【推荐1】The world’s first urban airport specifically for flying cars and drones(无人机) will be developed under government-backed plans to cut road congestion(拥堵)and pollution. The zero-emission airport, to be called Air One, will be built in Coventry later this year to allow small electric passenger-carrying aircraft to operate in an urban area. It will initially open in November in a month-long demonstration a part of events to mark Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture.

Urban- Air Port, the London-based aerospace company which is behind the facility, said it planned to eventually build more than 200 airports in cities around the world, with rooftops and floating platforms being used to locate them as close to urban centres as possible. Flying cars-effectively large. passenger - carrying drones- are not currently permitted to operate in UK airspace. However, the European Aviation Safety Agency has started a consultation on the issue and hopes that permission will be given in a few years to allow" electric vertical lake -off and landing vehicles"to operate commercially.

The technology is seen as quieter, lighter, cheaper and more environmentally friendly than helicopters, allowing people to take short journeys between city centres rather than relying on the increasingly congested road network.

Ricky Sandhu, founder and executive chairman of Urban - Air Port, said the new facility would give flying cars a place to land, take-off and charge their batteries. "It will bring clean urban air transport of zero emission to the masses, " he added . " Most of our cities are crowded urban centres where space is limited and you may not find sufficient space on the ground so rooftops can be important. " The ultimate aim was to build the airports on rooftops and on offshore platforms.

【推荐1】Tomorrow’s food experts’ menus could feature items prepared with complex cooking techniques and presentation—all at the push of a button. Columbia University mechanical engineers have designed a 3-D printer that can produce and cook dishes at the same time with details at the millimeter scale.

The proof-of-concept design, described in Science of Food, combines a multiwavelength laser cooker, roughly the size of five smartphones put together, with a microwave-oven-sized food printer. Beyond applying complex substance and presentation designs, this type of software-controlled setup could someday scan a QR code to automatically prepare dishes adapted to individual eating habits and dietary requirements, says Blutinger, lead author of the paper and a digital-cooking researcher at Columbia.

The new technology is “astounding”, says Megan Ross, a food scientist who studies 3-D printing at Ireland’s University College Cork and was not involved in the study. Ross notes that the design is still at an early stage and that many technical challenges still remain, such as preventing cross contamination (交叉污染) between layers of uncooked and cooked meat. Still, Ross is impressed by the device’s ability to produce foods outside the kingdom of traditional cooking. “Is this going to be sold in shops everywhere in the next few years? No,” she says. “But everyone has to start somewhere.”

Compared with 3-D-printed chicken cooked in a traditional oven, the laser-cooked chicken had nearly twice as much weight and size, the researchers found. “That chicken is going to be juicy,” says Liam Macleod, a Denver-based chef (厨师) and former 3-D food printing specialist at the Culinary Institute of America who was not involved in the study. Macleod does not think such technology will ever replace chefs, but it might “add a tool to their collection” to deliver a new sensory experience. “Cooking is a skill set that has been practiced and perfected for thousands of years,” he says. “It’s very exciting to come up with something new and unique that people haven’t experienced yet.”

【推荐2】For decades, Frederick Banting and Charles Best were believed to have contributed to the discovery of insulin (胰岛素) between 1921 and 1922 at the University of Toronto (U of T). In 1923, the university created the Banting and Best Chair of Medical Research, followed by the Banting and Best Department of Medical Research and the Banting Institute (1930) and, in 1954, the Best Institute.

However, the 1923 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded jointly to Banting and John J. R. Macleod. The physiology professor, who headed up the laboratory where the research took place, had been much more involved in the research than was later acknowledged. After learning that Macleod was honoured alongside him rather than Best, Banting shared his prize money with Best. Macleod, meanwhile, split his share of the prize with the fourth member of the team, J. Bertram Collip, a young biochemist from the University of Alberta. Collip’s essential contribution was producing a purified pancreatic extract (胰腺提取物), which was administered on Jan. 23, 1922, to Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old patient at Toronto General Hospital. That shot was the first successful human trial of insulin.

Much of the early research on insulin took place in the old medical school building at U of T. Opened in 1903, it featured state-of-the-art technology, including facilities for animal research. But Banting, a war-time surgeon, lecturer and medical researcher, was unimpressed. When he arrived in 1921, the operating room had lain unused for years and needed a thorough cleaning to make it usable. Located just below the building’s roof, it also became unbearably hot during the summer. Early laboratory testing took place right there.

In 1982, Michael Bliss, a history professor at U of T, restored Macleod and Collip to their rightful place as co-discoverers of insulin. In 1990, a new plaque (牌匾) acknowledging the cooperation was put up outside U of T’s current medical sciences building.