【推荐1】Japan says it will start releasing radioactive(放射性的) water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear center into the sea beginning in two years. The polluted water is to be treated before it is released into the Pacific Ocean. The government announced the plan Tuesday and said it had been approved by cabinet ministers. The decision had long been expected, but faced delays linked to safety concerns and public opposition.

Japan has said the water release is necessary to move forward with cleanup efforts at the Fukushima nuclear center. Three reactors(反应堆) there suffered meltdowns after the 2011 earthquake and huge ocean wave destroyed the plant5s cooling systems. The disaster forced 160,000 people to flee polluted areas around the plant. Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, operates the nuclear center. It is carrying out the cleanup. TEPCO said Fukushima will run out of all its storage space for radioactive water by late 2022.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said the government had decided the ocean release was the most realistic way to solve the water storage problem. Other methods considered included injecting the water into the ground or converting it to steam or hydrogen and then releasing it into the atmosphere.

The government describes the water to be released as “treated” and not “radioactive”. But experts say that 100 percent of radioactive materials cannot be removed. Government officials say tritium(氚) is the only substance that cannot be removed from the water. They say tritium is not considered harmful in small amounts.

The officials say all other radioactive materials in the water can be reduced to releasable levels. The exact amount of radioactive material that would remain in the water is not known. Some scientists say the long-term effects on ocean life from large amounts of such treated water also remains unknown. Fishermen and many people living in the area strongly oppose the plan. They have said releasing the water into the ocean could cause widespread damage to Fukushima5s fishing and agriculture industries.

【推荐1】Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr was the type of woman people love to comment. She was strikingly beautiful, with green eyes, black hair and full lips, which attracted the attention of Hollywood producers in the 1930s and 1940s. However, as Lamarr once said, “The brains of people are more interesting than the looks.” This rang true with her. She was one of the most prolific inventors of the 20th century, who yielded various inventions in her life. Despite the fame as a distinguished actress, Lamarr died with little money to her name, although she invented the technology that powers so much of our world today.

Lamarr was born into a well-to-do family. Her father, a bank director and curious man, inspired her to look at the world with open eyes. He would discuss with her the inner-workings of different machines. These conversations guided Lamarr’s thinking. Meanwhile, Lamarr’s mother introduced her to the arts, placing her in both ballet and piano lessons.

Lamarr’s beauty took center stage in Hollywood at age 16. Later, Lamarr was introduced to businessman and pilot Howard Hughes, who helped to fuel the innovator in Lamarr, giving her a small set of equipment to use in her trailer (活动房屋) on set. While she had an inventing table in her house, the small set allowed Lamarr to work on inventions between takes. She was indeed a genius. “Improving things comes naturally to me,” she once said. Her mind was full of possibilities. She created an upgraded stoplight and a tablet that made a soda similar to Coca-Cola, and proposed the concept of spread spectrum (扩频) technology that makes Wi-Fi today possible.

The moment finally came. The Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded Lamarr with Pioneer Award in 1997. She also became the first woman to receive the Invention Convention’s Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award. Although she died in 2000, Lamarr was listed into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. Such achievement has led Lamarr to be named the mother of Wi-Fi and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

[1] Inakadate is considered the home of Tanbo art, a rice field art form. Its story as a world-renowned tourist destination began in the early 1990s, when local authorities realized that youths were moving to large urban centers continuously, and started brainstorming for ways of reviving (焕发生机) the village. One of the proposed ideas was an art form inspired by the local’s traditional rice farming, done by hand for hundreds of years. Tanbo art involved the use of different-color rice varieties to turn local rice fields into giant canvases (画布) for complicated designs that revealed their beauty when viewed from above.

[2] The first rice field artwork was unveiled in 1993, when purple and yellow rice plants were used to create a detailed picture of Mt. Iwaki — the highest mountain in Aomori — along with easily recognized characters. A viewing platform was set up somewhere above the rice field, from which people could admire the unique artwork in all its glory. The project was so successful that Inakadate authorities decided to turn it into a yearly event.

[3] To create the impressively massive rice field artworks, locals use a technique which involves surveying the rice fields, perspective drawing (透视绘图), and the handmade plantation of various types of rice plants to create the desired visual effect. Tanbo art has come a long way in the last three decades, with designs gradually becoming larger and more complicated.

[4] Many locals say that Tanbo art has saved Inakadate, bringing in impressive numbers of people from all over the world and boosting the local economy. According to CoolJP, around 200,000 people flocked to Inakadate to see its unique artworks in 2006, and by 2016 that number had ballooned to around 340,000.

【推荐3】In Japan, the new year began with disaster as a 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula (能登半岛) on the country’s western edge on Monday. More than 2,000 active fault lines (断层线) lie beneath Japan, making it one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world.

Many scientists have long considered earthquake forecasting to be impossible. But given recent improvements in artificial intelligence, some researchers have been studying whether that could change.

Last fall, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin increased such hopes for earthquake prediction with a seven-month trial in China. In all, the algorithm (演算法) successfully forecast 14 earthquakes, each within about 200 miles of its actual epicenter (震中). Meanwhile, it missed one quake and predicted eight that never happened. The trial was part of an international A.I.-design competition, one of a few such events held in recent years to advance earthquake prediction technologies.

Sergey Fomel, a geoscientist at UT Austin and a member of the research team, says in a statement. “We’re not yet close to making predictions for anywhere in the world, but what we achieved tells us that what we thought was an impossible problem is solvable in principle.”

Additionally, machine learning could help detect hidden patterns in data or collect more data to better inform earthquake forecasting, Hutchison writes for MIT Technology Review. For example, some researchers are showing how A. I. might use recordings from a specific seismic site to anticipate an earthquake’s magnitude. One team has built and trained neural networks to predict where aftershocks may occur after an initial strike. And others are using machine learning to identify and extract seismic waves—the vibrations that spread through the earth during tectonic activity (构造活动)—from other noises in the ground.