【推荐1】Have you ever wondered why you might be a little shorter than your friends or family? Perhaps you’re at the other end, sick of people asking “What’s the weather like up there ?”. Well, scientists believe the mystery of why humans are growing taller and reaching puberty (青春期) earlier is due to a sensor in the brain.

A joint research, carried out by the University of Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt University and the University of Bristol, showed that there is a brain receptor—MC3R—responsible for signals from food reaching a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which was already well known for being responsible for keeping things in check like body temperature and managing appetite and weight.

MC3R not working properly tends to mean that people are shorter and start puberty much later. Professor Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, one of the authors of the study, said,“ It tells the body we’re great here, we’ve got lots of food, so grow quickly, have puberty soon and make lots of babies .” “ It’s not just magic—we have the complete wiring diagram for how it happens .”

There is an awful lot about the brain we still do not know. However, this research could lead to further development of drugs for children with delayed growth and puberty starting much later. But then, more understanding of the receptor won’t mean that we can make ourselves taller. That all still depends on genes, but it could help people with chronic illnesses who need to build up muscle .

“Future research should investigate if drugs that selectively activate the MC3R might help redirect calories into muscle and other lean (瘦肉) tissues, with the prospect of improving the physical functionality of such patients ,” O’Rahilly said .

【推荐2】Twenty years ago, the word “smartphone” didn’t exist. By necessity, neither did the word “dumbphone.” In two decades, we might talk about all of our appliances in similar ways. From ovens to garage doors to insulin pumps to vehicles, many of our devices are going to be connected to the Internet in the same sense that our phones are now. One company, SmartThings   sells devices that help consumers control their lights and locks while they’re not at home, for example. Eventually, these items will be able to respond to signals from one another independent of human input.     1    .

That could be great, but it also vastly expands the universe of things that could go wrong, particularly when it comes to privacy. Take dishwashers. At heart, they're very simple machines. But a hacked dishwasher might start running on overdrive, going through multiple cycles, wasting gallons of water and costing you extra and possibly flooding your house. Although the folks who make dishwashers may be fantastic engineers, or even great computer programmers, it doesn’t necessarily imply they’re equipped to protect Internet users from the beginning,

    2     Hacking is just an extreme case. Short of that, there are all kinds of security problems that could crop up in an Internet of Things situation. Many of these devices are pumping out vast amounts of data. According to Hagins, a modest 10,000 households have SmartThings installed. Together, those homes produce 150 million data points a day.

    3    As early as 2010, Siemens said it was capable of using its smart meters to learn some pretty incredible things about our energy usage: “We, Siemens, have the technology to record it every minute, second, microsecond”. From that we can infer how many people are in the house, what they do, whether they're upstairs, downstairs, do you have a dog, when do you habitually get up, when do you have a shower: masses of private data.     4    

One difference between data-hungry businesses like Google and your future home network of Internet-enabled objects is that some of those devices may not need to talk to each other over the public Internet. If they’re connected to the same Wi-Fi network, maybe those devices won’t need to transmit data across the Web. “Utilize but keep the data within the home boundary, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Lee Tien suggested ‘‘Keep the interesting variations within the home boundary.”

【推荐1】Committed to helping humans communicate with and understand as many species as possible, a California-based nonprofit organization, Earth Species Project (ESP) is taking the lead.

“We are species-independent,” Raskin said to The Guardian, adding that ESP is developing translation algorithms(算法) that can be applied to biological systems of all kinds, from worms to whales. Raskin acknowledges that the goal is similar to going to the moon. Instead, the ESP roadmap involves solving a series of smaller problems to achieve the big picture. These tools will assist researchers in revealing the secrets of species under study using artificial intelligence.

Bees, for instance, do a special “waggle dance” to signal to each other that they should land on a certain flower, which is a form of non-verbal communication. A noisy social environment can make it difficult to determine which animal is making the sound within a group. This phenomenon is known as the “cocktail party problem”.

Though there are many challenges, some progress has been made, such as an algorithm that can produce imitated animal sounds to talk directly with them.

“It’s making the Al speak the language, although we don’t know what it means yet,” Raskin said, “These are the tools that allow us to understand entire communication systems.” As we can see, Artificial Intelligence is once again being used by scientists to break barriers and open new doors that would otherwise be unopenable. More and more scientists are turning towards artificial intelligence for help in various fields, despite many well-known scientists warning that AI must be controlled and looked over.

Last year, a former Google engineer claimed that the Al was sentient(有感知能力的). Although this isn’t likely to be the case, it shows just how far artificial intelligence has progressed. Interestingly, and in a somewhat connection to ESP, Professor Avi Loeb has proposed that Artificial Intelligence developed by humans could one day maybe identify Alien AI and communicate with it.

【推荐2】The 37-year-old artist, Kelly McKernan, from Nashville, Tennessee calls her works “surreal (超现实的)”. She says they are “dealing with discomfort in the human journey”. Living as an artist is difficult enough. Now McKernan faces another challenge: artificial intelligence (AI).

About a year ago, McKernan began seeing online images (图像) strangely similar to her own. She soon learned that companies were feeding artwork into AI systems to train software programs to create similar images. McKernan said, “I didn’t give my agreement for my name or works to be used this way.”

McKernan said she even tried to contact some of the companies to say “Hey, little artist here, I know you’re not thinking of me at all, but it would be really cool if you didn’t use my work like this.” But there was no answer.

In January, McKernan, and two other artists, Karla Ortiz and Sarah Andersen, started action by law against three image-generator companies: Stability AI, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. They also included the online gallery DeviantArt in the case.

The artists are seeking to protect their copyrighted works and their careers. They say the AI image-generators violate (侵犯) the rights of millions of artists by using their artworks for training and then producing similar works that compete against the originals (原作). The artists are seeking damages and a court order to stop AI companies from using their works without being allowed.

Karla Ortiz works in the entertainment industry. Her work has been used in several well-known movies, including Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Jurassic World. She feared that film companies would think artworks from artists cost too much. Why, she asked, would film companies buy artworks from artists if they can pay $30 a month for AI-created works?

McKernan agreed: “Will I even have any work a year from now?”