1 . Sandhya Sriram is impatient. The stem-cell (干细胞) scientist wanted to put her knowledge to use, developing cultivated seafood. Yet no one was doing that in Singapore. So four years ago, she set up a company to create lab-grown crustacean (甲壳纲动物) meat. ______, she registered her company, Shiok Meats in August 2018. “Nobody was doing crustaceans,” says Sriram, Shiok’s Group CEO and co-founder. “What do Asians eat the most? Seafood. It was a simple answer. And they’re so delicious.” A lifelong ______, she had never tried real shrimp, but she sampled it the week she registered the company.

Today, the results of her ______ can be seen at the headquarters of her company. During a fall 2022 visit, a bio-process engineer looked into a microscope carefully. He had taken samples from a bioreactor in the room next door, where the company is   ______ crustacean cells. Under the lens, he was checking to see if the cells were ready to harvest.

Shiok Meats has already revealed shrimp, lobster, and crab prototypes (最初形态) to a select group of tasters, and it plans to   ______ regulatory approval to sell its lab-grown shrimp by April 2023. That could make it the first in the world to bring cultivated shrimp to diners, putting it at the leading position of the cultivated-meat   ______. As of this writing, only one company has gained regulatory approval to sell lab-grown animal-protein products: Eat Jus’s cultured chicken is ______ but only in Singapore. Shiok Meats still needs to submit all the paperwork necessary and get regulatory approval, but the company hopes to see its products in restaurants by mid-2024, offering foodies a more environmentally friendly option free of ______ than crustaceans from farms.

But even if that ambitious   ______ is met, it will likely be a while before the average person is eating cultivated crustaceans. It will require not just regulatory approval but also more funding and a bigger factory, along with ______ consumers and governments around the world to accept lab-grown seafood.

“We’re at an interesting stage of a startup; it’s called the Valley of Death,” says Sriram. “We are in the space where we haven’t submitted for regulatory approval yet, but we’re looking to commercialize in the next two years.” Nevertheless, the impatient entrepreneur is   ______. Sriram hopes to have the company’s next manufacturing plant ready by the end of 2023, where a 500-liter and a 2,000-liter bioreactor will be a major   ______ from its current 50- and 200-liter bioreactors. The goal is for her products to enter the mainstream in Singapore in five to seven years.

______ these products could help tackle some of the environmental impacts of crustacean production. Organic waste, chemicals, and antibiotics from seafood farms can pollute groundwater. Shiok Meats says the way it produces crustacean meat minimizes animal cruelty, as growing protein in a lab helps avoid ______ animals. And cultivating shrimp closer to where it’s ______ cuts emissions from fishing-boat fuel and shipping products around the world.

In a word, when science meets seafood, many wonderful things happen naturally.

2 . In the middle of 2023, a study conducted by the HuthLab at the University of Texas sent shockwaves through the fields of neuroscience (神经科学) and technology. For the first time, the thoughts and impressions of people _______ to communicate with the outside world were translated into continuous natural language, using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and brain imaging technology. This is the closest science has yet come to _______ someone’s mind.

Losing the ability to communicate is a deep cut to one’s sense of self. _______ this ability gives the patient greater control over their lives. But it could also give other entities, such as corporations, researchers and other third parties, a(n) _______ degree of insight into, or even control over, the lives of patients. The NeuroRights Foundation, based at Columbia University in New York, argues that new rights surrounding neurotechnologies will be _______ for all humans to preserve their privacy, identity, and free will. The potential _______ of disabled patients makes this a particularly important problem.

_______ this approach, Chile was the first country that adopted legislation, drafting new laws, to address the risks of neurotechnology. It not only introduced a new constitutional right to mental _______, but is also in the process of adopting a bill that bans selling neurodata, and forces all neurotech devices to be regulated as medical devices, even those intended for the general consumer.

The proposed legislation recognizes the intensely _______ nature of neural data and considers it as organ tissues, which cannot be bought or sold, only donated. But this legislation has also faced ________, with legal scholars questioning the need for new rights and pointing out that it could discourage beneficial brain research for disabled patients.

While the legal action taken by Chile is the most impactful and ________ to date, other countries are considering updating existing laws to face the new developments in neurotechnologies.

And while it is likely that the first applications of neurotech will be medical, future ________ are likely to involve consumer applications such as entertainment, as well as for military and security purposes. The growing ________ of neurotechnology in a commercial context only causes more legal concerns.

Different people, societies, and cultures will disagree on where to draw the line. We are at a(n) ________ stage of technological development. And as we begin to uncover the great potential of brain science, the need to consider their implications for legal action becomes more ________.

5 . The development of bigger brains has long been considered a hallmark of our species’ increased intelligence and subsequent dominance on this planet. The last two million years of our evolution were marked by a nearly fourfold increase in brain volume.

But a growing body of evidence suggests our brains recently changed in an unexpected way: They declined in size sometime following the end of the last Ice Age.

“Most people think of brain evolution happening in this one-dimensional way. It grows, plateaus and stops,” said Jeremy DeSilva, a professor of paleoanthropology at Dartmouth College. “But we’ve lost brain tissue equal to the volume of a lime - it isn’t a tiny little sliver we’re talking about.”

The precise timing of that Post-Ice Age brain shrink has remained a mystery until now. A group of researchers led by DeSilva used a mixture of fossil and modern specimen data to pinpoint that this loss of gray matter happened between 3, 000 to 5, 000 years ago, according to research published in June in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Many anthropologists had initially assumed that the changes coincided with the appearance of agricultural practices around 10, 000 years ago, and a global shift away from hunting and gathering.

The more-recent dates from DeSilva’s group point to booming eras for ancient civilizations in North Africa, the Middle East and South America -complex societies that they think may have played a role in the shrinkage.

They hypothesized that human societies got so cooperatively organized in the past 3, 000 years that we began relying on what researchers call collective intelligence.

“It is the idea that a group of people is smarter than the smartest person in the group,” said James Traniello, a biology professor at Boston University and one of DeSilva’s co-authors. “So basically, if you live in a group, you solve problems more rapidly, more efficiently and more accurately than what’s possible for any individual.”

Traniello said the inspiration for applying this idea to why human brains may have shrunk came from “ultrasocial” insects such as ants. Ants form highly cooperative societies in which division of labor has favored smaller-brained individuals due to an advanced level of social organization.

The researchers suggested that perhaps our need to maintain a large brain c to keep track of information about food, social relationships, predators and our environment—has also relaxed in the past few millennia because we could store information externally in other members of our social circles, towns and groups.

“We’re so social that we don’t have to know everything anymore,” DeSilva said. “And we collectively then operate as a pretty functional society.”

6 . Artist Susan Shepherd is best known for her flower paintings, and the large garden that surrounds her house is the source of many of her subjects. It is full of her favourite flowers, most especially vancties of tulips and poppies. Some of the plants are unruly and seed themselves all over the garden. There is a harmony of colour, shape and structure in the two long flower borders that line the paved path which crosses the garden from east to west. Much of this is due to the previous owners who were keen gardeners, and who left plants that appealed to Susan. She also inherited the gardener, Danny. “In fact, it was really his garden,” she says. “We got on very well. At first he would say, “Oh, it’s not worth it” to some of the things I wanted to put in, but when I said I wanted to paint them, he recognized what I had in mind.”

Susan prefers to focus on detailed studies of individual plants rather than on the garden as a whole, though she will occasionally paint a group of plants where they are. More usually, she picks them and then takes them up to her studio. “I don’t set the whole thing up at once,” she says. “I take one flower up at once,” she says. “I take one flower out and paint it, which might take a few days, and then I bring in another one and build up the painting that way. Sometimes it takes a couple of years to finish.”

Her busiest time of year is spring and early summer, when the tulips are out, followed by the poppies. “They all come out together, and you’re so busy,” she says. But the gradual decaying process is also part of the fascination for her. With tulips, for example, “you bring them in and put them in water, then leave them for perhaps a day and they each form themselves into different shapes. They open out and are fantastic. When you first put them in a vase, you think they are boring, but they change all the time with twists and turns.”

Buzzwords (流行词) Capture How We Lived in 2023

While walking along Suzhou Creek to gather material for my latest “Shanghai Expression” column, I was wondering     1    Shanghai’s modem skylines match the historical aspects of the area so effortlessly. The old and the new create a unique ambience (格调) .

Near the creek, I encountered Uncle Chen, fishing in a tranquil spot.

“Nice day for fishing,” I said in greeting him.

He looked up with a smile. “Yes, it’s a break from the mobile phono world.”

It     2     (strike) me that American publisher Merriam-Webster included “authentic” on its list of the year 2023’s top words. It reflects a growing focus on genuineness in an era     3       (dominate) by AI, celebrity culture and social media.

As I talked with Uncle Chen, the bustle of the city     4     (continue) around us. Food deliverymen buzzed past. Online celebrities in dopamine dresses held selfie sticks for livestreaming,     5     (highlight) the rise of a breed of “new professionals.”

Tourists and locals alike strolled through the area, some engaged in     6     appeared to be a “citywalk” —a wander     7     a clear destination.

Office workers walked by holding fancy coffee cups, a sign of the evolving coffee trends     8     have swept the city, like the “Moutai-flavored latte.”

Watching Uncle Chen, tourists, online celebrities, office workers and delivery people, I saw a changing city in a realm of constant change, summarized by a variety of contemporary buzzwords.

    9     2023 winds down, it’s interesting to note that buzzwords aren’t just words. Rather, they are markers of the dynamic, ever-changing aspects of life.

Each buzzword has its own story. Each popular phrase offers a peek into the hearts and minds of people, especially the younger generation. Let’s pause     10     (look) at some of them more closely.

8 . ChatGPT, the new artificial-intelligence technology created by Open AI, has many worrying about the future of education. The two largest public school districts, New York and Los Angeles, have banned the chatbot from their devices and networks, concerned that students may use it to cheat on assignments. Though ChatGPT’s capabilities are limited, it will likely continue to disrupt education as the technology advances.

But educators needn’t fear this change. Such technologies are transformative, but they threaten only the information-centric type of education that is failing to help students succeed. What young people need today is educational models that help them take ownership of their studies. They need instruction that equips them with real-life skills and prepares them for an economy in which rote, mechanical tasks will be increasingly performed by machines. AI may be a useful invention that hastens much-needed educational reform.

Practicing skills to enhance one’s facility with reasoning, analysis and argumentation — rather than memorizing basic information — should be central to learning. These are skills young people will need in future careers and, most important, that AI can’t replicate. Our experience with AI is perhaps best understood when compared with previous disruptions in education. When printed books, for example, began to emerge in the mid-1400s with the advent of the movable type, one can imagine university professors feared that students wouldn’t need to come to class because they could simply buy the book.

Yet in practice, printing had the opposite effect: The number of universities exploded along with the total number of books. The new technology disrupted the mechanical aspect of education, but in doing so it allowed educators to refocus on higher-level skills — the strategic elements rather than the tactical. The same followed the introduction of calculators and spreadsheets, which freed up time that would have been spent memorizing rote algorithms for mathematical problems.

This change didn’t make the underlying skills unnecessary; it merely transformed what could be done with them. The effect of such technology as ChatGPT will likely be similar. The AI will serve as an information-gathering and mechanical-organizing tool, but it won’t eliminate the fundamental need for critical thinking. These skills will persist and only increase in value. Therefore, schools must remember that the value created by education isn’t a head full of facts but a person with the skill to use these facts with the tools available to magnify his effect in the world. AI is best seen as another of these tools, which, when used strategically, can unleash student learning and performance in ways not yet seen.

9 . Those who had the pleasure of watching Benny Goodman at work saw a rather ordinary-looking man in rimless glasses and a conservative business suit; but they also saw a human being who could play the clarinet(单簧管) like no one before or since. This made Benny Goodman a unique individual.

Other Americans who have stood out from the flock include Joe DiMaggio, Beverly Sill, Ernest Hemingway and Jonas Salk. They, like Benny Goodman, were recognized and honored for no other reason than excellence.

It is doing something better than other people that makes us unique. Yet a surprising number of people still see individuality as a surface thing. They wear garish clothes, dye their hair strange colors and decorate their skin with tattoos to make some kind of social statement. But an ordinary guy who has dyed his hair purple or orange is nothing more than the same person with a funny-looking head.

The whole purpose of individuality is excellence. Those who invent, who improvise(即兴发挥), who know more about a subject than other people do, and who take something that doesn’t work and make it work––these people are the very soul of capitalism.

Charles Kettering didn’t like the idea of cranking a car to make it start, so he invented the electric starter. Henry Ford figured out the assembly-line technique and made it possible to mass-produce automobiles, and Elisha Otis, inventor of the elevator, indirectly created the city sky-line. These people understood that individualism means working at the top of one’s capacity.

The ones with the purple hair and the funky jewelry are just along for the ride, trying to be “different” and not knowing how to go about it.

The student who earns straight A’s on his report card has grasped the idea and has found the real meaning of individuality. So has the youngster who has designed his own spaceship, who gives piano recitals, who paints pictures of the world around him.

Benny Goodman understood it too. This is why he was at his best, blowing his clarinet, in a blue suit and black shoes.