【推荐2】How to Get More Sleep

It’s common in today’s stress-filled world to get by on six hours of sleep or less a night. For most of us, lacking sleep harms more than just the brain.     1     . If you’re lacking sleep out of choice, it may be time to rethink that decision. In the meantime, you can try some healthy sleep habits.

    2     . Your brain needs to be trained to go to sleep and wake up at certain time every day of the week, including weekends.

Create a good sleeping environment. Keep it cool—the temperature between 16℃ and 20℃is best for good sleep.     3     or work in your bedroom and let your brain think of the room as only for sleep. Ban all light, including the blue light of mobile phones or laptops, which may signal your body to wake up.

Rethink coffee in the afternoon, evening wine or medicine before sleep. Coffee can make it hard to sleep. Using alcohol to sleep will cause you to wake up within a few hours. When you fall asleep anyway, it’s typically of poor quality.     4     . They only mask the problem, experts say, and may be dangerously addictive.

    5     . If you’re not asleep within 15 to 20 minutes of your head hitting the pillow, get up and go into another low-lit room. Instead of turning on the television or looking at your phone or laptop, do something mindless, like folding clothes. Once you feel sleepy, head back to bed.

And don’t be annoyed. It never puts anyone to sleep. Keep training your brain, and it will respond in some way that you need.

【推荐3】Ways to keep your eyesight in tip-top shape

If you have perfect vision, you probably don’t worry too much about eye health.     1     Therefore, you may find the following tips helpful in protecting your eyes.

Eat for your eyes

We all know carrots can support eye health, but there are also a bunch of other fruits and vegetables that are beneficial. Mainly, you want produce that contains vitamins A, C, and E, which can help prevent some diseases like cataracts. Look for dark-colored vegetables such as peppers and sweet potatoes.     2    

Give your eyes a break

Hours and hours of staring at the screen have become the everyday reality for many of us, and you’ve probably already noticed how straining it can be on your eyes. To help reduce this strain, experts recommend following the 20-20-20 rules.     3     Taking these little breaks can help avoid eye strain. Of course, it’s not a bad idea to keep your eyes away from a screen for an entire day every once in a while.

Wear eye protection

It’s always a good idea to wear something in situations that might put your eyes at risk, whether you’re playing sports or doing construction work.     4     so it can happen to anyone. With simple eye protection, you can easily avoid permanent injury to your eyes.

Don’t forget your sunglasses

Other than looking cool, sunglasses protect your eyes from ultraviolet rays(紫外线).     5     Just make sure the sunglasses have lenses that offer ultraviolet protection.

【推荐1】Hugging probably isn’t the first thing when thinking about what robots could help humankind with. Alexis E. Block and her colleagues have been involved in the HuggieBot project for years, trying to be trailblazers of a robot that could deliver human-like hugs.

The creators of HuggieBot 3.0 claim that it is “the first fully autonomous human-sized hugging robot”. It features a custom sensing system called “HuggieChest” consisting of two inflated (膨胀的) parts to imitate a soft chest. But there’s a lot more than a soft chest to the HuggieBot 3.0. The advanced robot delivers hugs using a pair of arms mounted to a custom metal frame (框架) that were selected for being human-like, quiet, and safe. As a hug takes place, a pressure sensor and microphone inside the artificial chest detect human touch and begin transmitting data via a board to a Robot Operating System (ROS)-based computer located in the HuggieBot 3.0’s 3D-printed head.

The team used feedback from 512 real people over 32 trials to train a machine learning system. “The HuggieBot 3.0 can stay still, move slightly vertically (垂直地), tap or pat a person’s back and squeeze with-varying degrees of pressure The team wrote in a recent study.

Alexis E. Block started working on the original HuggieBot back in 2016. The first version was built on six “hugging commandments” to autonomously enter into and end a hug. The HuggieBot 2.0 took the project a step further by integrating sensing perception, but the 3.0 version is the most advanced version with five added hugging commandments to deliver a human, like hugging experience.

In a recent test, 12 participants who hugged the robot for longer declared that they felt it was “significantly nicer to hug” than previous ones.

The HuggieBot 3.0 isn’t perfect, and its creators point out that it isn’t quite like hugging a real person just yet, but they are already working on a fourth version that should come with improved hug positioning and techniques. They hope that one day HuggieBot will be able to take the place of the sensation of human bugging to perfection.

【推荐3】Wireless Charging:

Deliver Electricity through the Air

A wireless charging room has been developed by scientists. It can deliver power through the air to any laptop, tablet or phone without the need for plugs or cables.

The new technology involves generating magnetic fields over longer distances without also producing electrical fields that would prove harmful to any people or animals within the room, according to the team from the University of Tokyo.

The system, which has been tested in a single room but is still in its infancy (在初始阶段), can deliver up to 50 watts of power without exceeding current guidelines for human exposure to magnetic fields, the study authors explained. It could be used to charge any device with a wire coil (电线圈) fitted inside, similar to the system used with wireless charging pads currently in use—but without the pad. As well as removing bundles of charging cables from desks, it could allow for more devices to be fully robotized without the need for ports, plugs or cables.

To demonstrate the new system, they installed the unique wireless charging infrastructure in a purpose- built aluminum “test room” that was 10 feet by 10 feet. They then used it to power lamps, fans and mobile phones that drew current from anywhere in the room, regardless of where furniture or people had been placed.

Researchers didn’t say what the technology might cost because it is still very early in development and “years away” from being made available to the public. “This really ups the power of the ubiquitous (无所不在的) computing world- you could put a computer anywhere without ever having to worry about charging or plugging in,” said study coauthor Alanson Sample from the University of Michigan.

There are also clinical applications, according to Sample, who said heart implants currently require a wire from the pump to run through the body and into a socket. “This could eliminate that,” the author said, adding it would act to reduce the risk of infection and improve patients’ quality of life by eliminating the wire completely.

【推荐2】A new study suggests that when parents baby talk to their babies, they might be helping them learn to produce speech.

The way parents tend to speak to babies—raised voice, exaggerated (夸张的) pronunciation, slower speed is considered to not only attract them, but possibly help them learn to understand what parents are saying. New research from the University of Florida suggests that baby talk can have another, previously unknown advantage: helping babies learn to produce their own speech. The researchers think that by copying the sound of a smaller vocal tract (声道), we adults are showing babies what the words should sound like when they come out of their own mouths.

“It seems to contribute to the production of speech, not just the understanding of speech,” said Matthew Masapollo, Ph.D., an assistant professor in UF’s Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. “It’s not just goo-goo ga-ga.”

In the study, the researchers changed sound frequency (声频) to copy either a baby’s or adult’s vocal tract, and then tested how babies reacted. 6-8 month old babies “showed a clear and strong preference for speech with the frequency that suggests a vocal tract similar to their own in size and length,’’ they wrote.

4-6 month old babies didn’t have that preference, though. So the fact that older babies are more attracted to adults’ baby-like sounds may result from their new ability to control their voices and make words rather than meaningless sounds.

“Though baby talk may sound simple, it’s achieving a lot,” says coauthor Linda Polka of McGill University. We re talking to babies to show them something about speech production, she said. “We’re equipping them for their own speech.”

【推荐3】Someone can be overweight, underweight or at an ideal weight. There is no one perfect weight for a kid to be, but there are ideal weight ranges for kids based on height and whether the person is a girl or a boy. Though healthy kids can weigh more or less, a good weight range is about 15 to 70 pounds (about 23 to 32 kilograms) for a kid who’s 8 years old.

But being overweight is more than a number on the scale. A doctor is a good person to make a judgment about a kid’s weight. The doctor can look at a kid's ideal weight range while also taking the kid’s height into account. A taller kid naturally could weigh more than a shorter kid and not be overweight. Perhaps the best way to determine if a kid is overweight is to use something called body mass index or BMI.

BMI uses a kid’s height and weight in a calculation that results in a number. That number can be marked on a chart (图表) that also considers the kid’s age and if the kid is a girl or a boy. BMI can show how much body fat the person has, but it’s only an estimate (估计) , because muscle weighs more than fat, it’s possible for a muscular person to have a high BMI, but that doesn’t mean he or she is overweight. Likewise, it’s possible for someone to have a low or ideal BMI but still have too much body fat.