【推荐1】The maker of ChatGPT recently announced its next move into generative(有生产力的)artificial intelligence. San Francisco-based OpenAI’s new text-to-video generator, called Sora, is a tool that instantly makes short videos based on written commands, called prompts.

Sora is not the first of its kind. Google, Meta and Runway ML are among the other companies to have developed similar technology. But the high quality of videos displayed by OpenAI —some released after CEO Sam Altman asked social media users to send in ideas for written prompts —surprised observers.

A photographer from New Hampshire posted one suggestion, or prompt, on X. The prompt gave details about a kind of food to be cooked, gnocchi(意大利团子), as well as the setting —an old Italian country kitchen. The prompt said: “An instructional cooking session for homemade gnocchi, hosted by a grandmother —a social media influencer, set in a rustic(土气的)Tuscan country kitchen.” Altman answered a short time later with a realistic video that showed what the prompt described.

The tool is not yet publicly available. OpenAI has given limited information about how it was built. The company also has not stated what imagery and video sources were used to train Sora. At the same time, the video results led to fears about the possible ethical and societal effects.

The New York Times and some writers have taken legal actions against OpenAI for its use of copyrighted works of writing to train ChatGPT. And OpenAI pays a fee to The Associated Press, the source of this report, to license its text news archive(档案). OpenAI said in a blog post that it is communicating with artists, policymakers and others before releasing the new tool to the public.

The company added that it is working with “red teamers” — people who try to find problems and give helpful suggestions — to develop Sora. “We are working with red teamers who will be adversarially(对立地)testing the model,” the company said. “We’re also building tools to help detect misleading content such as a detection classifier that can tell when a video was generated by Sora.”

【推荐3】As the planet gets hotter, the need for cool living environments is becoming more urgent. But air conditioning is a major contributor to global warming since units release powerful greenhouse gases and use lots of energy.

Now, researchers from McGill University, UCLA and Princeton have found in a new study an inexpensive, sustainable alternative to mechanical cooling with refrigerants (制冷剂) in hot and dry climates, and a way to relieve dangerous heat waves during electricity blackouts.

The researchers set out to answer how to achieve a new benchmark (基准) in passive cooling inside naturally conditioned buildings in hot climates such as Southern California. As an attempt, they examined the use of roof materials that radiate (辐射) heat into the cold universe, even under direct sunlight, and how to combine them with temperature-driven ventilation (通风). These cool radiator materials and coatings are often used to stop roofs overheating. Researchers have also used them to improve heat rejection from chillers. But there is untapped potential for integrating them into architectural design more fully, so they can not only reject indoor heat to outer space in a passive way, but also drive regular and healthy air changes.

“We found we could maintain air temperatures several degrees below the current surrounding temperature, and several degrees more below a reference ‘gold standard’ for passive cooling,” said Remy Fortin, lead author and PhD candidate at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture. “We did this without sacrificing healthy ventilation air changes.” This was a considerable challenge, considering air exchanges are a source of heating when the aim is to keep a room cooler than the outside.

The researchers hope the findings will be used to positively impact communities suffering from dangerous climate heating and heatwaves. “We hope that materials scientists, architects, and engineers will be interested in these results, and that our work will inspire more complete thinking for how to integrate breakthroughs in radiative cooling materials with simple but effective architectural solutions,” said Remy Fortin.

【推荐1】In a recent study, researchers have suggested that temperature is a major predictor of body size variation. Meanwhile, scientists studying red deer have said that warmer winters in northern Europe and Scandinavia may lead to the body size of these animals becoming smaller. Prof Steve Brusatte, a paleontologist (古生物学家) at the University of Edinburgh, suggested that the way in which other mammals (哺乳动物) have previously responded to periods of climate change could offer an insight into humans’ future.

Writing in The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, Brusatte notes that animals in warmer parts of the world today are often smaller than those in colder areas, an ecological principle known as Bergmann’s rule. “Why do they become smaller? It is not entirely understood, but it is probably, in part, because smaller animals have a higher surface area relative to their volume than bigger animals and can thus better release extra heat,” he writes. “It is a common way that mammals deal with climate change”.

He added: “That’s not to say every species of mammal would get smaller, but it seems to be a common survival trick of mammals when temperatures change pretty quickly. That does raise the question: if so, might humans get smaller? And I think that certainly makes sense.”

Prof Adrian Lister, of the Natural History Museum in London, said it is commonly believed that the strong relations between temperature and mammal body size may often be down to the availability of food and resources. “We are not really controlled by natural selection,”he said.“If that was going to happen, you’d need to find large people dying before they could reproduce because of climate warming. That is not happening in today’s world. We wear clothes, we have got heating, and we have got air conditioning if it is too hot.”

【推荐2】For a wide range of diseases, diagnosis comes later in life for women than for men, according to a large Danish study. Researchers don’t know whether the later diagnoses are due to genetics, the environment, possible biases in the healthcare system - or some combination of reasons.

The study of health data from 6.9 million Danish people found that across hundreds of diseases, women on average were diagnosed when they were about four years older than the age at which the conditions were recognized in men. “We’re not just looking at one disease here, we’re looking at all diseases and we are looking at an entire population, from cradle to grave,” lead author Soren Brunak from the University of Copenhagen told Reuters Health by phone. On average, women received cancer diagnoses 2.5 years after men. They received diagnoses for metabolic diseases like diabetes 4.5 years later. “This actually surprised us quite a lot,” Brunak said. “Men generally have a tendency to get to the doctor later. So presumably the difference in onset is even larger.”

Brunak and his team considered incidence rates of diseases in the 18 broad categories of the ICD-10 diagnosis system managed by the World Health Organization. The study wasn’t designed to explain the causes of the differences. Another limitation is that researchers only looked at diagnoses made in hospitalized patients.

Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at the Cedars-Sinai Smidt Heart Institute, who was not involved in the study, pointed out to Reuters Health that the study therefore lacks information on age at diagnosis for people who didn't require hospitalization. “On the other hand,” she said, “being hospitalized is a sign of a serious illness, so that adds significance to the diagnosis and supports that disease onset may be later in women.”

Brunak’s study, published in Nature Communications, showed that the bone-thinning disease osteoporosis was a notable exception to the trend. Here, women were typically diagnosed before they suffered a fracture, while the opposite was true for men.

“I am fascinated by this study, which generally confirms all that I present in my Stanford course on Sex and Gender in Human Physiology and Disease,”said Marcia Stefanick, Director of Stanford University’s Women’s Health and Sex Differences in Medicine Center.

【推荐2】Nearly 96, when most are lonely and in poor health, Olga Murray, full of energy, has been eagerly planning a trip to Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. How can she be in such good shape? Is it her good genes? (Her mother lived to 98.) Or her daily salads and three-times-a-week workouts?

Scientists increasingly are finding that the answer — living with purpose — can be a particularly healthy pursuit, which can improve the quality of those final years. Murray offers a vivid example of how to create a sense of meaning.

Murray’s story began in 1984, after she had worked 37 years as a lawyer and was starting to think about retirement (退休). At 59, while traveling in Nepal, Murray found herself amazed by the children there. “They were poor beyond anything I had ever experienced,” she recalled in a self-published memoir (自传) years later. “Yet they were the most joyful little kids anywhere on earth.” She wanted to put the rest of her life into helping educate Nepalese children.

Returning to Nepal the next year, she met Allan Aistrope, then a volunteer English teacher at the country’s only orphanage (孤儿院). The two began with organizing college scholarships for four of the orphans. After another five years, they had started the Nepal Youth Foundation, which by then was supporting several hundred scholarship students and raising 60 homeless children. In 1994, they hired Som Paneru, a former scholarship student, as executive director. She handed over the presidency to Paneru in 2012. Now, she is busy as usual, leading lots of fundraising campaigns.