【推荐3】Chicken is the number one food that causes food poisoning (中毒). So it makes sense that people want to know how to tell if chicken is bad.     1    

Check the date. Checking the date is the first step to see if raw (生的) chicken is safe to eat. If the printed date passed, the quality of the meat isn’t that great, although it’s still usable.     2    . The advice differs for each type of meat, so be careful how long these meats last in the fridge.

    3    . Check with your eyes, nose, and fingers before buying chicken that might be bad. Raw, fresh chicken that isn’t bad does have a very faint, mild smell. Bad chicken, however, has a clear terrible or sour (酸的) smell. And when it goes bad, the color of the chicken changes from pink to gray. And rather than having a wet, smooth feel, bad chicken is covered with a thick layer of what seems like sticky matter.     4    , the package should feel cold to the touch as it should be kept below freezing.

Cooked chicken lasts three to four days in the refrigerator. If you’re unsure, use your senses again to check if cooked chicken is bad. Meat whose color has changed is one of the things that food poisoning experts never eat.

Remember, how to tell if chicken is bad comes down to color, touch, and smell.     5    , it’s wise to throw it out. If your chicken passes all these tests, make sure you also know how to cook chicken breast the right way.

【推荐1】The release of OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video AI tool last month was met with a mix of worries and excitement from researchers who are concerned about misuse of the technology. The California-based company showcased Sora’s ability to create photorealistic (超级现实主义的) videos from a few short text prompts (提示词), with examples including clips of a woman walking down a neon-lit (霓虹灯闪烁的) street in Tokyo and a dog jumping between two windowsills.

Tracy Harwood, a digital-culture specialist at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, says she is “shocked” by the speed at which text-to-video artificial intelligence (AI) has developed. A year ago, people were laughing at an AI-produced video of the US actor Will Smith eating spaghetti. Now some researchers are worried that the technology could upend global politics in 2024.

OpenAI, which also developed ChatGPT and the text-to-image technology DALL·E, first released Sora on 15 February, announcing that it was making the technology “available to red teamers to assess critical areas for harms or risks”. Red teaming’ refers to the process of conducting simulated attacks (模拟攻击) or exploration of a technology to see how it would cope with criminal activity, such as the creation of misinformation and hateful content, in the real world.

Sora isn’t the first example of text-to-video technology; others include Gen-2, produced by Runway in New York City and released last year, and the Google-led Lumiere, announced in January. Harwood says she has been “underwhelmed” by some of these other products. “They are becoming more and more ordinary in what they present to you,” she says, adding that the programs require very specific prompts to get them to produce compelling (引人入胜的，可信的) content.

Misinformation is a major challenge for these text-to-video technologies, Harwood adds. “We’re going to very quickly reach a point in which we are flooded with a barrage of (一连串) really compelling-looking information. That’s really worrying.”

【推荐2】Spiders are pretty remarkable. They live almost everywhere, from rainforests to deserts. Some even spend most of their lives underwater. They are smarter than you think, with some able to make plans and count. Scientists think they might even dream when they sleep. Yet many people find these eight-legged animals scary. Now, it seems, fake news maybe mostly to blame.

Media reports about people’s encounters with spiders tend to be full of falsehoods, a new study finds. “The vast majority of the spider content out there is about their being scary and hurting people, ”says arachnologist Catherine Scott. In reality, researchers note, “Spiders almost never bite people.” In fact, many spiders protect us by eating insects, such as mosquitoes, which spread disease. Even spiders that could pose a threat rarely bite people, Scott says.

For the new study, Scott and their colleagues analyzed more than 5,000 online newspaper stories about humans and spiders. Each had been published between 2010 and 2020. They came from 81 countries and were written in 40 languages. The researchers didn’t just find errors in the stories. More than four in ten, articles had overblown the spiders’ behaviors and often used sensational words like killers and nightmares to describe them.

If people knew the truth about spiders, they would spend less time blaming them for bites caused by other animals, Scott argues. People might also be less likely to kill spiders with pesticides that are poisonous to other species including humans. Clearing spiders’ name would be good for them, too. Say, for instance, the ones in your house that don’t get squashed (压扁) out of fear.

Improving spiders’ public image could even boost conservation efforts in general. “Spiders are kind of unique in that they seem to be really good at grabbing people’s attention,” says Lisa Taylor, an arachnologist who was not involved in the study. “If that attention is paired with real information about how fascinating they are, then I think spiders are well-suited to serve as tiny ambassadors for wildlife in general.”