【推荐1】In November, “NFT” was chosen as 2021's “Word of the Year” by Collins Dictionary. NFT is short for Non-Fungible Token. It is a “one-of-a-kind” property in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property but has no tangible (可触摸的) form. Now, NFTs are becoming popular in the art world.

Unlike the traditional artworks that are made by hand and have their own special technique, digital arts can be copied and gained for free. But NFTs could provide a digital certificate (证明), showing the ownership of a unique virtual or physical artwork.

“In the digital world, you wouldn't know if something is a copy of something else because the copy is almost perfect. The NFT was the first to prove who owns this property,” said Pindar Wong, chairman of Internet financial infrastructure consultancy VeriFi.

Along with protecting ownership, NFTs allow the owner to get a payment each time his/her work is sold. The artwork itself still belongs to the owner, and the buyers can get limited rights to show the digital artwork. So whenever the NFTs are sold, each transaction (交易) can only be made with the owner.

“NFTs can ensure that owners, including artists or musicians, can have a part of the income from every transaction, which could encourage their creations,” said Sylvia Wang, a consultant at business-to-business platform ArtBiz Asia.

That's why many experts believe that NFTs can greatly change the art industry. According to the latest report, in the first half of 2021, the sales of NFT digital artworks reached $ 2.5 billion, an increase from just $13.7 million for the same period in 2020.

US artist Mike Winkelmann said that with the help of NFT technology, the art field has entered a new time. He created a digital work of art — Everydays: The First 5, 000 Days. In March, it was sold for $ 69 million.

【推荐2】The San Diego County Water Authority has an unusual plan to use the city’s scenic San Vicente Reservoir (水库) to store solar power so it’s available after sunset. The project could help unlock America’s clean energy future.

Perhaps ten years from now, if all goes smoothly, large underground pipes will connect this lake to a new reservoir, a much smaller one, built in a nearby valley about 1100 feet higher. When the sun is high in the sky, California’s abundant solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir. It’s a way to store the electricity. When the sun goes down and solar power disappears, operators would open a valve (阀门) and the force of 8 million tons of water, falling back downhill through those same pipes, would drive machines capable of producing 500 megawatts of electricity for up to eight hours. That’s enough to power 130, 000 typical homes.

“It’s a water battery!” says Neena Kuzmich, Deputy Director of Engineering for the water authority. She says energy storage facilities like these will be increasingly important as California starts to rely more on energy from wind and solar, which produce electricity on their own schedules, without considering the demands of consumers.

Californians learned this during a heat wave this past summer. “Everybody in the state of California got a text message at 5:30 in the evening to turn off their appliances,” Kuzmich says. The sun was going down, solar generation was disappearing, and the remaining power plants, many of them burning gas, couldn’t keep up with demand. The reminder worked:People stopped using so much power, and the grid (电网) survived.

Yet earlier on that same day, there was so much solar power available that the grid couldn’t take it all. Grid operators turned away more than 2000 megawatt hours of electricity that solar generators could have delivered, enough to power a small city. That electricity was wasted. There was no way to store it for later, when operators desperately needed it.