【推荐2】With low temperatures, radiation and high-energy particles, the vacuum of space is nothing but harsh (严酷的). Can you imagine spending six hour walking in space? Chinese astronauts did just that on their latest spacewalk.

On Aug 20, Chinese astronauts Liu Boming and Nie Haisheng went out on the second spacewalk of the Shenzhou XII mission, according to the China Manned Space Agency. The pair set up and adjusted equipment, showed their spacesuits and tested the large robotic arm and other spacewalk-related devices.

Despite the astronauts’ skill, spacewalking is a challenging task. Luckily, their bulky (臃肿的) spacesuits protect them. A spacesuit is like a small space station. It has everything astronauts need when they carry out a spacewalk.

China’s Feitian spacesuits have six layers. The innermost layer collects astronauts’ urine (尿液). There are also four layers that help control the temperature and air pressure inside the suit. Spacesuits are filled with air, so they look like they’re puffed up (膨胀). The sixth layer is made of special fibers that cover astronauts from radiation, according to The Paper.

Astronauts are connected to the space station with safety ropes. The suit has headphones and speakers for astronauts to communicate. There is also a mirror on the wrist that astronauts can use to check their suits.

The first Feitian suit was made in 2008. Zhai Zhigang wore it to carry out China’s first spacewalk, which lasted about 19 minutes.

The suits Chinese astronauts wear today are the second generation of Feitian. They can support longer walks lasting up to eight hours and can be used more often. The first generation could only be used five times within two years, while the second generation can be used 15 times within three years. Each suit costs around 30 million yuan, and it takes four months to make just one according to Ifeng News.

【推荐3】A self-driving Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in a late-night accident in Tempe, Arizona, police said on Monday. The accident is believed to be the first pedestrian death involving the technology of autonomous vehicles.

The gray SUV had an operator in the driver’s seat and was traveling at about 40 miles per hour in autonomous mode when it struck a woman who was walking across the street late Sunday night, Tempe police said. The pedestrian was rushed to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead from her injuries.

“The City of Tempe has been supportive of autonomous vehicle testing because of the innovation and promise that the technology may offer in many areas, including transportation options for disabled residents and seniors,” Tempe Mayor, Mitchell said in the statement. “Testing must occur safely. All indications we have had in the past show that traffic laws are being obeyed by the companies testing here. Our city leadership and Tempe police will pursue any and all answers to what happened in order to ensure safety moving forward.”

Self-driving cars have been praised by technology companies as the wave of the future. Autonomous cars are already being in more than 30 cities around the world, with companies investing more than $80 billion into research and development.

“Everyone recognized that someone was going to die in a crash involving an autonomous vehicle eventually,” Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies risks in automated driving systems, told NBC News. “As good as that technology tries to be, mistakes can happen, or it may be one of the small fraction of crashes. I just think everybody kind of hoped that one wouldn’t come this soon.”

Smith added that because federal and state agencies don’t have the resources to monitor individual vehicles, the responsibility for safety falls on the individual companies running the technology.

The National Transportation Safety Board announced that a four-person team has been sent to Tempe to investigate the crash.

【推荐1】If you’ve watched Grey’s Anatomy, then you’ve gotten an insight into the complex hierarchies (等级) that rule a hospital. Over 17 seasons, the show’s heroine, Meredith Grey, got promoted from a lowly intern (实习生) to chief of general surgery, learning from the presiding residents and older surgeons along the way. There’s rarely doubt about who is in charge, who has more expertise, or who should be supervising and training other staff. Grey’s fictional journey illustrates the complicated dynamics of a health care setting, whether it’s a local clinic or a busy city hospital. Those hierarchies can help teams provide care efficiently, but what happens when those traditional roles are disrupted?

“These status barriers are tricky,” says Sara Singer, a professor of organizational behavior and a professor of medicine.“They can get in the way of medical professionals learning new skills, particularly when junior employees are asked to show more senior coworkers how to use a new technology. ” But, as Singer and her coauthors reveal in a recent paper, upending these complex hierarchies can be a useful training strategy.

Singer and her coauthors studied observations from five different primary care settings over the course of nearly two years. At each, medical assistants and patient-service representatives had to learn several new digital technologies. Even though these positions are fairly low in the medical and administrative order, Singer says that within these jobs, tenure and status are still important. So when younger employees were selected to be trainers, that threw the typical power balance off the good state. At some sites, employees struggled to pick up the skills they needed. “There were some groups where the training seemed to be taking and people seemed to be following on with the work that was intended,” Singer says. “But at other places it just wasn’t working out.”

By creating a system that gave everyone a chance at those opportunities, clinics could remove the jealousy that might come from selecting one younger employee over another time and time again.

【推荐2】If you’ve ever awoken from a vivid dream only to find that you can’t remember the details by the end of breakfast, you’re not alone. People forget most of the dreams they have—though it is possible to train yourself to remember more of them. Dreaming happens mostly during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. During this sleep stage, brain activity looks similar to that in a waking brain, with some very important differences.

Short-term memory areas are active during REM sleep, but those only hang on to memories for about 30 seconds. You have to wake up from REM sleep to recall (记起) a vivid dream. If, instead, you pass into the next stage of sleep without waking, that dream will never enter long-term memory. If you sleep only six hours, you’re getting less than half of the dream time of an eight-hour night. Those final hours of sleep are the most important for dreaming. And people tend to remember the last dream of the night — the one just before waking.

Other factors also contribute to whether you’ll remember your nighttime adventures. Women tend to remember a few more dreams than men on average. Young people remember more dreams than older people. Memory of dreams increases in kids from the age at which they can communicate about those dreams, plateaus (停滞) from the early teens to the early 20s and then very gradually declines in adults over the rest of their life. There are a lot of individual differences in dream memory, though. Some people almost never remember a dream while others regularly recall several each night.

It is possible to train your brain to remember more of your dreams. If you want to remember your dreams, you’d better take a moment when you wake up, before you even move your body, to think about what you were just dreaming and remember as much as possible. This moves the dream from short-term memory to long-term memory.

【推荐3】Why do animals migrate or move? They do so to find a place that will offer better living conditions. Not all animals migrate, but those that migrate are attempting to help the survival of their species. There are a variety of reasons why animals leave. Some migrate to avoid weather changes. Some leave because of the food supply. Unlike humans who migrate because of relationships, job changes, or other social reasons, animals migrate to survive.

There are different types of migration, but one of the most interesting is the seasonal migration. In seasonal migrations, animals move twice a year. These movements usually occur due to changes in the seasons or in the weather. For example, some birds migrate away from colder regions to warmer weather and then come back to a place once the colder weather has passed.

How do animals know when it is time to migrate? Some animals do not leave an are until the environment changes and becomes a place that is not favorable for them to live. Other animals seem to have inborn systems that tell them when it is time to leave.

Animals that migrate use many different ways to successfully reach their destinations. Scientists believe animals’ senses play a huge role in helping them find their way. For example, salmon(三文鱼)are thought to recognize specific smells that help them. Others are thought to use even the sun, moon, and stars to help guide them on their journeys. Although the animals use different methods to migrate, one thing is the same: migration remains an important journey for the survival of many of Earth’s most amazing species.

【推荐2】“Siri, what’s the weather like in San Francisco?”

“Today’s forecast for San Antonio is…”

“No. San FRAN-CIS-CO!!”

“The tapper Sisqo was born in Baltimore, Maryland.”

Sometimes, talking to an artificially intelligent robot is, well, not so intelligent.

Yobav Shoham, the Stanford computer science professor, said, “AI has made truly amazing progress in the past decade, but computers still can’t exhibit the common sense or the general intelligence of even a 5-year-old.” Yann LeCun, a French scientist, put it more simply. “We’re very far from having machines that can learn the most basic things about the world in the way humans and animals can do. In particular areas machines have superhuman performance, but in terms of general intelligence they’re not even close to a rat,” he explained.

Oren Etzioni, an Israeli scientist, said, “There’s a brand of science fiction (小说) that’s very dystopian (反面乌托邦的). These works of fiction talk about how the world is going to get much worse. I’m too much of an optimist to get a lot of pleasure out of reading such stories.”

However, robots are becoming smarter. Indeed, our homes are becoming more intelligent when we place devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Hothe on our kitchen counter. But at least for the moment anyway, we shouldn’t feel intimidated by this artificial intelligence.

There are robots that move like animals and robots that offer guidance. There’s even a robot that can paint a picture of Einstein and a robot that can fold your laundry. Robots are not taking over the world yet. So for now, we can simply sit back and relax. And have a robot waiter pour us a drink.

【推荐3】This month, the Internet was flooded with wonderful digital art portraits, thanks to the work of the latest artificial intelligence-assisted application to go viral: Lensa. Users uploaded their photographs to the App and then—for a small fee—it used AI to transform their profile pictures into, say, a magical warrior princess version of themselves, in no time at all.

This year has seen a breakthrough for AI-driven image generators, which are now better than ever in quality, speed and affordability. If that sounds great to you, you might not be one of the millions of humans whose livelihoods depend on being able to exchange those skills for money.

Some artists predicted that a computer would recreate the aura of a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci in the near future. As long as there are enough data for the AI to train itself, it can copy numerous masterpieces just in several minutes. It seems unavoidable that a large number of artists would lose their jobs.

“I see it less as a threat and more of an opportunity,” the UK-based illustrator Michelle Thompson said, adding, “Like everything else, there will always be artists who can use the tools better.”

These tools are only as good as the data sets they are trained on. Human imagination, on the other hand, has no limit. For Dryhurst, an artist from Germany, AI models “could attempt to make a pale version of something we did years ago”, but that “doesn’t account for what we might do next”.

The kind of artificial intelligence we might imagine replacing artists—an entirely autonomous creative robot—does not yet exist, but it is coming. And as AI becomes more universal, artists, illustrators and designers will ultimately be set apart not by if, but by how, they use the technology.