【推荐1】Teenagers are damaging their health by not getting enough sleep because they are distracted (分散) by electronic products in their bedrooms, according to a survey.

UK advice body The Sleep Council said "junk sleep" could rival (比得上) the consumption of unhealthy junk food as a major lifestyle issue for parents of teenage children. It brings no less harm than junk food to one’s health. Its survey of 1,000 teenagers aged 12 to 16 found that 30 percent managed just 4 to 7 hours sleep as opposed to（形成对照）the recommended 8 or 9 hours by the experts. Almost a quarter said they fell asleep more than once a week while watching TV, listening to music or using other electronic products.

“This is an extremely worrying situation,” said Dr Chris Idzikowski of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre. “What we are seeing is the appearance of Junk Sleep --- that is sleep which is of neither the length nor quality that it should be in order to feed the brain with the rest it needs to perform properly at school.”

Nearly all the teenagers had a phone, music system or TV in their bedroom, with around two-thirds possessing all three. Almost one in five of the teenage boys said the quality of their sleep had been impacted by leaving their TV or computer on. The survey also found that 40 percent of teenagers felt tired each day, with girls aged 15 to 16 doing the worst. However, just 11 percent said they were bothered by the lack or quality of sleep.

“I'm surprised that so few teenagers make the link between getting enough good quality sleep and how they feel during the day,” Idzikowski said. “Teenagers need to wake up to the fact to feel well, perform well and look well; they need to do something about their sleep.”

【推荐2】Mogao Grottoes is located at the western end of the Hexi Corridor along the ancient Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. Until now, most mural paintings at Mogao Grottoes have been dated by directly referring to the mural texts or historical documents. However, some are still left with the creation era (年代) uncertain due to the lack of reference materials or the disagreement of art experts.

The drawing style of mural paintings was changing throughout history and can be learned and quantified (量化) through painting data. A new dating method has been developed by encoding (编码 )the drawing styles using visual codes learned through deep learning. This new method successfully discovered the creation era of six mural paintings at Mogao Grottoes.

With the help of experts from Dunhuang Academy, seven mural paintings from two grottoes (No. 205 and No. 206) were chosen as subjects for this dating research.

To figure out the creation era of these paintings, Qin Zou, a researcher from Wuhan University, collected 3,860 mural paintings from 194 different grottoes with confirmed creation-era labels. To find the visual codes that can identify the era in these paintings, the authors built a deep convolutional neural network(卷积神经网络)and classified these painting images into the right eras. Based on the classification model, a dating method was built and applied to date the seven paintings.

Six of the new dating results were approved by experts from Dunhuang Academy. “These dating results are correct and the method is great,” said Mr. Hui-Min Wang, a distinguished expert from the Archaeological Institute of Dunhuang Academy.

“To the best of our knowledge,” wrote the researchers,“ this work represents the first account of a scientific and quantitative manner to support the era prediction and reduce the uncertainties in dating ancient paintings by using deep learning.

【推荐3】Your next car might drive itself After years of trials on city streets,driverless vehicles are now on the way. Last month ,a driverless bus began carrying passengers through Lyon, France.Most in the automobile industry think self-driving vehicles will be on the road by 2020 or earlier.

Driverless cars will first be huddled with human-driven cars.But the first places where they will become dominant（统治的）are highly populated urban areas. Many advanced cities are already reducing the role of human-driven cars. Driverless cars will quicken that process and will bring us enormous benefits.

Driverless cars will reduce accidents by around 90 percent. That's big — the annual deaths on the world's roads are about 1.2 million a year. Pollution and carbon emissions will drop, because urban driverless cars will be electric.

On the other hand, driverless cars will cause problems. Over the next 20 years, the mostly low-skilled men who now drive trucks, taxis and buses will see their jobs reduced. Traditional carmakers are especially scared. The cars of the future might be made by tech companies such as Apple, Baidu and Google. Imagine Germany, where automobile making is the largest industry.

Dramatic changes are coming, and driverless cars could arrive by 2020. But governments have barely begun thinking about it. Only 6 percent of the biggest US cities have taken them into their long-term planning.A decade ago anyone hardly saw the Smartphone coming. Now what about the driverless cars?

【推荐1】The home of the future won't be completely different and we will be living in houses and flats just as we do today. But people will want to shape their homes to match their dreams. No two homes will be the same. People will be able to buy "house kits" containing a basic house structure, with movable walls, doors and windows. They will put together the different parts to create the home they want.

Many jobs that we do today will disappear, others will still exist but will change and new jobs will be created. Skilled workers such as builders, gardeners and electricians won't disappear because machines can't replace them. Teachers will still exist because students need human contact. But they will be using modern technology in class more and students will be working more from home. The medical technology revolution and space travel will create new jobs which we can only imagine today.

Space holidays will develop in the future, but these holidays won't be for everyone because they won't be cheap. Short space trips will develop first, then space hotels will orbit the earth where it will be possible to have a longer vacation. By the end of the next century, there will be holiday centers on the moon with leisure facilities for families.

Paper won't exist in the future. Instead, there will be e-paper which people will be able to use over and over again. This will develop in order to save natural resources. E-newspapers and e-magazines will replace traditional newspapers and magazines and we will download information and news articles from the Internet every day onto our reusable paper.

The laws of physics tell us that the earth is going to disappear sometime in the future. This isn't going to happen tomorrow but scientists predict that it will happen in five billion years when our sun explodes (爆炸). We will have to explore the universe and find another home. At some point in the distant future, either we stay on the earth and die with it, or we leave and move to another planet. There won't be any other choice.

【推荐3】Humans have been keeping animals as pets for tens of thousands of years, but Dr. Jean-Loup Rault, an animal scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, believes new companions are coming: robot pets.

“Technology is moving very fast,” Rault told ABC News, “The Tamagotchi in the early 1990s was really the first robotic pet, and now Sony and other big companies have improved them a lot.”

This may not sit well with pet lovers. After all, who would choose a plastic toy over a lovely puppy? But Rault argues that the robotic kind has a lot going for it: “You don’t have to feed it, you don’t have to walk it, it won’t make a mess in your house, and you can go on a holiday without feeling guilty.” The technology also benefits those who are allergic to pets, short on space, or fearful of real animals.

It’s not clear whether robot pets can replace real ones. But studies do suggest that we can bond with these smart machines. People give their cars names and kids give their toy animals life stories. It’s the same with robots. When Sony stopped its repair service for its robot dog Aibo in March 2014, owners in Japan held funerals.

As an animal welfare researcher, Rault is concerned about how robotic pets could affect our attitudes towards live animals. “If we become used to a robotic companion that doesn’t need food, water or exercises, perhaps it will change how humans care about other living beings,” he said.

So are dogs and cats a thing of the past, as Rault predicts? For those who grew up with living and breathing pets, the mechanical kind might not do. But for our next generation who are in constant touch with smart technology, a future in which lovely pets needn’t have a heartbeat might not be a far-fetched dream.

【推荐2】For many of us, summertime means road trips to the beach or mountains, or at the very least some additional dust on the outside of our vehicle. The extra dirt leads us to do one of the two things: wash our car in the driveway or head to the car wash. But which choice is better for the environment?

The main concerns with either choice are the amount of fresh water used and the types of chemicals used to get rid of the dirt. Both of these concerns can be closely monitored when washing the car at home, says Katy Gresh, spokeswoman for the Southwest Region of the Pennsylvania department of Environmental Protection. She advises car owners to keep a set amount of water in a container for the entire wash. “You don’t want to leave the water running or use more than you need for the job,” she says. But even following this piece of advice comes with an environmental risk: Washing your car in the driveway gets the dirty water into drains (下水道).

“Drains are not made for treating waste,” says John Schombert, executive director of 3 Rivers Wet Weather. Even when car owners use natural soaps to wash the car, Schombert says they are probably ineffective in breaking down grease (油脂) anyway.

The commercial car wash knows full well the rules regarding wastewater in drains. According to the International Carwash Association (ICA), professional car washes must use special water treatment systems. These processes not only keep the dirty water out of drains and regular water treatment systems, but also work to reduce water usage at commercial facilities.

As experts point out, cleaning our car at home can use 100 gallons of water. Compare that to self-service car washes, which allow you to use only about 17 or 18 gallons of water. And most full-service car washes average about 30 to 45 gallons of water per vehicle.

【推荐3】Many factories and businesses around the globe have been struggling to deal with the severe economic realities of the recession(衰退), so they are having their employees take compulsory unpaid leave to save money. For some workers, their salaries have been cut by 20 percent, forced to stay home one out of every five working days. For some businesses, though, the economic downturn is actually a goldmine.

Instead of going out to fancy restaurants to dine with the whole family, many choose to stay at home. "People are eating out less and staying home more, which is driving our sales," reports Domino's Pizza chief manager Chris Moore. Pizza is very popular, and it is also very affordable for a family that has little extra money to spare. Domino's business in England rose 15 percent in the first six weeks this year compared with the previous year. Moore believes that the customers now will remain loyal when the financial situation rights itself. "By exceeding(超越) their expectations in terms of product quality and speed of delivery... these customers will stay with Domino's when the economy becomes better." said Moore.

Delivered pizza is not the only winner in the stay-at-home economy. Almost all online games have been reporting record-high income since the middle of 2008. Online games are designed to enable players to let off steam by interacting with each other socially in the comfort of their own homes. A Shanghai-based online game producer recently joked: "The game businesses are worried about economic recovery."

Another business that has boomed during the recession is camping equipment. Luxury vacations for families are down, but people still want to get away from their dull lives. This means that sales of tents, sleeping bags, and other outdoor equipment have gone up as families are trying to still have fun even though their bank accounts aren't as good as they once were. There have been reports that sales of fishing equipment are on the rise because many people believe this can help lower their grocery bills.