretty basic. “What’s happening here is to find out: is there a face, or is there not a face,” Heape told me. “There is not a photograph taken. There is no video being recorded.” He also said that none of camera data leaves the chip when it’s being analyzed (分析) for faces.

【推荐1】My bookshelf is full of children’s books. There are picture books, teen adventure books, and young adult coming-of-age books. Sure, I have actual kids living in my house, so that’s one of the reasons I own a lot of children’s books. But to tell you the truth, I purchased more than half of those books for myself. I love reading books that are targeted toward kids, probably more than I enjoy reading adult books.

Remember the innocent wonder that engulfed (吞没) you when you read children’s books as a kid? When you could be transported to faraway, magical places that didn’t seem unbelievable at all. Especially since you still believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. Now you can magically transport yourself back into your child-sized shoes when you pick up a children’s book.

The best children’s literature can help us re-find things we may not even know we have lost, taking us back to a time when new discoveries came daily and when the world was huge, before the imagination was adjusted and changed.

Kid’s books are so much more fun than adult books. They dare to go where no adult books go, into the field of scaring monsters, giant robot zombie mermaids, and 130-story treehouses. Just when you think you’ve picked up a sensible children’s book, you’ll be thunderstruck by an explosive scene. Seriously, who wouldn’t find that amusing?

Reading children’s books is the key to maintaining an active imagination. They allow you to see the magical possibilities in your world and they keep you young. Plus, if you’ve got kids or grandkids, they are an excellent way to bond with them through magical stories.

I know I’ll keep reading children’s books as long as I have the ability to read. Because we all have a kid inside of us and we need to let it shine through.

【推荐2】Migratory (迁徙的) birds flying to China’s largest freshwater lake for winter are likely to face a tougher environment than before. Little rainfall, a record drought, and the earliest dry season in the Poyang Lake area — all exacerbated by climate change — have threatened the food supply and habitat of wintering birds, domestic media reported Monday.

Known as a “migratory bird haven,” Poyang Lake and its surrounding wetlands and ponds serve as one of the most important wintering stopovers for hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, including Siberian cranes and oriental white storks. The lake’s seasonal shrinkage provides abundant food to the waterbirds and helps maintain their habitat.

Duan Qingxian, director of the nonprofit Poyang Lake Wildlife Rescue Association, said on Tuesday that migratory birds inhabiting the lake area, as monitored by his team, had declined by at least 50% compared with the same period over the past years. “There is less food such as grassroots, snails, and shells for waterfowl (水禽) due to the drought,” said Duan, who has lived in Duchang on the north side of the lake for over 40 years. “While patrolling the lakeside this year, I saw several dozen geese at a time flying from north to south, instead of hundreds previously.”

In September, local authorities started drawing water from Poyang Lake’s main channel to replenish nearby sub-lakes. They also cut grasses that were too old and hard for the birds to eat to make the grass sprout (抽芽). Duan said that human efforts to minimize the effects of changing weather patterns were just “a drop in the bucket” for a massive lake like Poyang. “We just do what we can do to reduce the impact of the drought on migratory birds as much as possible,” Duan said. “As long as the weather cools, and it rains, the tender grass will grow, and more birds will come.”

【推荐3】Every year, as the surface water temperature off the United States mid-Atlantic coast rises steadily from late spring through the summer, a pocket of uncharacteristically cool and crisp water gets trapped at the bottom of the ocean. Packed with nutrients this thick band of cold water, known as the mid-Atlantic cold pool, is a vital home for shellfish species. Extending at its seasonal peak from Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the cold poll creates a diverse ecosystem ranging from algae(海藻)to fish — and some of the most valuable shellfish fisheries in the United States.

Now, however, two pressures have scientists worrying about whether the cold pool will last. The first is no surprise: climate change. Over the past five decades, climates change has destabilized the cold pool, causing it to warm and shrink. Compared with 1968, the cold pool is now 13℃ warmer and has lost more than one-third of its area.

The second concern is 1ess certain. In 2023, the US federal government approved plans to install(安装)98 wind turbines(涡轮机)off the New Jersey coast, covering an area of more than 300 square kilometers. Yet putting so many turbines to the seafloor could have unexpected consequences for the cold pool. That’s why Travis Miles, a researcher at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, and his colleagues are investigating. So far, Miles and his colleagues can’t definitively say what will happen to the cold pool, saying more research is needed to assess how climate change and offshore wind, together, could affect the cold pool. However, their initial analyses suggest the cold pool should be fine — at least in normal conditions.

New Jersey’s offshore wind plans are strongly opposed mainly by fossil fuel-industry funded efforts. Miles worries that an overabundance of caution or fear of potential impacts, including on the cold pool, might slow down the development of renewable energy. “...it’s quite clear that climate change is far more damaging than installing wind farms,” he says. “I don’t think any scientist would argue with that.”