3 . At 81 years old, Jeanne Daprano is still pushing her body to the limit. She’s still running competitive races, breaking world records and taking on new challenges.“The thing I’m learning about aging is that it’s inevitable,” Daprano said.“I’m not going to escape it. There are two ways to go:You can either press on or give up.”

Daprano grew up in Iowa. Then, she moved to California. As a primary school teacher, she began running in order to keep up with her student.“I was known as a running teacher,” she said.“I had my students do fitness before we studied in the morning and then throughout the day.”Then she began running competitively with 5K and 10K road races before moving to the track. She is now the world record holder in the women’s 75-year-old age group 400 meters and 800 meters. “When I get to the final fi nish line, I want this body to be worn out. I’m not doing this to live to be 100. I’m doing this to be the best I can be today.”

After moving to Atlanta about a decade ago, Daprano met fitness trainer David Buer. Ever since, she’s been coming to his gym, where he tailors workouts for Daprano’s specifc needs.“When she came to me, she was pushing 70 years old,”Buer said.“I’ve worked with other individuals of Jeanne’s age, but she came to me with different goals. She had a unique drive and passion—not just a passion for fitness or athletics but for life in general.”

Last February, Daprano took on a new challenge: her first indoor rowing competition. In classic fashion, she broke the world record in the 80-to-84 age group, rowing 2,000 meters in 9:23:7. For those hoping to either start getting in shape or stay in shape for a long time, she offers this advice: Listen to your body. What are you passionate about? How are you going to keep physically fit and mentally fit? Start where you are. Don’t look ahead or compare yourself to somebody else.

4 . Wherever we go, we are surrounded by history. Across the globe, cultural heritage (遗产) is passed down through the generations. Yet, we fight a never-ending and very expensive war to preserve it for the future. And today, it is under attack as never before. Technology is often seen as something that destroys the past.    1     .

Creating copies via 2D images is extremely laborious and time-consuming. AI technologies are being used to do all the required sourcing, allowing lots of images to be cross-referenced and stored in hours.     2     . AI will also make the restoration and preservation of existing cultural heritage far easier and is vastly superior to previous methods.

Airborne technology (机载技术) is being increasingly used in the fight to preserve our cultural heritage.     3    

LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) has already been used to reveal over 60, 000 Mayan structures that were lying undiscovered in the jungles of Guatemala, without needing a single boot on the ground. Drones (无人机) are also being used to document and monitor huge areas and remove the need for all that costly manpower.

Human interaction with the most important sites and architecture is doing a great deal of harm. Virtual Reality (VR) technology will play a leading role in preserving our cultural heritage in the coming years.    4     , VR technology will gradually become the way that people experience them. We’ll all eventually be able to walk through places, look at (and touch!) artifacts and works of art without ever seeing them with our own eyes.

    5    . Efforts in research, data sharing and project work will need to be pooled internationally. Using the technical expertise of specialist organizations will become ever more important to the sustainable promoting and preserving of the cultural heritage of countries all across the world.

5 . Pinocchio may be just a children’s fairy tale, but Spanish scientists at the University of Granada recently investigated this so-called “Pinocchio effect” and found that our noses don’t grow when we tell a lie, but actually shrink a bit.

Dr. Gómez Milán and his team developed a lie detector test that used thermography (体温计) to tell if people were lying and found that whenever participants in their research were being untruthful, the temperature of the tip of their nose dropped up to 1.2℃, while the temperature of their forehead increased up to 1.5℃. Scientist also found that drop in temperature at nose level actually caused it to slightly shrink, although the difference is undetected by the human eye.

“One has to think in order to lie, which rises the temperature of the forehead,” Dr. Gómez Milán explained the findings. “At the same time, we feel anxious, which lowers the temperature of the nose.” For this study, researchers asked a number of 60 students to perform various tasks while their temperature is scanned by technology. One of these tasks required making a 3 to 4 minutes call to their parents or a friend and telling a significant lie. Participants had to make up the lie themselves during the call. Interestingly, this lie detector picked up the temperature difference in 80 percent of the test subjects, which is a better rate of success than that of any modern lie detector.

“With this method we have achieved to increase accuracy”, said Dr. Gómez Milán, who added that law enforcement interviewers could one day combine other lie detection technology with thermal imaging to achieve better results.

6 . Follow this four-day route, and you’ll lose yourself in the wizarding world of Harry Potter.

Day 1 Overview Edinburgh

It was in Scotland’s capital city that J. K. Rowling started to plot the adventures of Harry and his pals. With stoned streets, winding alleys and medieval (中世纪的) architecture, the city certainly has a few things in common with the settings from the books and films. She wrote the early chapters in various cafes around the city’s Old Towns.

Day 2 Overview travel to Fort William

Travel by train from Edinburgh to Glasgow. From there, you can take the West Highland Line toFort William. This is a great way to see some famous spots from the window, including the mysterious Rannoch Moor, the place where Death Eaters board the train in the movie Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows.

Day 3 Overview all aboard the Hogwarts Express

Witness the sweeping cinematic scenery of the movie Harry Potter by booking a seat on the Jacobite Steam Train. Stop for lunch in Mallaig and then make the return journey to Fort William. Please be sure to book the steam train in advance, as it is exceedingly popular. By the way, it runs seasonally.

Day 4 Overview lakes and glens (峡谷)

In the films, mysterious, misty landscapes frame the background of Harry’s tale, so it’s no surprise that the film producers chose the Highlands for many scenes. Spend a day wandering through some of these beautiful spots and feel the magical atmosphere.

7 . We can video chat with astronauts aboard the International Space Station and watch live footage from the frozen heights of Everest. But communicating with a submarine (潜艇) or a diver is not so easy. The lack of practical methods for sharing data between underwater and airborne devices has long been a frustration for scientists. The difficulty stems from the fact that radio signals work perfectly in air travel but poorly in water. Sonar (声呐) signals used by underwater sensors reflect off the surface of the water rather than reaching the air.

Now, researchers at MIT have developed a method with the potential to revolutionize underwater communication. “What we’ve shown is that it’s actually feasible to communicate from underwater to the air,” says Fadel Adib, a professor at MJT’s Media Lab, who led the research. The MIT researchers designed a system that uses an underwater machine to send sonar signals to the surface, making vibrations (震动) corresponding to the 1s and 0s of the data. A surface receiver then reads and decodes these tiny vibrations. The researchers call the system TARF. It has any number of potential real-world uses, Adib says. It could be used to find downed planes underwater by reading signals from sonar devices in a plane’s black box and it could allow submarines to communicate with the surface.

Right now the technology is low-resolution (低分辨率). The initial study was conducted in the MIT swimming pool at maximum depths of around 11 or 12 feet. The next steps for the researchers are to see if TARF is workable at much greater depths and under varying conditions—high waves, storms, schools of fish. They also want to see if they can make the technology work in the other direction— air to water.

If the technology proves successful in real-world conditions, expect “texting while diving” to be the latest underwater fashion.

9 . Massive heat waves and droughts are already becoming a threat to farmers. Over the next three decades, California’s San Joaquin Valley alone could lose up to 535,000 acres of farmland as a result of the shortage of water supplies.

Jennifer Brophy, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, is working on methods she hopes will be used to change commercial plant species so they can survive severe conditions. She is developing new genetic engineering techniques that can help plants grow in a variety of different conditions. By changing the genome (基因组) of both commercial crops and soil bacteria, she thinks it may be possible to help plants survive droughts.

To make plants respond to extreme climate, Brophy is building what she calls “genetic circuits (基因回路).” In addition to changing the genes within plant cells, this method also changes how and when those genes are activated (激活). If the plant senses a specific sugar, it can express one protein; if it senses another signal, it’ll express a different protein, kicking off an entirely separate chain of events. If both signals are there, the plant may be able to express something else entirely. “Using circuits, you can have plants respond in new ways to all these different inputs,” she says.

Humans can learn from the weather forecast whether it’s going to be really hot or really dry in the next couple of weeks so that we can plan accordingly. “A plant doesn’t necessarily know what’s coming. It just knows if it’s hot or mild right now,” says Brophy. This can lead to problems when weather becomes unstable. A plant that usually flowers in spring may flower in winter if there are a few unseasonably warm days. When temperatures fall again, the flowers die and ruin a year of crops. “It’d be great to be able to communicate with plants to tell them, ‘hey, you should wait on that flowering,’” she adds.

Controlling plants’ growth at this level is an exciting prospect, but actually putting it into practice is along way off. At the moment, Brophy is testing the concept in the lab using a small weedy plant called Arabidopsis, trying to figure out how to activate certain genes on command.