Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence* (AI) system — Ithaca, to help fill in missing words in ancient writings. The system is designed to help historians repair the writings and find out when and where they were written.

Many ancient people used writings, also known as inscriptions*, to record different parts of their lives. The inscriptions have been found on materials such as rock, china and metal. The writings often contained valuable information about how ancient people lived and how they structured their societies. But in many cases, the inscribed objects have been damaged over the centuries. In addition, many of the inscribed objects were moved from areas where they were created. This makes it difficult for scientists to discover when and where the writings were made.

The new AI-based tool helps researchers repair missing inscriptions and estimate the true origins of the records. The researchers, led by Alphabet’s AI company DeepMind, call their tool Ithaca. Ithaca was able to correctly predict* missing inscription elements 62 % of the time. In addition, the tool was 71 % correct in telling where the inscriptions first came from. And the system was able to effectively date writings to within 30 years.

When historians work on their own, the success rate for restoring damaged inscriptions is about 25%. But when humans teamed up with Ithaca to help their work, the success rate jumped to 72%.

Thea Sommerschield, a lead researcher, said she hoped systems like Ithaca “can unlock the cooperative* chance” between AI and humans. In one case, Ithaca proved new evidence presented by historians about the dating of a series of important Greek laws. The laws were first thought to have been written before 446/445 BCE*, but the new in the 420s BCE. Ithaca predicted a date of 421 BCE. Sommerschield said that the date change may seem small. But it has “meaningful influence for our understanding of the political history of Classical Athens,” she added.

The team is currently working on other versions of Ithaca trained on other ancient languages. DeepMind has showed a free, interactive tool based on the system for use by researchers, educators, museum workers and the public.

2 . Learning English can be great fun. Today I learned some expressions (表达) about fruit and vegetables. I’d like to tell you something about them.

First, cucumbers (黄瓜) are long and green. People often eat them. If we say a person is “as cool as a cucumber”, that means he never worries about anything or gets angry. He is calm at any time.

If two people look exactly the same, we might say they are “two peas in a pod (豆荚)”.

Potatoes are popular food in many countries. “Small potatoes” means something or somebody unimportant. For example, Jim doesn’t want to be “small potatoes”, so he works hard. Someone might call you “a couch potato” if you sit and watch television all day and get little or no exercise.

Bananas are a kind of popular fruit. We can say you “go bananas” if you are very angry.

Can humans and machines “talk” to each other? We often see this in movies and on TV shows. In the 1960s, in the TV series Star Trek, spaceships could reply to human voice orders. In 1968, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is a computer that human can talk to, it can play chess with humans and fix their spaceship. This type of technology, which help machines understand human speech and act accordingly, is known as voice control, or voice recognition.

Today, voice recognition is not just shown on the screen, but is widely used for everyday tasks. Siri and Alexa, the voice recognition software made by Apple and Amazon, are two examples. You can ask it to do many things, from setting alarms to turning on the television and placing online shopping order.

One of the nice things about voice recognition is that it can be used when we’re on the go. When you’re driving a car or walking down the sidewalk, it can be not easy or even dangerous to pick up your smartphone and type away on the keyboard. With voice recognition, you can focus on whatever you’re doing at the moment while still finishing other tasks.

People with hearing problems can also benefit. Speech recognition can be used to listen to spoken words and turn them into text that deaf people can read. Advanced speech recognition software can even hear words spoken in one language and then translate it into another language.

As voice recognition software becomes more advanced, it will be able to help us in even more ways. So far, most voice recognition technology is not able to recognize specific voices. That is to say, your voice “sounds” the same to the software as your friend’s voice. However, Apple and other companies are already working to develop voice recognition software that replies only to specific voices.

How would this be useful? It could make your things safer. You could set your phone, computer or even other things like your car or home to open only when they hear your voice.

Before the discovery of DNA analyzing in the 1980s, fingerprints were the easiest way to solve serious crimes due to two basic features: their persistence and their uniqueness.

It’s believed that of the 7 billion or so people on Earth, each one of us has our own unique fingerprints. But did you know that our fingerprints could actually reveal a lot more about us than just our identity?

According to Bailey of The Conversation, fingerprints can show people’s lifestyle and living environment, eating habits, possible medical problems and even the job of a person.

So how can we figure all these out from just a simple fingerprint?

Well, a fingerprint is formed when a finger makes contact with a surface. Most fingerprints are not visible to our eyes and require a chemical way to make them visible. Stuck between the ridges of a fingerprint, however, are substances that can tell a story about who we are. Things like traces of sweat, blood, and food reveal a lot of information about us–what we’ve touched, what we’ve eaten and even what medicine we’ve taken.

At the moment, the skills to discover these substances are mostly used in solving the crime cases, but its application could be much wider, according to Bailey, who gives speeches in chemistry at the University of Surrey in the UK. For example, she and her fellow researchers were able to tell what medicines people were taking from their fingerprints, which may be of great help in the future to doctors treating their patients. A fingerprint check may also be able to tell a doctor whether a patient is properly taking the medicine they’ve been given. In the treatment of some of the most serious illnesses, it’s deadly important that the body is taking in these medicines. As Scientific American noted, this is particularly important for patients undergoing treatment for heart conditions and psychosis*, as these people might struggle to take the medicines or forget or choose not to take them.

And while it’s commonly believed that our fingerprints never change, but in fact, they do—and people can get a great deal of information from the ways they change. In the future, fingerprint science won’t only be restricted to the crime lab but can help doctors keep us in the best possible health as well. Won’t that be really amazing?

The balalaika, also called the "Russian guitar", is a traditional Russian musical instrument. It has a long neck, a wooden triangle-shaped body and strings. It is usually used to play Russian music by plucking the strings with fingers or a pick.

Russians like the balalaika. The music played with it can be cheerful, as if the farmers were dancing happily to celebrate their harvest. It can also be energetic, as if the workers were working hard to make their country richer and stronger. If a Russian moves to live or work abroad, he will probably take a balalaika with him. When he feels lonely and sad, he will play it to cheer himself up.

The balalaika was originally played by the poor in Russia. At that time, balalaikas were made by the players themselves. They were rough, simple and cheap with different numbers of strings, from two to even six. Later a Russian musician Vasily Vasil'yevich Andreev (1861-1918) improved the balalaka. He created a whole family of balalaikas of different sizes, all with three strings. The smallest balalaika is called Prima. It is 60-70cm long. The biggest, Contrabass, is almost 2metres high with a leg to sit on the floor. Andreev founded the first balalaika orchestra in the world, mainly using balalaikas to perform. He gave concerts at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1889, which was a great success.

Today, there are blalaika groups performing around the world. More and more people get to know the balalaika and are attracted by its Russian style music.