【推荐1】①Open AI has introduced a new technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create high-quality videos from text descriptions.

②The company showed a few short, vivid and realistic videos, including mammoths (猛犸象) moving forward in a snowy field and people doing everyday things like reading a book or walking down a city street.

③Open AI calls the new system Sora. “Sora is able to generate complex scenes with different kinds of characters, specific types of motion, and correct and true details of the subject and background based on simple text prompts (提示语),” the ChatGPT makers said.

④The new tool isn’t the first of its kind. Other companies, including Google, Meta and AI start-up Runway, have built their own text-to-video AI models. But AI analysts (分析员) said the length and quality of Sora videos went beyond expectation and was outstanding in all of the models.

⑤Sora will first be available to a small group of artists and filmmakers as well as researchers who will try to find out what can be improved about it.

⑥Mutale Nkonde, an analyst, thinks the idea that anyone can easily turn text into video is exciting. She, however, worries that these tools might be put into some hateful information and it may influence the livelihoods (生计) of people in many industries.

⑦Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science, said Sora is likely to become a quick and inexpensive way of creating online misinformation. The high-quality videos it produced would make it even harder for people to distinguish (区分) what is real on the Internet.

⑧Putting watermarks on AI-produced videos and images, as many companies have said they would do, might help, according to Siwei Lyu, the director of the Media Forensic Lab at the University at Buffalo. But in many cases, watermarks could be removed or altered (篡改), he said.

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【推荐3】What time is it? The answer you give can be different, because you are in different Earth’s time zones(时区). But how could you tell the time if you aren’t anywhere on Earth?

Scientists are now thinking of creating a lunar(月球的) time zone. They believe it would be better for astronauts to communicate by using Moon Time, as they travel to, from, and across the Moon. At the moment, astronauts are using time zones of their own countries. But there could be safety problems caused by the differences in time-telling.

________ Gravity(引力) influences how quickly or slowly time passes. Since gravity is weaker on the Moon, clocks run a bit faster there. After 24 hours, a lunar clock would be 56 microseconds ahead of a clock on Earth. Another point to consider is that a full day on Earth is about 24 hours between two sunsets. While on the Moon, it is nearly 709 hours, about 29.5 Earth days. This means that lunar nights can be around two weeks long, with only the Earth and the stars in the sky. With all this to think about, scientists need to decide whether it would be better to follow a time zone on Earth, or for the Moon to have its own special zone, which would have much longer days.

Scientists must consider other problems too. For example, who should be responsible for keeping the time zone going? And how can it be made practical for astronauts to use?

There are more countries planning Moon trips in the future. The idea of creating a time zone on the Moon would make these easier. And if a lunar time zone is set up, scientists could create time zones for other planets like Mars.

Why do zebras have stripes? Scientists think they might have the answer. The team studied horses, zebras and horses dressed as zebras. They spent more than 16 hours standing in fields and watching these animals. They wrote a new study that was later published in the journal Plos One, showing the pattern seems to confuse flies. The stripes make it harder for flies to bite zebras.

Martin How, a scientist at the University of Bristol in England, helped write the study. He said the flies moved naturally around both zebras and horses. However, landing was different. Fewer flies landed on zebras than horses. Scientists saw that the flies moved too quickly and were not able to control their flight when they got close to the zebras. Instead of controlling their direction, they would turn away or run into the zebras. “This is probably because of the flies’ poor eyesight.” How said, “From about 6 feet away, a zebra would just look like a grey horse to a fly.” So when the flies got close, the stripes might deter them at once by making them feel either confused about the direction or uncertain about how fast things were passing by, affecting their ability to land.

The scientists wanted to make sure the effect was not caused by something else. For example, it could have happened because zebras and horses smell different. So the scientists put black, white and zebra-striped coats on seven horses in turn. There was no difference in the rate at which the flies landed on the horses’ uncovered heads, but the flies touched and landed on the zebra coat far less often than either the black or white coats.

The team said that biting flies must be one of the reasons why stripes developed. Zebras come from pars of the world where flies carry bad diseases. There could be some very terrible results when being bitten by flies. But horses are different. They have lived in different environments where diseases from flies are less dangerous.

That’s big news for outdoor enthusiasts who have suffered from fly bites. Perhaps they could get ideas from zebras.

【推荐3】Advice on Preparing a Healthy Meal for Your Pet Dog

There are many reasons to prepare your dog’s food. He might be a picky eater, or you may want to avoid giving him additives in the dog food you buy, or maybe you just want to show your dog some love. If you only make a homemade healthy meal sometimes, don’t worry too much about balancing the nutrition (营养), if you plan to feed your dog homemade meals for a long time, you’ll need to consider more about it.

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