1 . Algorithms (计算程序) are able to do a huge number of tasks, and the number of tasks that they are able to do is expanding practically every day. According to a new study, despite increasing concern over the effect of algorithms in daily life, more and more people nowadays are willing to trust a computer program, especially if a task becomes too challenging. From choosing the next song on your playlist to choosing the right size of pants, people are relying more on the advice of algorithms to help make everyday decisions.

During the study, researchers asked volunteers to count the number of people of a crowd in a photograph and supplied suggestions that were offered by a group of other people and suggestions offered by an algorithm. As the number of people in the photograph expanded, counting became more difficult and people were more likely to follow the suggestions offered by an algorithm rather than count themselves or follow the “wisdom of the crowd”.

One of the common problems with AI is when it is used for awarding credit. While that is a subjective decision, there are lots of numbers there, like income and credit scores. Therefore, people feel like this is a good job for an algorithm. But we know that dependence leads to unfair and incomplete practices in many cases because of social factors that aren’t considered.

Facial recognition and hiring algorithms have come under inspection in recent years because their use has shown cultural prejudice in the way they were built, which can cause inaccuracies when matching faces to identities or screening for qualified job candidates. The prejudice may not be present in a simple task like counting, but their presence in other trusted algorithms is a reason why it is important to understand how people rely on algorithms when making decisions.

“The eventual goal is to look at groups of humans and computers making decisions and find how we can get them to trust each other and how that changes their behaviors,” one of the researchers said. “Because there is very little research in that setting, we’re starting with the fundamentals.”

2 . Going to sleep at a certain time is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease, according to researchers. A team led by the U.K. -based University of Exeter found that going to sleep between 10 and 11 p.m. was beneficial compared to earlier or later bedtimes.

The research included 88,000 participants in the U.K. Biobank who were recruited between 2006 and 2010. The average age of the group — ranging from 43 to 79 years old — was 61 and 58 percent were women. Participants filled out demographic (人口统计的), lifestyle, health and physical questionnaires, according to a European Society of Cardiology news release. The study looked at the association between objectively measured sleep onset timing and cardiovascular disease using wrist-worn accelerometers, collecting a week’s worth of data.

Using Cox proportional hazards models, an age- and sex-controlled base analysis found that sleep on set time of 10 to 10:59 p.m. was associated with the lowest incidence of cardiovascular (心血管的) disease. Another model that controlled for sleep duration, sleep irregularity and established cardiovascular risk factors like smoking status and body mass index did not reduce the impact of the association.

There was a 25 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease with sleep onset at midnight or later, a 12 percent greater risk for 11 to 11:59 p.m. and a 24 percent raised risk for falling asleep before 10 p.m. compared to sleep onset from 10 to 10:59 p.m. More than 3,170 cases, or 3.6 percent, were reported during an average follow-up period of nearly six years. Sensitivity analyses revealed the association with increased risk of cardiovascular disease was stronger in women, with only sleep onset earlier than 10 p.m. significant for men.

“The body has a 24-hour internal clock, called circadian rhythm (昼夜节律), that helps regulate physical and mental functioning,” study author David Plans of the University of Exeter said in a statement. “While we cannot conclude causation from our study, the results suggest that early or late bedtimes may be more likely to disrupt the body clock, with adverse consequences for cardiovascular health.”

3 . What you should know when applying for a credit card online

Applying for a credit card online can be awful, as you may have heard all sorts of information and might not know what to believe. Consider these tips when applying for a credit card online.

Who can apply for a credit card online

Online credit card applications are open to US adult residents -in other words, people with a mailing address in the US who are over 18 and either have a Social Security Number (SSN) or Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN). Applicants under the age of 21 will need a co-signer or proof of income as part of the application process. While nearly anyone can apply for a credit card, note that credit card issuers evaluate applications based on many different factors and criteria. They are interested in getting a full picture of your financial health. Therefore, besides collecting your basic contact information, they will use your SSN to pull your credit report.

How to apply for a credit card online

Do your research. There are hundreds of different credit cards available with a variety of offers, fee structures and rewards programs. Chart your spending behaviors so you know which categories you spend most heavily in, and then shop around for the card that matches your credit profile and best fits your needs.

Follow internet security best practices. When you’re ready to apply, make sure both your web browser and operating system are up to date. Consider filling out the application on a mobile data connection or a safe, private network to prevent the risks of someone stealing your personal information. And if you have any doubt about the safety of an email from a card issuer, go directly to the issuer’s website rather than clicking on any links in the email.

Five-year-old Naomi lost her teddy bear on a hiking path     1     the autumn of 2020. Teddy was the first gift Naomi’s parents gave to her. Despite     2     (constant) checking with the lost and found, her family didn’t get the bear back. Fortunately, Ranger (护林员) Tom,     3     monitors actual bear activity, came across the teddy bear. He kept it and rode with it     4     a friend of the family spotted the bear and helped send it back home nearly a year later.

6 . Combining knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, scientists from McGill University develop a biomaterial tough enough to repair the heart, muscles, and vocal cords, representing a major advance in medicine.

“People recovering from heart damage often face a long and tricky journey. Healing is challenging because of the constant movement tissues must withstand (承受) as the heart beats. The same is true for vocal cords. Until now there was no injectable (可注射的) material strong enough for the job," says Guangyu Bao, a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University.

The team, led by Professor Luc Mongeau and Assistant Professor Jianyu Li, developed a new injectable hydrogel (水凝胶) for wound repair, which is a type of biomaterial that provides room for cells to live and grow. Once injected into the body, the biomaterial forms a stable structure allowing live cells to grow or pass through to repair the injured organs.

“The results are promising, and we hope that one day the new hydrogel will be used to restore the voice of people with damaged vocal cords," says Guangyu Bao.

The scientists tested the durability of their hydrogel in a machine they developed to copy the extreme biomechanics of human vocal cords. Vibrating (振动) at 120 times a second for over 6 million cycles, the new biomaterial remained undamaged while other standard hydrogels broken into pieces, unable to deal with the stress of the load.

“We were incredibly excited to see it worked perfectly in our test. Before our work, no injectable hydrogels possessed both high porosity and toughness at the same time. To solve this issue, we introduced a pore-forming polymer to our formula (配方),”says Guangyu Bao.

The innovation opens new ways of making progress for other applications like tissue engineering. The team is also looking to use the hydrogel technology to create lungs to test COVID-19 drugs.

8 . The Greenwood fire took its name from the nearby lake where lightning struck on Aug.15, causing a wildfire that burned for weeks. Fueled by drought and wind, its persistence dominated headlines for much of late summer and early fall in Minnesota. When the last flames were finally put out, the northern Minnesota fire had consumed nearly 27,000 acres, countless firefighting resources, and at its worst, the lives that some had built around nearby McDougal Lake. Vast areas of forest were left burned-out, with the black and bare remains of what were once massive pines.

But, despite the destruction left behind, Mother Nature is set to a comeback. When organic matter is burned from the forest floor, seeds dropped by plants and trees begin to take hold, with the sprouting species emerging first. The trees above have died, which sends a chemical signal to the root system that is actually more expansive than just under that tree, and that chemical response encourages those root systems to re-grow. Ten years ago, a fire ripped through 93,000 acres of Minnesota forest in and around the BWCA. Today, that burnt area's rebirth is well underway.

"Here in the Pagami Creek wildfire scar, we have Jack Pine, Red Pine, Black Spruce, Aspen and paper birch-those are our main species, those are the ones that are growing quickly. It's 10 years on, and these trees are 10 to 15 feet tall in many areas," said Kyle Stover from the U.S. Forest Service.

A wildfire kills most things in its path, but despite the flames and intense temperatures, rarely is everything reduced to ashes -and that plays a key role in a forest's regeneration. Just one year after the fire, the survivors dominate the forest, and grasses replace the burnt ground. Wildflowers are abundant bushes and small trees have started to grow, and Jack Pine returned. So, it's an amazing ecological system of creating new forest life when it appears that all is lost, one that has evolved throughout the ages, where fire has always played a vital role.

9 . How to Be a Good Upstairs Neighbor

One must remember to be polite when living in an apartment building. You may unintentionally bother your neighbors with actions that you think to be harmless.     1     Living upstairs, you must always be aware that everything you do may be heard by those who live below. This doesn’t mean that you have to completely change your lifestyle, though.

    2     This will greatly reduce the sound of your footsteps, thus limiting the sound your downstairs neighbor will hear. You should always remember to change your shoes when entering your apartment to ensure that your downstairs neighbor doesn’t hear you walking around.

Place carpets in your apartment if you have hardwood floors. Doing so is another way to decrease the sound of steps coming from an upstairs apartment. You can also put your furniture on these carpets.     3    

Close your windows when you can. A floor is usually about three meters high, so it’s quite easy to hear your conversations.     4     Therefore, whenever you are watching TV or listening to a radio, try to keep your windows closed as much as possible.

Do your cleaning on weekend afternoons.     5     Doing such housework at 3:00 pm on a Saturday is much better than doing so at 9:30 on a Tuesday night.

10 . Artificial intelligence is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, which influences education, criminal justice, hiring and welfare, But so far the industry has escapedregulation (管理), despite affecting the lives of billions of people, even when its products are potentially harmful.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sped this up. Many Al companies are now promoting emotion recognition tools (ERTs) for monitoring remote workers. These systems map the “micro-expressions”in people’s faces from their video cameras. Then they predict internal emotional states drawn from a list of supposedly universal categories: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, surprise and fear. However, there is scientific doubt whether emotional states are accurately detected at all. “It is not possible to confidently infer happiness from a smile, or sadness from a frown,” a 2019 review stated.

Resistance to this highly controversial (有争议的) technology is growing; the influential.

Brookings Institute suggested ERTs be banned completely from use by law. The European Union becomes the first to attempt a proposal to regulate AI, but the draft AI act has its problems. It would ban most “real-time” biometric ID (生物识别) systems — but fails to define what exactly real-time means.

Clearly, we need far stronger protections and controls that address such harmful effects on society. However, too many policymakers fall into the trap of “enchanted determinism”: the belief that AI systems are magical and superhuman — beyond what we can understand or regulate, yet decisive and reliable enough to make predictions about life-changing decisions. This effect drives a kind of techno-optimism that can directly endanger people’s lives. For example, a review in the British Medical Journal looked at 232 machine-learning algorithms (算法) for predicting outcomes for COVID-19 patients. It found that none of them were fit for clinical use. “I fear that they may have harmed patients,” said one of the authors.

Many countries have strict regulations and thorough testing when developing medicines and vaccines. The same should be true for AI systems, especially those having a direct impact on people’s lives.