2 . Tonal languages use pitch (音调) to distinguish words that otherwise might sound the same. In Mandarin, for instance, mă means horse whereas mã means mother. Nontonal languages like Spanish sometimes include pitch changes to suggest emotion, for example, but not to change a word’s meaning.

As a Mandarin speaker and musician, Jingxuan Liu wondered about the crossover (融合) between language and music. While studying at Duke University, Liu helped analyze the musical abilities of nearly half a million people from 203 countries. Her colleagues had launched an online game in which participants completed several musical tasks, including identifying matching melodies at different pitches and finding beat tracks that fit songs’ rhythms.

On average, native speakers of the 19 represented tonal languages were better at the melody task compared with speakers of 29 nontonal languages. And the effect wasn’t small a tonal first language strengthened melodic understanding by about half the amount that music lessons did, which was also surveyed. But tonal languages speakers tended to be worse at the rhythm task.

Humans must be choosy about what they pay attention to. Pitch patterns are quite important in tonal languages, which might explain the balancing act in music. “You’ve got a finite resource of attention, and you’ve got to divide up that somehow,” says study coauthor Courtney Hilton, a scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Prior research on language and music often compared just two tongues, usually English and Mandarin. But other cultural influences, such as Eastern and Western music styles, could have affected results. By examining a wide range of people, the new study included languages never estimated in this way and reached more generalizable conclusion.

“Our result here is showing that the language someone speaks which is an important part of culture — also shapes cognition,” Hilton says.

3 . Sites for free online education enable you to learn courses in your comfortable place. The courses of these websites are offered by top universities. You can learn a specific subject without much investment. These websites offer many videos, articles, and e-books to increase your knowledge.

Coursera

Coursera is a free learning platform that offers MOOCs courses from well-known universities. All courses contain pre-recorded video lectures that you can watch when it is convenient for you. Coursera has programs together with universities that allow you to get a master’s degree. You can explore various college courses without any trouble.

CodeHS

CodeHS is a learning site that’s specially designed for students to learn computer science. This website provides lesson plans where you can access various resources to learn it. The courses are designed in a way that suits your personal needs. The videos can be viewed online as well as offline.

Khan Academy

This site is useful to match your learning goals. You choose this site to personalize your learning experience. This free platform can be used for learners and teachers. The resources of this site are available online as well as offline. The content of Khan Academy is available in English, French, German, and more.

Connections Academy

Connections Academy is the best online course website that helps students to learn from home. The courses of this platform are designed for elementary school and middle school. The site provides personalized learning experiences and enables you to easily meet teachers and classmates in the virtual classroom.

5 . A fourth color might be added to traffic lights to better realize the potential of self-driving vehicles, as stated in a recent paper by researchers at North Carolina State University in the US.

Autonomous vehicles can do more than just drive-they are able to sense their surroundings and upload information. A shared network gives orders to stop at a crossing based on traffic conditions.

The added white lights would be used to signal to human drivers that autonomous vehicles are managing the upcoming traffic flow intelligently. Drivers don’t have to check the traditional lights if the white one is on. “The white lights will tell human drivers to simply follow the car in front of them,” one of the study authors Ali Hajbabaie told the university’s website.

Simulated (模拟的) models showed that autonomous vehicles were able to improve traffic flow on their own. Introducing the white light also has a positive effect on reducing fuel consumption. The higher the percentage of autonomous vehicles at a crossing, the faster the traffic moves, reducing about 40 to 99 percent of the total delay time.

What kind of infrastructure (基础设施) is needed as self-driving technology thrives? In an interview with China Surveying and Mapping magazine, Liu Jingnan at the Chinese Academy of Engineering shared his answers.

To begin with, the vehicle’s network that collects data about the environment and shares the data with other vehicles needs to be intelligent. High-precision maps are needed for autonomous vehicles to plan routes in detail. They can provide both updated information on traditional maps and real-time changes, such as accidents.

For example, when driving around a curve, the navigation (导航) system in the vehicle needs to calculate the safe speed based on the map’s information. And if the area is foggy, the network has to alarm the other cars to slow down.

Other elements on the road need to be upgraded too. For example, road markings should be precise and readable for machines. Sensors should be built on sidewalks and roads to allow vehicles to predict potentially dangerous situations.

My Intelligent Robot for the Elderly

9 . The two terms nature and nurture have been subjects of comparison since the 16th century. The argument is centered on the question as to whether it is nature or nurture that makes us who we are.

Nature provides the starting point for an organism that will interact with nurture, the environment, during the organism’s life. Nature does not just affect an organism during its lifetime, but it also can directly affect the expression of genes in offspring (后代). For the Geneticists, they believe that our lives are entirely determined by genetics, which is nature. An opposing view is that there is no indication that genes (基因) determines one’s personality, rather there is growing evidence that nurture serves as the determining factor in personality development.

Nurture refers to the conditions under which living things grow and develop after birth. When applied to human beings, it means how the person is raised, which includes nutrition, education, care, as well as the kind of surroundings, such as cultural influence, family and friends.

The argument of nature and nurture as to which is more important is necessitated by an attempt to differentiate how much effect genetics has on a person’s development against how easily humans are influenced by one’s environment.

While nurture undeniably plays its part on the growth and development of one’s personality, nature dramatically outweighs nurture, for nature can be likened to a foundation. The impact of nurture on the development of persons cannot be totally denied. However, nature is regarded as being of most importance because of the fact that it affords an opportunity and creates a foundation and the basis for the question of nurture to arise at the very first instance. Even without nurture, the nature impact can still stand independently without necessarily causing destruction. More so, even when the nurture impact is successfully effected, it does not remove the genetic characteristics of a person. It therefore stands correctly that nature is that which determines the substance of a person.