【推荐3】It has been two months since I moved to China, but its digital advancement hasn't stopped impressing me ever since. One of the major things that I cannot imagine living without anymore is mobile payment. There are two major mobile payment apps here, Alipay and WeChat Pay. Both have similar payment features, though WeChat has more like a social media. That's why I will focus on this "super app".

So far, I've been shocked by how efficient life can be with WeChat. It is present in every aspect of people's daily life, from paying water and electricity bills, meals, cinema tickets to calling a taxi, following news, and chatting with friends. Most merchants have adopted it, from tiny local street food stalls to high-end（高端的）stores. A cashier may be surprised if you do not pay with WeChat or Alipay at the grocers or in restaurants. And it seems like the entire payment industry has encouraged this shift to mobile payment, equipping payment terminals with QR code scanners to simplify payments. Mobile payments are so common here that I realize that I can perfectly survive if I forget my wallet at home one day because most days I just don't take it out of my bag！

As mentioned earlier, WeChat is also a major social media platform with about one billion daily users, which is more than the entire population of European Union. So I have to say Chinese technological and digital development is a real miracle.

【推荐2】The idea of billions of people going through a few masks a week during this pandemic (疫情) rings alarm bells, but a team of researchers in Melbourne, Australia, may have the solution.

To recycle the abandoned masks, Jie Li and his team added millions of face masks to road-paving (铺路) materials. They found the polypropylene (聚丙烯)plastic used to make single-use face masks could really increase the flexibility of the road.

The new composite material is a mixture of about 2% masks, with recycled concrete aggregate (RCA)—a material produced from waste concrete and other minerals from buildings pulled down. This recycled material found in the study is ideal for two of the four layers generally required to create roadways. And the final product is more resistant to wear than normal asphalt (沥青), as well as being cheaper too, if there was a method for collecting masks.

Li and his team did a cost-analysis and found that, at $26 per ton, the RCA was about half the cost of mining materials, and as much as a third of the cost of shipping the used masks to a landfill (垃圾填埋场). If the percentage of damaged roads in Washington state were repaired with Li’s mixture, it would reuse nearly 10 billion masks, sparing American landfills hundreds of millions of tons of trash.

The team is going to look for industry partners or governments willing to give their plastic mask road an opportunity for a large-scale test.

【推荐3】Everyone judge the film through a different angle. If you a doctor, you may think:”That character would not have survived that fall.” If you’re a physicist : That’s not how black holes work.” And if you’re me, it’s more like: “What a dumb concept of future personal technology!”

It makes me crazy when sci-fi movie makers dream up stuff with no basis in science.Human teleporters(传送器)? Sorry, Star Trek. A bed that detects and cures cancer in seconds? No, Elysium.

On the other hand, some technologies in some movies are so practical that people invest them in the real world. Star Trek’s self opening doors are now a standard feature of grocery store entrances, and the driver less cars from Total Recall(and many other films )are already on American roads.

Lately it’s clear that Hollywood’s production designers have been putting serious thought into the tech we’ll someday crazy. Her , for example, is about a man who falls in love with his siri-like voice assistant. He talks to her through a single earbud(耳机），through which he gets a surprising amount done: processing e-mail, flipping through news stories, sending messages. When an image is essential to the communication, he flips open his phone, where the pictures appears.

The solution makes a lot of sense-----more than , for example, Google Glass, a now dis continued headband that place a miniature screen above your eyebrow. It’s not the technical ones but the social missteps(失策) that make the Glass’s plan fail. Glass’s camera frightened others and made you look like a monster.

You can see why people went nuts over the concept: imagine having all the power of a smart phone without actually needing a smart phone. We won’t see this in the real world, though. Even a projector, battery and processor could be squeezed into a thin band, there remains a lot of challenges. How would the projector attain sharp focus on an irregular , moving palm? How would it project on sunny day? How would it work on very light or very dark skin?

The robots in HBO’s westwood----so perfectly designed that we can’t tell the robots from humans----might be a little untrue. Yet the personal tech in that series makes a lot of sense: the characters carry cardboard-thin, trifold phones. When you need a quick check, you glance at it’s “cover”; when you need the bigger picture, you unfold it into a tablet.（平板）

Most of these shows, however, continue to get one thing wrong: obviously,in the future, our computers make little sounds as their text and images appear. Why do movie makers think that adding silly sound effects make their machines more realistic? In the real world, a room full of burbling screens makes us crazy.

Well, I suppose I should let that part go. They’re just movies, right? They’re not a description of the future----at least not yet.

【推荐1】While elephants born without tusks (长牙)are not unheard of，they normally form just 2 to 6 percent of the population. However, that is not the case at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, where an astonishing 33 percent of female elephants born after the country’s civil war ended in 1992 are tuskless. While that may appear to be just a coincidence, Joyce Poole, an elephant behavior expert, has another theory. The researcher thinks we may be witnessing unnatural evolution of the species due to the constant hunting of elephants for valuable ivory.

Poole says before the country’s 15-year-long civil war, the 100,000-acre park was home to over 4,000 elephants. However, by the time the conflict ended in 1992, about 90 percent of them had been killed for ivory to help finance weapons (武器)and meat to feed the soldiers. Of the less than 200 survivors, over 50 percent of adult females had no tusks. Therefore, it is not surprising that the park’s tuskless elephant population has grown greatly.

This is not the first time researchers have observed a great change in the population of elephants. At Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park and Lupande Game Management Area， areas which were heavily hunted in the 1970s and 1980s, 35% of elephants 25 years or older and 13% of those younger than 25 are now without tusks. A 2008 study published found that the number of tuskless females at the Ruaha National Park in Tanzania went from 10.5 percent in 1969 to almost 40 percent in 1989, largely due to illegal hunting for ivory.

The recent ban on ivory in both the US and China should help get rid of, or at least reduce, elephant hunting. However, scientists are not sure how long it will take for elephants with a higher rate of tuskless females, to change the trend.

【推荐2】Should we allow modern buildings to be built next to older buildings in a historic area of a city? In order to answer this question, we must first examine whether people really want to preserve the historic feel of an area. Not all historical buildings are attractive. However, there may be other reasons — for example, economic reasons — why they should be preserved. So, let us suppose that historical buildings are both attractive and important to the majority of people. What should we do then if a new building is needed?

In my view, new architectural styles can exist (存在) perfectly well alongside an older style. Indeed, there are many examples in my own hometown of Tours where modern designs have been placed very successfully next to old buildings. As long as the building in question is pleasing and does not dominate (影响) its surroundings too much, it often improves the attractiveness of the area.

It is true that there are examples of new buildings which have spoilt the area they are in, but the same can be said of some old buildings too. Yet people still speak against new buildings in historic areas. I think this is simply because people are naturally conservative (保守的) and do not like change.

Although we have to respect people’s feelings as fellow users of the buildings, I believe that it is the duty of the architect and planner to move things forward. If we always reproduced what was there before, we would all still be living in caves. Thus, I would argue against copying previous architectural styles and choose something fresh and different, even though that might be the more risky choice.

A fresh-faced batch of teenagers just began a new school year, but will they get the most out of it? In the mornings, many are forced to get to school much too early. And at night, screens are a temptation that’s hard to resist. This double whammy (双重灾难) is a perfect lesson in sleep deprivation (剥夺).

Three out of every four students in grades 9 to 12 fail to sleep the minimum of eight hours that the American Academy of Medicine recommends for their age group. In most cases, insufficient sleep results in reduced attention, preventing students’ progress and lowering grades. More alarmingly, sleep deprivation may lead to physical and emotional problems.

It is important to understand why teenagers have a particularly hard time getting enough sleep, and what adults need to do to help. First, a reminder of the basic biology: Adolescents are no longer the morning larks of their younger years. They become rewired as night owls, staying awake later and then sleeping in. This is mostly driven by changes in the way the brain responds to light.

New technology habits aren’t helping. More teenagers now turn to activities involving screens at night. The growth in screen time is particularly problematic for sleep. The blue light emitted by LEDs, TVs, tablets and smartphones suppresses the body’s secretion (分泌) of melatonin, the hormone that signals it’s time to sleep. Overdosing on screens at night effectively tells the brain it’s still daytime, delaying the body’s cues to sleep even further.

Parents should inform their kids of the time that can be spent on screens, and praise children who show signs of regulating their own media consumption. In the hour before bedtime, there should be a suspension on bright lights in the home, avoiding devices and harsh LED bulbs in kitchens and bathrooms.

In 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., a policy now backed by the American Medical Association and many other health organizations.

Parents also need to join forces with community leaders, sleep scientists, health professionals and educators to put school start times on the local, then state agendas.

Whenever schools have managed the transition to a later start time, students get more sleep, attendance goes up, grades improve and there is a significant reduction in car accidents.

【推荐1】Three divers enter a hole leading to a water-filled cave on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. They swim for an hour. Finally, they reach a large room 60 feet underground and about the size of two basketball courts. Here, they discover an upside-down human skull. Other bones lie nearby.

The team came across the skull in 2007. The divers then told the Mexican government about the finding. Soon the government formed a team of scientists to look into it. The group, which included archaeologist Dominique Rissolo, believed that the skull belonged to someone who lived in the last ice age. At the ice age some twenty thousand years ago, sea levels dropped and new land appeared. Over time, rain and wind ate holes into some of the land.

"The person may have died after entering the cave," Rissolo says. Then, when the ice age ended some ten thousand years ago, sea levels rose. Water flooded the cave, covering the remains.

Worrying that moving the skull might destroy it, scientists decided to examine it at its watery resting place. They collected information about the skull and other pieces of bones. They found that the bones belonged to a 15- to 17-year-old girl who lived at least twelve thousand years ago. The team named her after a type of water nymph (仙女) in Greek myths: the Naiads (Naia).

Naia is the oldest nearly complete human skeleton (骨架) ever found in the Americas. DNA tests showed that she's a direct ancestor of present-day Native Americans. Naia's DNA also matches with people native to Siberia, a part of Russia. Scientists have long thought that ancient people from this area arrived in Alaska during the last ice age. They were the first humans to live in the Americas. And Naia proves how far south they went.

In 2014 the scientists decided to bring up Naia's skull from the cave to protect it from curious divers. So it was taken to a lab, where it remains today.

【推荐2】A table-waiting robot cat built by a Chinese technology firm can carry plates of food, navigate a restaurant, miaow at diners and even react to having its ears stroked (抚摸).

Making its debut at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the so-called BellaBot was built for Chinese restaurants lacking enough waiters.

It is the brainchild of the Chinese robotics and artificial intelligence firm PuduTech. It features four shelves in the centre of its tower-like body to carry plates. Having been loaded up with meals by its human colleagues, the cat-themed robotic waiter miaows when it delivers food to diners to encourage them to take their plates. If customers thank BellaBot by stroking its ears, it will respond with a look of pleasure on its on-board screen, which displays animations of a cat’s face. “The owner’s hand is so warm,” BellaBot has been programmed to respond.

However, much like a real cat, the robot’s reaction soon changes if it is petted for too long. “It gets mad to remind you not to interrupt its job,” the designers introduced. The BellaBot waiter robot is a more personality-rich update to PuduTech’s previous model, which featured a more utilitarian (实用主义的) design and user interface.

Both BellaBot and its predecessor were designed with a particular mind to Chinese restaurants which are often short of waiting staff.

In a real-world food-service setting, however, BellaBot may find it difficult to operate at peak times. Nevertheless, restaurants are expected to increase their reliance on automation whether in the form of robotic waiting staff or otherwise. Furthermore, improvements in technology will see consumer robot designs grow steadily better at communicating with humans and facing new activities.