【推荐2】New bio-plastics are being made in laboratories from straw, wood chips and food waste, with researchers aiming to replace oil as the source of the world’s plastic.

The new approaches include genetically modifying bacteria to eat wood and produce useful chemicals. But the bio-plastics are currently significantly more expensive to make than fossil fuel-based plastics.

Land and seas around the world, from high mountains to deep oceans, have become polluted with plastic, prompting major public concern. The world has produced 8bn tons of plastic since the 1950s and demand is still rising.

While some waste plastic is recycled, much of it is burnt to produce electricity, resulting in carbon emissions that drive climate change. In contrast to plastic made from oil, plastics made from plant-based materials only release the carbon the plants absorbed from the air as they grew. Bio-plastics will also give more options for products that biodegrade (生物降解) in the environment, although they can be made very long-lasting if required.

“Plastics are an incredible enhancement to our daily lives,” said Paul Mines, CEO of Biome Technologies in the UK, which has spent t5m in the last five years on bio-plastics research. “But we can’t go on using fossil fuel-based materials. About 6-7% of every barrel (桶) of oil is used to make plastics.”

“Using plant materials is feasible,” said professor Simon, at the University of York. “Replacing half of the nation’s plastic bottles could be done using just 3% of the sugar beet crop, 5% of wheat straw or 2.5% of food waste,” he said.

Currently, just a few thousand tons of bio-plastic are used in the UK each year, compared to millions of tons of conventional plastic. Mines said this could rise to about 20,000 tons in the next five years.

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【推荐1】1. One question every coach has beard in their coaching career is this.

“Why isn’t my kid playing?”

The stupidity of many “win-at-all-cost” coaches in youth sports is neatly matched by that of “play-my-kid-or-else” parents at the high-school level.

When the games start to count, the main reason why your kid isn’t playing is simple:

“They’re just not good enough.”

“He/she just isn’t fast enough.”

“He/she just isn’t strong enough.”

Good coaches, however, are not usually that blunt. They are very skillful in not telling what you and I would consider the “truth”. The thing is that many kids know what they’re good at, and what they’re not good at. When it comes to football, for instance, most of the middle-schoolers or freshmen already know the one or two kids who are good enough to play on the varsity team or to catch the eye of a college admissions officer. Their parents do not.

The rest play because they enjoy it, need the discipline, want to belong to a team, have dreamed of it since they were five or six, are trying to make their parents happy, need a varsity sport on their college application, or some combination of the factors above. Some of them don’t possess much athletic skill, but make up for it by practicing, by getting stronger and quicker, and with on-field effort.

Far too many children today are living in a world where they never learn “no”. They don’t know how to handle disappointment and failure. Nor do they know how to react and move on when they don’t get their own way.

It’s awful when your kid isn't playing. Been there, done that. No reasonable parent wants to see their child hurt. But no one escapes this life unhurt, emotionally if not physically. When these kids move on in life, they are going to get rejected when they apply for college, fail to get the job they want, and taste failure and disappointment on multiple fronts.

Coaches should try to make sure everyone gets some playing time. But that should never come at the expense of other kids who are more talented, try harder or spend more time practicing. No child should ever go out for any team thinking they’re going to be guaranteed a spot or playing time, no matter how loudly their parents complain.

In that sense, sports are a true mirror of life. No one is guaranteed “playing” time in life. For the most part, hard work, effort, planning and desire is rewarded. The benefits can be wonderful. But it’s good to be prepared when it doesn't work out that way.

【推荐2】Certain forms of AI are indeed becoming ubiquitous. For example, algorithms (算法) carry out huge volumes of trading on our financial markets, self-driving cars are appearing on city streets, and our smartphones are translating from one language into another. These systems are sometimes faster and more perceptive than we humans are. But so far that is only true for the specific tasks for which the systems have been designed. That is something that some AI developers are now eager to change.

Some of today’s AI pioneers want to move on from today’s world of “weak” or “narrow” AI, to create “strong” or “full” AI, or what is often called artificial general intelligence (AGI). In some respects, today’s powerful computing machines already make our brains look weak. AGI could, its advocates say, work for us around the clock, and drawing on all available data, could suggest solutions to many problems. DM, a company focused on the development of AGI, has an ambition to “solve intelligence”. “If we’re successful,” their mission statement reads, “we believe this will be one of the most important and widely beneficial scientific advances ever made.”

Since the early days of AI, imagination has outpaced what is possible or even probable. In 1965, an imaginative mathematician called Irving Good predicted the eventual creation of an “ultra-intelligent machine…that can far surpass all the intellectual (智力的) activities of any man, however clever.” Good went on to suggest that “the first ultra-intelligent machine” could be “the last invention that man need ever make.”

Fears about the appearance of bad, powerful, man-made intelligent machines have been reinforced (强化) by many works of fiction — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Terminator film series, for example. But if AI does eventually prove to be our downfall, it is unlikely to be at the hands of human-shaped forms like these, with recognizably human motivations such as aggression (敌对行为). Instead, I agree with Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, who believes that the heaviest risks from AGI do not come from a decision to turn against mankind but rather from a dogged pursuit of set objectives at the expense of everything else.

The promise and danger of true AGI are great. But all of today’s excited discussion about these possibilities presupposes the fact that we will be able to build these systems. And, having spoken to many of the world’s foremost AI researchers, I believe there is good reason to doubt that we will see AGI any time soon, if ever.

【推荐3】Would you BET on the future of this man？He is 53 years old. Most of his adult life has been a losing struggle against debt and misfortune. A war injury has made his left hand stop functioning，and he has often been in prison. Driven by heaven-knows-what motives，he determines to write a book.

The book turns out to be one that has appealed to the world for more than 350 years. That former prisoner was Cervantes，and the book was Don Quixote（《堂吉诃德》）. And the story poses an interesting question: why do some people discover new vitality and creativity to the end of their days，while others go to seed long before？

We’ve all known people who run out of steam before they reach life’s halfway mark. I’m not talking about those who fail to get to the top. We can’t all get there. I’m talking about people who have stopped learning on growing because they have adopted the fixed attitudes and opinions that all too often come with passing years.

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