【推荐1】Asparagus (芦笋) is a very odd vegetable.It can grow up to 2cm in an hour. Cut a field one afternoon, return the next morning, and with almost frightening speed it will be back. Whereas other vegetables spend time producing leaves, asparagus grows as single spears (嫩茎), making it superbly suited to robotic pickers.

In late June a small white object slowly makes its way along a field of asparagus in Gloucester-shire. When it passes over a group of spears it pauses, whirr then clunks: the asparagus has been sliced. This robot called Sprout is being developed by a London start up called Muddy Machines. It is more inflexible on wheels than Ex Ma-china android. However, John Chinn, Britain’s largest asparagus producer, regards it with enthusiasm. For him, he says, it could be“fantastic”.

The world is suffering from a shortage of seasonal workers. Last summer Mr. Chinn needed 1,300 workers. He got around 800. Trying to find labour is, for a farmer, “the thing that stops you sleeping”. The shortage of workers is particularly acute in Britain, where Brexit(英国脱欧)has been spoiling harvests as well as growth.

Now, it is a time to innovate. Moravec’s paradox (莫拉维克悖论) states that computers find things simple that humans find hard — and vice versa.Differential calculus (微分学)?Not a problem. Telling the difference between a ripe strawberry and a stone? Really hard. Harvesting is especially ripe for robotic puzzlement.Leaves confuse them;bumps puzzle them; colour prevents them.In 2015,Joe Jones, a robotics whose inventions include the Roomba,a vacuum cleaner, was considering new areas to explore, and started to make a list of which crops a robot might be able to pick most easily. He considered different variables (变量) that “would make it easy for a robot to handle”, then scored each crop out of 12.“And what crop,”he wrote on his blog,“came out on top?”

In the fields of Gloucester shire is the answer. Sprout crawls forward; pauses. Another whirr, whoosh, clunk. It is an original model, but Mr. Chinn is optimistic. His dream would be to see a herd of 100 in his fields next year.He needs them.The stress is now so bad that ”If we can’t find a solution, we’ll all give up soon.“

【推荐3】According to a new study described by researchers as a global breakthrough, plants are not as silent as we once thought they were. They do make sounds, particularly when injured or stressed—just not ones that we can hear with our ears. Researchers recorded and analyzed sounds produced by plants and discovered that they can give off clicking sounds at a volume similar to human speech, but too high for human ears to pick it up.

In order to seclude the plants to ensure that any sound picked up by recording equipment could only be coming from the plants and not the atmosphere around them, researchers at Tel Aviv University placed plants in an acoustic (声学的) box in an environment with no background noise. The plant types used in this study were mainly tomato and tobacco plants. Researchers used recording equipment capable of picking up frequencies between 20 and 250 kilohertz, reaching more than 15 times higher than the maximum frequency the average adult can hear.

In the greenhouse setting, they also recorded a group of tomato and tobacco plants as they grew increasingly dehydrated (脱水的), and found that their sound outpoint increased steadily for the following four to five days after being watered, and then decreased. Essentially, the thirstier the plants got, the louder they complained—until they reached a certain critical stage of dehydration, at which point their voices quieted as they dried up. The researchers also found that dehydrated tomato and tobacco plants produced an average of about 35 and 11 sounds per hour, respectively. Cut tomato and tobacco plants made 25 and 15 noises per hour. Healthy plants, on the other hand, produced far fewer sounds, at less than one per hour.

Recording these sounds could help inform farmers about which of their crops are most in need of water, allowing for more precise irrigation, which could be a step forward for agriculture. “When more and more areas are exposed to drought due to climate change, efficient water use becomes even more critical for food security. We believe that humans can use this information, given the right tools—such as sensors that tell growers when plants need watering,” said Lilach Hadany, a professor from the School of Plant Sciences and Food Security at the Wise Faculty of Life Sciences.

【推荐2】One morning soon, you’ll get on your bike and ride from one end of America to the other, because the Great American Rail Trail is 53% complete, making a cross-country bike ride closer to a reality.

The idea of a bike trail(小路) made up of scenic paths, trails and former rail lines from Washington DC to Washington State has been 30 years in the making. Now, with more than 50% of the trail up and running, the project, run by the Rails to Trails in cooperation with local authorities, is building up, with hundreds of miles of trails in development now. Though not entirely complete, the rail trail has drawn people of all types.

Last August, Ryan Gardill and a colleague biked 350 miles from Pittsburgh to Washington DC. Their travels took them through some beautiful and historical parts of the American East. “The trail connected me to our revolutionary and industrial history. Most of the towns on the trail were once important to America.”

The major goal of the trail is to provide the American public with the opportunity to explore their beautiful country, without getting in their car. A secondary objective is to bring prosperity(繁荣) back to the small towns and cities that once prospered along the country’s now diminished rail system, according to National Geographic.

One of these is Muncie, Indiana, a city located on a former rail system and a part of the Rail Trail. The city is already seeing the economic benefits of the trail. “A large majority of our customers are local, but the Rail Trail could help grow tourism,” said Jason Allardt, owner of the historic Kirk’s Bike Shop.

This is the hope for many once-prosperous towns and cities all throughout America, though it may take nearly 20 years to get the entire trail up and running.

【推荐1】Among the excitement of all things artificial intelligence, writers are increasingly wrestling with a hard truth: It appears robots are coming for their jobs. Little more than a plaything of researchers a decade ago, AI and automated robots are regularly producing countless articles on a daily basis.

Observes Mayur Bhatt, marketing head, SEO Services Guru: “It is only a matter of time before algorithms (算法) are able to write articles on any topic and for any target group.” Adds noted author Stephen Marche: “Whatever field you are in, if it uses language, it is about to be transformed.” People of writing driven by AI insist the robots are simply here ‘to serve humanity’. Robots will do the hard labor work, they say. Writers will be freed-up to engage in more interesting, more in-depth and more creative work.

But for the many writers and editors who have already lost their jobs to AI, that pleasant future is a tough sell. Consider Radar, a hyper-local news service that has been generating AI-written articles in the UK since 2017. Instead of using reporters to cover news beats, Radar relies on robots. Those automatons mine government databases on crime, health, environment and similar-and then auto-write stories from that data with an extremely local hook. For example: Radar's AI software can ingest a new government report on crime across the UK, and then auto-generate hundreds of customized stories from the study, based on localized data. Each story is hyper-localized to a town or even a smaller community by including data from the government report. The resulting micro-focused stories are sold to news outlets throughout Britain -as well as to any other news outlet that might be interested. Gary Rogers, editor-in-chief, Radar: “There is open data across all the main beats of news — health, crime, transport, etc. — filled with stories waiting to be told.”

So far, many writers are aware of the adoption of Al-generated writing via a few, well-publicized stories about the tech's use at major news organizations like Bloomberg, the BBC and The New York Times. But it turns out those above represent only smattering of what's really going on. A 2021 study found that 15% of news stories are now automatically generated at leading news outlets using AI. Moreover, the adoption of AI-generated writing has gone far beyond news-reporting, cropping-up across a wide range of writing jobs.

To date, human beings still best their robot competitors in writing of the highest quality. Even so, the hard fact remains that AI will be producing an increasing number of automated writing in coming years that competes in a world often entrapped in the icy hold of ‘good enough’.

【推荐2】The recent launch of ChatGPT, a chatbot created by Open AI for public use, has underlined the growing reach of digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) in working life. Like most technological revolutions that affect the workplace, chatbots can potentially create winners and losers and will affect both blue-collar and white-collar workers.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing (NLP) tool that allows users to interact with the GPT-3 model using natural language. The model is trained on a great amount of data, which allows it to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of inputs.

This type of AI can greatly benefit the productivity of skilled workers. Chatbots offer the possibility to automate (使自动化) boring and time-consuming tasks, such as writing standardized reports, meeting minutes and emails. Workers could therefore be freed to focus on more important and creative tasks. A chatbot virtual personal assistant could guide skilled workers through different projects or production processes. It can also generate original content and ideas, and potentially help to research and develop new products and services.

But tools such as ChatGPT presents a real risk of skilled and semi-skilled workers losing their jobs. For example, chatbots can be developed to train employees in an organization, resulting in the unemployment of human trainers.

Previous waves of technological change have created both winners and losers. Workers who are quicker to adjust to technological change will win by increasingly taking on tasks complementary (互补的) to AI while giving up automated ones.

【推荐3】Austrian painter Gustav Klimt created some of his best-known masterpieces during the first decade of the 20th century.     1    . Nazi looting (纳粹 掠 夺) during World War II led to the destruction of many prized Klimt works, including the Faculty Paintings: three enormous scenes titled Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence.

To study these paintings, art historians have long had to make do with black-and-white photographs. Thanks to machine learning, however, researchers have now restored (恢复) historical images of the Faculty Paintings to almost their original colors.     2    .

To create the images, Google Arts and Culture and the Belvedere Museum in Vienna developed a tool that selected information about Klimt’s use of color from different sources. The data set included newspaper descriptions of the Faculty Paintings and 80 full-color reproductions of Klimt paintings from the same period.     3    .

Google engineer Emil Wallner spent nearly six months coding the AI algorithm (编写人工智能算法) to create color predictions.    4    . For example, one might expect the starry sky featured in Klimt’s Philosophy to be blue, but the AI-colored version tends to be a little green, based partly on newspaper accounts that describe the painting’s greenish color.

“    5    ,” says Franz Smola, who worked on the restoration with Wallner. “We were able to color Klimt’s works even in places about which we had no knowledge.”

Art lovers can explore these colorful recreations online. The restored paintings are paired with an online exhibition, “Klimt vs. Klimt: The Man of Contradictions”, which explores the painter’s life and works.