【推荐2】In an attempt to raise awareness about the ability to turn wastewater into safe drinking water, a   brewery in Stockholm, Sweden has started a new beer brand made with recycled sewage water(污水).

Called PU: REST, the new beer developed by Stockholm's New Carnegie Brewery together with the Swedish Environmental Research Institute( IVL) and Carlsberg is supposed to convince people that "second hand water" can be as clean as normal tap water. IVL says that the challenge to get people to drink recycled water is not a technological one, but a psychological one, so what better way to convince consumers of the purity of treated wastewater than using it to create a beer?

PU: REST was just born in Sweden on May 25th this year, and it's already being called"crap beer"on social media, but its creators remain hopeful that it will help change the general opinion about recycled wastewater. The difficulties in getting this relatively cost- and energy-efficient method to be used for the production of drinking water is not technical but primarily emotional, "said Staffan PsSon, project manager at IVL."The recycled water is as pure and safe as normal tap water, but most people are still skeptical about actual drinking purified wastewater".

Chris Thurgeson, brewmaster at New Carnegie Brewery, described PU: REST as a"crystal clear pilsner",adding that his company took this challenge because it believes"thal both producers and consumers must dare to think differently if we are to successfully take care of Earth's resources".

PU: REST reportedly has "a very clean and crisp taste", but judging by the comments left on the New Carnegie Brewery Facebook page, consumers arent that excited about it. You can now try PU: REST at New Carnegie Brewery's restaurant in Stockholm, or wait until it goes on sale across Sweden next month.

【推荐3】Robots have always had certain advantages over humans. They’re typically made of more durable materials than the soft tissue covering human bodies and since they can be repaired in the event of damage, they can basically “live” forever. But robots are usually heavy and awkward, and humans have always had a huge advantage in terms of dexterity.

Thanks to the mad scientists at Boston Dynamics, that appears to be changing. The humanoid Atlas robot, which has already showed incredibly impressive human-like abilities, just keeps getting better and better, and a new video by the company shows that its fluidity(流畅) of movement has now easily surpassed your own (and mine).

Atlas has slowly but surely been learning a lot of new skills over the past few years. It’s graduated from holding boxes and awkwardly walking to sprinting(冲刺) over obstacles and navigating(导航) all manner of difficult terrain(地形).

This latest show is an evolution of those skills, with the robot showcasing its ability to fall down, spin in the air, and even do a respectable handstand. It’s essentially a full-fledged(经过充分训练的) gymnastics routine being performed by a robot. Whether that’s awesome or scary depends on your point of view.

We created the maneuvers(招式) using new techniques that streamline the development process. First, an optimization algorithm(优化算法) transforms high-level descriptions of each maneuver into dynamically-feasible(动态可行的) reference motions. Then Atlas tracks the motions using a model predictive controller that smoothly blends from one maneuver to the next. Using this approach, we developed the routine significantly faster than previous Atlas routines, with a performance success rate of about 80%.

Still, being able to pull this off four out of five times is nothing to laugh at, and if Atlas is indeed learning things faster than ever before, we’ll likely be seeing even more impressive routines in the near future.

【推荐1】Visitors to Henn-na, a restaurant outside Nagasaki, Japan, are greeted by an unusual sight: their food being prepared by a row of humanoid robots. The “head chef”, named Andrew, is using his two long arms; he stirs batter (面糊) in a metal bowl, then pours it onto a hot grill. In a nearby hotel, robots check guests into their rooms and help with their luggage.

CEO Hideo Sawada, who runs the restaurant and the hotel, predicts that 70% of the jobs at Japan’s hotels will be automated (自动化) in the next five years. He said, “Since you can work them 24 hours a day, and they don’t need vacation, eventually it’s more cost-efficient to use the robot.”

This is seemingly worrying. In fact, in America, automation helps the food-service and accommodation sector continue to grow. In the company Panera, because of its new kiosks, an app that allows online ordering, the chain is now processing more orders overall, which means it needs more total workers to meet consumer demand. Starbucks customers who use the chain’s app return more frequently than those who don’t, the company has said, and the greater efficiency that online ordering allows has boosted sales at busy stores during peak hours. Starbucks employed 8% more people in the U.S. in 2016 than it did in 2015, the year it launched the app.

Of course, whether automation is a net benefit for workers in restaurants and hotels, and not just a competitive advantage for one chain over another will depend on whether an improved customer experience makes Americans more likely to dine out and stay at hotels, rather than brown-bagging it or finding an Airbnb to book unique homes.

【推荐3】We usually think of archaeology as involving brave explorers and lots of painstaking digging. But today, long-hidden cities are being revealed from the air, where modern archaeologists use laser beams to spot evidence of ancient life buried beneath thick vegetation.

Lidar, short for “light detection and ranging” (and a cousin of radio-based radar), involves directing a rapid succession of laser pulses at the ground from an airplane or a drone. Software captures the time and wavelength of the pulses reflected from the surface and combines it with GPS and other data to produce a precise three-dimensional map of the landscape below. These high-tech explorations have revealed long-buried Mayan cities.

In recent years, lidar has exposed a sprawling ancient city in western Mexico called Angamuco, The discovery of this long-lost Mexican large city is especially significant. Built by the Pur pecha, Angamuco was a major civilization in the early 16^th century, before Europeans arrived. The city extended over ten square miles before it was covered by a lava flow. That is a huge area with a lot of people. There are about 40, 000 building foundations there, which is about the same number of building foundations that are on the island of Manhattan. The Pur pecha’s main buildings were loosely sited in eight zones around the edges rather than being located in one large center.

“To think that this massive city existed in the heartland of Mexico for all this time and nobody knew it was there is amazing,” says Chris Fisher, an archaeologist who led the expedition.

The revelation of Angamuco is a prime example of the power and promise of lidar. Archaeologists discovered signs of the buried city in 2007 and initially attempted to explore it using a traditional “boots on the ground” approach. But the team soon realized that with the rugged terrain, it would take at least a decade to outline the entire massive city.

In 2011, they began using lidar to map nearly 14 square miles, revealing many astonishing features, from pyramids and temples to road systems, garden areas, and even ball courts. This gave them the “map” they needed to know where to explore further. So far, Fisher and his team have verified more than 7,000 architectural features over a 1.5-square-mile area. The earliest artifacts include ceramic fragments and other remains dating as far back as AD 900.

All told, researchers now believe that more than 100, 000 people lived in Angamuco from about AD 1000 to AD 1350. That makes it the biggest city in western Mexico at the time-or at least the biggest city we know about so far.

“Everywhere you point the lidar instrument, you find new stuff,” says Fisher. “Right now, every textbook has to be rewritten, and two years from now, they’re going to have to be rewritten again.”

【推荐1】In effect, many people avoid the very attempts that are the source of true happiness. They fear the pain inevitably brought by such things as marriage, raising children, professional achievement, religious commitment and self-improvement.

Ask a bachelor (单身汉) why he resists marriage even though he finds dating less and less satisfying. If he is honest he will tell you that he is afraid of making a commitment. For commitment is in fact quite painful. The single life is filled with fun, adventure and excitement. Marriage has such moments, but they are not its most distinguishing features.

Couples with infant children are lucky to get a whole night's sleep or a three-day vacation. I don't know any parent who would choose the word fun to describe raising children. But couples who decide not to have children never know the joys of watching a child grow up or of playing with a grandchild.

Understanding and accepting that true happiness has nothing to do with fun is one of the most liberating realizations. It liberates time: now we can devote more hours to activities that can genuinely increase our happiness. It liberates money: buying that new car or those fancy clothes that will do nothing to increase our happiness now seems pointless. And it liberates us from envy: we now understand that all those who are always having so much fun actually may not be happy at all.