【推荐1】Imagine a typical day in our lives, where our relationship with technology is a constant rollercoaster ride. Onemoment, we’re frustrated and burdened, convinced we can’t bear it any longer. But within moments, we realize its necessary presence and how interconnected it has become with our existence.

Back in 1989, pop artist Keith Haring saw this relationship better than most. A complete set of limited-edition Pop Shop III Haring produced in 1989 reflects that understanding. The set recently sold for S125, 000 at Heritage Auctions (拍卖). The four images tell a story of people struggling with technology. In one image, a giant pair of scissors cuts the wire to a computer. In another, a person gets pulled into the machine trying to fix it. Yet another shows a person crazily trying to help.

It’s not surprising that Haring would predict our challenging relationship with the digital revolution. His art, with its seemingly simple style and its deeper themes of love, death, war, and social harmony, is desired by collectors.

The most paid for a Haring painting is $6.5 million for the piece Untitled (1982) in 2017.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring was best known for striking graffiti-inspired drawings that took him from New York City’s streets, subways and clubs to museums and public spaces around the world. Haring created a unique drawing style based on the importance of the line. He filled his works with recognizable images like dancing figures, “radiant babies,” barking dogs, and flying objects, and integrated it with uncommon energy and optimism. Much like his teacher Andy Warhol, the focus of Haring’s career was to make art accessible to the public.

Haring died in 1990 at the age of 31, but his work — and our struggle with technology — lives on.

【推荐2】Salt is important. But if we eat too much, it may cause some diseases, such as high blood pressure. That’s bad. We do, however, have to make sure we include salt in food that we eat every day. There are many kinds of salt you can buy. Some are cheap, others expensive. One of the many reasons that some salt is more expensive than others is that it contains more minerals. One of the finest salts you can buy is called bamboo salt and it’s made in South Korea.

When it comes to Korean food, you will probably think of kimchi. If you have ever tried kimchi, you will know that it can be salty. It’s unlikely that bamboo salt is used in the production of kimchi. But like kimchi, bamboo salt has a very long history. Koreans used bamboo salt thousands of years ago. Dr Kim Ⅱ Hoon began producing the bamboo salt we can buy today in the early twentieth century. When he died in 1992, his son took over. It takes a long time to produce. The process (工序) goes something like this.

Sea water is evaporated (蒸发), leaving the salt. This is put into three-year-old bamboo cases. The bamboo is covered with natural clay, rich in minerals, then baked for up to fifteen hours. The salt hardens and the bamboo burns away. The hardened salt is then ground into a powder (粉末). The process is repeated seven more times. It is then heated a ninth time up to 1,700 degrees Celsius. When the salt cools down, it is as hard as stone. Its colour has changed from grey to purple. The stone is once again ground down and is ready to use.

The repeated heating process removes the impurities (杂质) from the salt. The bamboo gives the salt sweetness not found in other salts. It is high in many minerals including potassium, phosphorus and iron. Bamboo salt is said to be good for many different illnesses. These include helping digestion (消化) and managing blood pressure.

【推荐1】Developing new materials requires significant time and labor, but some chemists are now hopeful that AI could one day shoulder much of this burden. In a new study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team used a popular AI model, ChatGPT, to perform one particularly time-consuming task: searching scientific literature. With that data, they built a second tool, a new model to predict experimental results.

Reports from previous studies offer a vast amount of information that chemists need, but finding and analyzing the most relevant details can be laborious. For example, those interested in designing highly porous, crystalline (晶体) metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — which have potential applications in areas such as clean energy—must sort through hundreds of scientific papers describing a variety of experimental conditions. Researchers have previously attempted to let AI take over this task; however, the language processing models they used required significant technical expertise , and applying them to new topics meant changing the program. Omar Yaghi and colleagues wanted to see if the next generation of language models, which includes ChatGPT, could offer a more accessible, flexible way to extract information.

To analyze text from scientific papers, the team gave ChatGPT prompts (提示符) it through three processes intended to identify and summarize the experimental information the papers contained. The researchers carefully constructed these prompts to minimize the model’s tendency to make up responses, and to ensure the best responses possible.

When tested on 228 papers describing MOF syntheses (合成), this system drew more than 26, 000 factors relevant for making roughly 800 of these mixtures. With these data, the team trained a separate AI model to predict the crystalline state of MOFs based on these conditions. And finally, to make the data more user-friendly, they built a chatbot to answer questions about it. The team notes that, unlike previous AI-based efforts, this one does not require expertise in coding. What’s more, scientists can shift its focus simply by adjusting the narrative language in the prompts. This new system, which they call the “ChatGPT Chemistry Assistant,” could also be useful in other fields of chemistry.

【推荐2】To help astronauts of the future survive the mental challenges that come with living in space for extended periods of time, space travelers’ missions could soon be accompanied by AI-powered, empathetic (同理心的) robotic assistants.

Not only does space travel present astronauts with a lot of physical stresses, spending months or years in such a physically demanding place with limited space and the same people can also raise lots of mental tests as well. According to MIT Technology Review, scientists are wording to ease some of the mental challenges facing astronauts by creating “an AI assistant that’s able to feel human emotion and respond with empathy.”

While such a technology would prove itself useful by being able to predict the needs of crew members and “intervene (介入) if their mental health is in need of help, ”it has the potential to he life saving when humans choose to explore beyond the earth’s gravitational field and towards deep space.

Though astronauts currently on the International Space Station have an intelligent robot to interact with, it lacks proper emotional intelligence. As a result, a team at the organization’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is working on a more advanced and complicated emotional support companion that can control a spacecraft’s functioning in addition to tracking crew member’s behaviors.

Right now in the lab, an AI-equipped robot called Henry the Helper can be found wandering around the grounds helping visitors who appear confused or lost based on their facial expressions. Two more emotionally intelligent robots are expected to be introduced later this year, one of which is said to be able to participate in conversations more complex than giving navigation (导航) assistance.

The team’s final goal is to make a companion named Fiona the Future a reality, an emotionally intelligent cross-platform system. Rather than being limited to a physical robotic device, it could be digitally integrated into space stations and habitats on Mars and beyond. Fiona, if all goes according to the JPL’s plans, will help keep astronauts of the future mentally fit as they start their journeys to deep space.