2 . The future home is something that people have talked about for decades. Because the future home idea inspires our imagination, scientists and engineers have been working hard to develop different systems to make houses “smarter”.

The video camera at the entrance recognize visitors using facial recognition. The facial recognition software of the future home will not only recognize friends, but strangers as well. And the software in the future home will run the strangers faces against a database of criminals.

The future home will also have smart application appliances (家电) as well. There will be a vast networking system connecting them. Ovens, microwaves and refrigerators will be controlled automatically, so remote cooking will be a possibility and meals are prepared for your arrival.

There will also be a green systems in place such as saving and reusing washing water and bathwater. Plants and people may receive pure or mineralized (含矿的) drinking water.

If you think this future home idea is pie in the sky or science fiction, then think again. Most of the systems described here are either in development or already out in the market. Future homes may not be standard yet for the middle class but this is not as far ahead as many people would think.

3 . When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, we had a milkman delivering milk to our doorstep. His name was Mr. Basille. He wore a white cap and drove a white truck. As a 5-year-old boy, I couldn’t take my eyes off the coin changer fixed to his belt. He noticed this one day during a delivery and gave me a quarter out of his coin changer.

Of course, he delivered more than milk. There was cheese, eggs and so on. If we needed to change our order, my mother would pen a note — “Please add a bottle of buttermilk next delivery” — and place it in the box along with the empty bottles. And then, the buttermilk would magically (魔术般) appear.

All of this was about more than convenience. There existed a close relationship between families and their milkmen. Mr. Basille even had a key to our house, for those times when it was so cold outside that we put the box indoors, so that the milk wouldn’t freeze. And I remember Mr. Basille from time to time taking a break at our kitchen table, having a cup of tea and telling stories about his delivery.

There is sadly no home milk delivery today. Big companies allowed the production of cheaper milk, thus making it difficult for milkmen to compete. Besides, milk is for sale everywhere, and it may just not have been practical to have a delivery service.

Recently, an old milk box in the countryside I saw brought back my childhood memories. I took it home and planted it on the back porch (门廊) . Every so often my son’s friends will ask what it is. So I start telling stories of my boyhood, and of the milkman who brought us friendship along with his milk.

4 . It’s exciting to imagine how future humans will have solved the problems we have now, or what amazing new inventions will make our lives more convenient and interesting. We asked top scientists to share their predictions on what the world will be like in a century. If they’re right, the 2114 is going to be really cool.

1. Robots will do your chores and more.

Robots will be doing most of our jobs, from building homes to teaching math. There are already robots that clean floors and pump gas. In the future they will be more complicated and useful. Unfortunately, with robots taking all the jobs, unemployment will be high.

2. You will read minds.

Speaking of being social, we will communicate in an entirely different way. Forget texts and emails. Mind­reading technology will allow us to send thoughts to each other without speaking a word. We will also be able to send thoughts to objects around us. (Instead of pressing “start” on the microwave, you could just think “start”.) Meanwhile, chips implanted (植入) in our brains will improve memory and intelligence.

3. Your car will drive you.

Today, around 30,000 Americans die in car accidents each year. One hundred years from now, accidents will be a thing of the past. According to Mark Safford, consultant or the U.S. department of Transportation, future cars will drive themselves. These electric cars will communicate with other cars on the road to travel safely in close formation at high speeds.

4. You will eat fake meat.

Raising animals is not an efficient way to produce food, and it harms the environment. Cows, chickens, and pigs eat a lot, and then we have to deal with all that poop (粪便). What’s more, that poop can poison lakes, rivers, and streams. Today, scientists can “grow” meat in a lab from animal cells, but it’s expensive and not very delicious. In the future, they will have perfected the process. You’ll order hamburgers that come from factories, not cows. Scientists may even find ways to make lab grown meat tastier and healthier than the real thing.

5 . The plan: turn Mars into a blue world with streams and green fields,and then fill it with creatures from the Earth. This idea may sound like something from a science fiction, but it is actually being taken seriously by many researchers. This suggests the future for the “red planet” will be the main topic for discussion at an international conference hosted by NASA this Week. Leading researchers as well as science fiction writers will attend the event. It comes as NASA is preparing a multi-billion-dollar Mars research programme.

“Turning Mars into a little earth has long been a topic in science fiction,” said Dr Michael Mever NASAs senior scientist. “Now with scientists exploring the reality we can ask what the real possibilities of changing Mars.” Most scientists agree that Mars could be turned into a little earth, although much time and money would be needed to achieve this goal. But many experts are shocked by the idea. “We are destroying our own world at an unbelievable speed and now we are talking about ruining another planet,” said Paul Murdin from the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK.

Over the past months, scientists have become increasingly confident they will find Martian life forms. Europe and Americas robot explorers have found the proof that water, mixed with soil, exists in large amounts on the planet.

In addition, two different groups of scientists announced on March 28 that they had found signs of methane (甲烷) in the Martian atmosphere: the gas is a waste product of living creatures and could be produced by microbes (微生物) living in the red planets soil. But scientists such as Dr. Lisa Pratt, a biologist at Indiana University, say that these microbes will be put in danger by the little earth project.

“Before we have even discovered if there is life on Mars, we are talking about carrying out projects that would destroy all these native life forms, all the strange microbes that we hope to find buried in the soil,” said Dr.Pratt.

Monica Grady, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum, London, shares this view.“We cannot risk starting a global experiment that would wipe out the precious information we are looking for,” she said. “This is just wrong.”

6 . What do you plan to do when you retire? Keep working? Get more exercise? Or learn something new? You may put them on hold. There's a chance that, sooner or later, you might have to move further than you were thinking, as far as Mars.

On Thursday, National Geographic will show the first-ever Mars show home, giving earthlings (地球人)an idea of what their life could look like on the Red Planet. In the not-so-distant year of 2037, the igloo-shaped structure could be the home of your future.

It shows a house built using recycled spacecraft parts and Martian soil, called regolith, which has been microwaved into bricks. Some parts of the home are recognizable — a kitchen, a bedroom — but there are fundamental differences that are important to human survival.

As the Martian atmosphere is around one hundredth as thick as the Earth’s, people will need permanent (永久的) shelter from the sun；society will move largely indoors. Most buildings will be connected by underground passages and the houses won't have windows. The homes will have simulated solar lighting, or natural light that has been bent several times. Walls will need to be 10 to 12 feet thick, to protect people from dangerous rays (光线)that can pass through six feet of steel, and a double air-locked entrance to keep the home under proper pressure.

"We don’t think of our houses as things that keep us alive, but on Mars your house will be a survival centre, 99 says Stephen Petranek, author of How We’ll Live on Mars. This is not just the stuff of sci-fi. “10 to 20 years from now there will certainly be people on Mars,” Petranek says.

“We’ve had the technology for 30 years to land people on Mars, but we haven’t had the will, ”Petranek says. But two main factors have “completely swung public attitudes”.

The private companies’ participation has forced government agencies to speed up their game, and influential films such as Gravity and The Martian have caught society’s eye.

7 . The Google Brain team has been working on computing systems called “neural networks”—systems that were designed based on how neurons work in the human brain.

This time, they gave a mission to three of the neural networks, which they named Alice, Bob and Eve. Each of the networks had its own job—Alice sent messages to Bob, Eve tried to “eavesdrop”(偷听) and find out the messages, and Alice and Bob had to figure out a way to hide the messages from Eve. All the help that Alice and Bob got from the researchers before the mission began was made up of a set of numbers, which Eve didn’t have access                    to.

At first, Alice was not very good at sending secret messages. But slowly it worked on a way to encrypt(加密) them—putting information into a special code so that others could not understand it if they got the information—using he numbers given by researchers. And after practice, Bob also came to be able to decrypt(解密) Alice’s messages. Without the numbers or keys, Eve failed to understand Alice’s “speech” most of the time.

This test is considered a big step in the development of computers’ learning skills. “Computing with neural networks on this scale has only become possible in the last few years, so we truly are at the beginning of what’s possible, ” Joe Sturonas of US encryption company PKWARE told New Scientist magazine.

Unfortunately, the test happened only one week after UK physicist Stephen Hawking, While speaking at Cambridge University, warned how AI(artificial intelligence)could develop a will of its own. This could be “either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to human being”, he said.

But just as Sturonas pointed out, no matter what the possibilities of computers are in the future, they are just starting out. We still have plenty of time to work out a solution before they get anywhere near becoming a threat to humanity.

8 . New Science Books in Brief

Volume Control

By David Owen || $18. 23

“ For a deaf child, having hearing parents can be a serious disadvantage," notes Owen in this sensitive study of hearing. He suffers from tinnitus. Combining the science with individual experiences, Owen discusses hearing aids, sign language, Thomas Edison and noise levels in US cities—all in absorbing detail.

Reality Ahead of Schedule

By Joel Levy || $29. 04

This picture-packed book tours scientific advances sparked by ideas in science fiction. For example, Levy shows how H. G. Wells^? s 1903 story The Land Ironclads inspired Winston Churchill to promote the development of the military tank. The title comes from a definition of sci-fi by Sydney Mead, an industrial designer widely known for his designs for science-fiction films.

Jet Stream

By Tim Woollings || $32. 95

The jet stream was discovered in the 1920s. In this analysis of its complex influence on weather, Woollings relates how the Japanese used the jet stream to launch trans — Pacific balloons in 1944. Today, the jet stream is very likely to be threatened by another product of human activity: rising carbon dioxide emissions.

Adventures of a Computational Explorer

By Stephen Wolfram || $22. 46

Stephen Wolfram, designer of the technical-computing system Mathematica, offers good stories in this collection of biographical essays. For example, he recalls himself as a six-year-old spotting a bite

taken out of the sun: a solar eclipse, something unknown to the other children.

9 . You are just waking up in the spring of 2030. Your Internet of Things bedroom opens solar powered e-windows and plays gentle music while your smart lighting displays a montage (剪辑的)of beachfront sunrises from your recent vacation.

Your shower uses very little water or soap. It recycles your grey water and puts the extra heat back into your home's operating system. While you dress, your artificial intelligence (Al) assistant shares your schedule for the day and plays your favorite tunes.

You still start your day with a coffee but it comes from your lot refrigerator which is capable of providing a coffeehouse experience in your home. A hot breakfast tailored to your specific nutritional needs (based on chemical analysis from your trips to the “smart toilet” is waiting for you in the kitchen.

When it's time to leave, an on-demand transport system has three cars waiting for you, your wife (or husband) and your kids. On the road, driverless cars and trucks move with mathematical accuracy, without traffic jams, routine maintenance or road rage. Accident rates are near zero.

On the way, you call your R&D team, who are enveloping a day's work in Shanghai. Your life-sized image is projected (投射)into the China Innovation Centre and your colleagues see you as if you were sitting in the room. It’s a bit surreal for them to see you in the morning light given that it's dark on the Bund, Shanghai's waterfront, though the novelty disappears after a few uses.

You review the day's cloud-based data from your Shenzhen manufacturing center, your pilot project in San Diego, and your QA team in Melbourne. The large amounts of datasets were collected in real-time from every piece of equipment and have been beautifully summarized by your company's AL All these facilities are closely maintained and operated through a advanced predictive analytics platform.

Pleased with the team's progress, you end the call and ease into a good book.

This is the future and it will be here sooner than you think.

10 . In the future, when robots can be used both in homes and in other areas, they could improve the living standards of people.     1     When robots can complete such jobs, people can spend more time with their family and friends.

Experts believe robots can be used on certain jobs to avoid accidents caused by careless behavior of some people. When robots are used on such work, it does not risk any human life due to accidents at the workplace. Human resources can be efficiently used by performing tasks which demand human skills like critical thinking and problem solving.     2    

While some people talk about how robots can be useful to humans, others voice their concerns. When robots become cheaper to produce, employers may prefer to use more robots than humans. As the technology constantly improves the abilities of robots, it could weaken the value of humans.     3     Some may even develop the habit of using robots on tasks that they can easily do. This could create a lazy society.

    4     Without them, the nation’s health care system will break down. There will simply be too many elderly people to care for as the nation faces a decreasing birth rate, an aging population, and the loosening of family ties.     5     Above all, Japan needs its dreams of robots in the home to come true because its immigration policy is anti-immigration.