【推荐1】Forks trace their origins back to the ancient Greeks. Forks at that time were fairly large with two tines that aided in the carving of meat in the kitchen. The tines prevented meat from twisting or moving during carving and allowed food to slide off more easily than it would with a knife.

By the 7th century A.D., royal courts of the Middle East began to use forks at the table for dining. From the 10th through the 13th centuries, forks were fairly common among the wealthy in Byzantium. In the 11th century, a Byzantine wife brought forks to Italy; however, they were not widely adopted there until the 16th century. Then in 1533, forks were brought from Italy to France. The French were also slow to accept forks, for using them was thought to be awkward.

In 1608, forks were brought to England by Thomas Coryate, who saw them during his travels in Italy. The English first ridiculed forks as being unnecessary. “Why should a person need a fork when God had given him hands?” they asked. Slowly, however, forks came to be adopted by the wealthy as a symbol of their social status. They were prized possessions made of expensive materials intended to impress guests. By the mid-1600s, eating with forks was considered fashionable among the wealthy British.

Early table forks were modeled after kitchen forks, but small pieces of food often fell through the two tines or slipped off easily. In late 17th century France, larger forks with four curved tines were developed. The additional tines made diners less likely to drop food, and the curved tines served as a scoop so people did not have to constantly switch to a spoon while eating. By the early 19th century, four-tined forks had also been developed in Germany and England and slowly began to spread to America.

【推荐2】Scientists have developed a fingerlike device that maps an object’s internal structure in 3-D by touching its surface. “This bionic finger has exciting application prospects in material characterization and biomedical engineering,” says Zhiming Chen, an engineer at China’s Wuyi University. “The technology could also be combined into robots and medical fields, which is our next research topic.”

The new “finger” contains a carbon fiber tactile sensor (触觉传感器), which returns a stronger signal when pressed against firmer objects. The device moves across an object’s surface to feel for increasing levels of pressure. This process can reveal subsurface details, such as hard layers inside soft er materials. “When pressed by this bionic finger, hard objects maintain their shape, whereas soft objects de form when sufficient pressure is applied,” says Jian Yiluo, the study’s senior author. “This information is sent to a computer, along with the recorded position, and displayed in real time as a 3-D image.”

Other imaging methods, including X-ray, PET, MRI and ultrasound, have their own advantages and disadvantages. X-ray s carry health risks, and other options lack portability or speed. Many are expensive. The new device is unlikely to be significantly cheaper than ultrasound, but it may provide better resolution (清晰度).

In man-made human tissue, the device can exactly find bones and a blood vessel (血管). For a flexible electronic circuit enveloped in soft material, it detected a circuit break and an incorrectly drilled hole. “When we make those devices, we always worry that if something is broken, the only way you can know is to take it apart,” engineer Subramanian says.

The device will struggle to map objects whose outer surfaces are too hard, and it may miss details underneath hard layers. The researchers plan to extend their invention into more dimensions, however, perhaps exploring from other directions as well. “This system might be expanded to multiple fingers, just like our hands, to realize detection in all directions,” Chen says. “This would enable it to get more complete information.”

【推荐3】Falling birth rates are a major concern for some of Asia’s biggest economies. Government s in the region are spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reverse the trend. Will it work?

Japan began introducing policies to encourage couples to have more children in the 1990s. South Korea started doing the same in the 2000s, while Singapore’s first fertility (生育) policy dates back to 1987. China, which has seen its population fall for the first time in 60 years, recently joined the growing club.

While it is difficult to quantify exactly how much these policies have cost, South Korean President YoonSuk-yeol recently said his country had spent more than $200bn (£160bn) over the past 16 years on trying to boost the population. Yet last year South Korea broke its own record for the world’s lowest fertility rate, with the average number of babies expected per woman falling to 0.78. In neighbouring Japan, which had record low births of fewer than 800,000 last year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has promised to double the budget for child-related policies from 10tn yen ($74.7bn; £59.2bn).

Having a bigger population who can work and produce more goods and services leads to higher economic growth. And while a larger population can mean higher costs for governments, it can also result in bigger tax revenues (税收). Also, many Asian countries are ageing rapidly. Japan leads the pack with nearly 30% of its population now over the age of 65 and some other nations in the region are not far behind. Compare that with India, which has just overtaken China as the world’s most populous nation. More than a quarter of its people are between the age of 10 and 20, which gives its economy huge potential for growth. And when the share of the working age population gets smaller, the cost and burden of looking after the non-working population grow. “Negative population growth has an impact on the economy, and together with an ageing population, they won’t be able to afford to support the elderly,” said Xiujian Peng of Victoria University.