Alexis, 17, sat quietly in the passenger seat of her dad's car. She let her eyes lazily scan the landscape for wildlife. Then a deer came into view about 200 yards in front of them. “Dad, there's a deer there!” Alexis said. It was a male deer with sharp antlers (角) on each side of its head.

    As the car moved closer, Alexis saw that the deer's head was bent toward the ground. Then she heard a scream and saw an arm fly up near the deer's head. Alexis realized the deer was attacking a woman. Sue, a 44-year-old mother, had been out for her morning run. The deer followed her and edged closer. “I knew I was in trouble.” Sue says. She went to pick up a stick for self-defense, and the deer charged. It lifted her with its antlers and threw her into the air. Sue could feel blood flew down her leg. Within seconds, the deer had pushed her off the road.

    When Alexis and her father pulled up, the deer was throwing Sue like a doll. Alexis looked into the woman's terrified eyes, and before her father had even stopped the car, the teenager jumped quickly out of the car and ran toward the deer. “I was kicking it to get its attention." she says. Then her father, who had followed his daughter, pushed the deer away from the women.

    Alexis helped Sue into the car and then applied a piece of cloth to Sue's injured leg. “We're going to get you to a hospital.” Alexis said. Then she heard her father shout loudly. He had been knocked to the ground. Alexis took hold of a hammer from the car and ran to where her father lay on his back. She beat the deer's head and neck, but the blows didn't scare it away. “I was losing faith.” she says. “A couple more strikes. Alexis.” said her father. “You can do it.”

    Turning the hammer around, Alexis closed her eyes and beat the deer's neck with all her strength. When she opened her eyes, the deer was running away.

    Alexis got in the driver's seat and sped toward the nearest hospital. After Sue was treated, she tearfully thanked her rescuers. “You expect a teenage girl to get on the phone and call for help,” she says, “not to beat up a deer.”

    If you find yourself checking your phone first thing in the morning, if you find you're text-messaging while driving, checking your phone instead of working on an important assignment—you are addicted.

    Don't worry. The new NoPhone might be just the thing you need. It looks and feels exactly like a smartphone, but it does nothing. It's just a piece of plastic that you can carry around in your hand to fool yourself.

    NoPhone is currently a prototype(手机模型) that will cost only $12 once it hits the market. Its makers are trying to raise $30,000 in order to cover the production and marketing costs.

    Dutch designer Ingmar Larsen, who helped create the NoPhone, said that he had the idea as a joke along with his friends Van Gould and Ben Langveld. To their great surprise, the idea received a lot of attention online and people from all over the world started placing requests for NoPhone of their own, so that's when the three friends decided to raise money for mass production.

David H said," I used to sleep with my phone in my hand, but my night errors would cause me to throw it across the room in an unconscious panic. With the NoPhone, I can still enjoy the comfort of holding a phone in my sleep, without waking up to a shattered screen, thanks, NoPhone."

If you're interested in NoPhone, but concerned about not being able to takeselfies anymore, don't worry. The makers do have an update at no extra charge—the mirror sticker. That way, they say, you can enjoy "real-time" selfies with your friends when they're standing right behind you.

    The next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) may be sitting right beneath you, at least if furniture maker Ikea has any say in the matter. The Swedish furniture company's “future-living” research lab in Copenhagen is conducting a survey to understand what people want when it comes to smart furniture.

    AI is now walking into more aspects of people's daily lives. Self-driving cars are just around the corner, and AI robots can play and beat the best players of strategy games. As smart home technologies have become more ubiquitous, products ranging from smart electrical outlets（插座）to smart smoke alarms are flooding the market. Therefore, it's not surprising that Ikea would be moving in the same direction.

    Exactly why people would want their sofa or bed frame to speak to then, track their daily movements or offer help is not yet clear. Though Ikea's the new survey doesn't directly answer that question, it does provide a hint of what people would feel comfortable with. Most participants wanted a more human0like form of virtual（虚拟的）assistants, as opposed to one that is more robotic. In terms of the ideal gender（性别）of the assistants, the most popular choice was neither male nor female. Few wanted a religious form of AI.

    Just as with human friends, most wanted AI friends that were like them, affirming their own worldview. They wanted an AI assistant that was reasonably intelligent-that could collect data to predict what a person wanted before he or she asked, and that could prevent someone from making mistakes.

    This is not the first time that Ikea has set foot in the field or futuristic technologies. In addition to wireless charging tables and chainless bikes that never rust（生锈）, the furniture giant has also pictured smart kitchens that can cook the best meal. To decide on how intelligent you want your next sofa or bookshelf to be, you can take Ikea's survey online.

    Having friends may well keep you healthier and help you deal with stress better. Some studies show that people with close friends have a greater ability to fight disease than people who are alone.

    Place friendship in the first place. Find the time to be with friends even if it means letting the lawn(草坪) go unmowed (未割的) or the dishes unwashed for a while. When you can't get together, use the phone to keep in touch.

    Open up to close friends. Keeping a deep friendship requires a level of “heartfelt” intimacy (亲密).Don't be afraid to express your inner fears and disappointments. Listen to your friends when they have problems， but offer advice only when it's wanted. Help raise friends' self-esteem(自尊) when they are sad about a job loss, or other such events.

    Have different friends for different activities, such as going to the movies， singing in a choir， and joining in a bowling league.

    Don't wait for a friend to ask for helps. When a friend has the flu， offer to go to the store or drive his or her children to their afterschool activities.

    Never take a friendship for granted. Like a good marriage， friendship needs care and patience. Become a joiner. Find a group that matches your interests.

    Talk to strangers. Conversations started in museums, laundry rooms， or bookstores can lead to firm friendship.

    Enroll in an adult education course. A classroom is an ideal place to meet others with similar interests.

    Pangolins (穿山甲) are strange-looking creatures, covered with hard scales (鳞). They can roll up into a ball to protect themselves from enemies and have tongues that are longer than their bodies.

    Pangolins have recently become the focus of Chinese people. A screenshot (截屏) of a micro blog post showing some people eating pangolins at a feast spread. A few days later, people were angered again by pictures showing people eating protected animals, including pangolins.

    Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg. Many more pangolins have been hunted or killed. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), more than 1 million of them have been killed or sold in the last 10 years. It also said that they are the most illegally traded mammals in the world. In September 2016, the IUCN added the pangolin to the world's "endangered animals list". They are now more endangered than pandas.

    A growing trade of their scales and meat is the main reason for their decline in numbers. Many people in Asia and Africa consider pangolin meat is delicious. Some people even think pangolin scales have medical qualities. However, their scales are made of keratin (角蛋白), the same material human fingernails are made of.

    Luckily, the situation is getting better. World Pangolin Day is on the third Saturday of February each year. It's a day to help people know more about pangolins. The government now stops anyone from buying and eating pangolins in China. Breaking this law is regarded as a crime. The trade of pangolins across the world is also not allowed, according to the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

The prodigious ability of our species to rapidly assimilate vocabulary, expanding from a mere 300 lexemes by the tender age of two to an impressive repertoire exceeding 1,000 by the age of four, remains a subject of profound enigma. Certain scholars in the realms of cognitive science and linguistics have posited that the human mind enters the world equipped with innate cognitive predispositions and logical parameters that facilitate this linguistic feat. However, recent advancements in the sphere of machine learning have unveiled the potential for swift acquisition of semantic understanding from sparse data, eschewing the need for preconceived, hardwired assumptions.

An ensemble of researchers has triumphantly honed a rudimentary artificial intelligence construct to correlate visual representations with their corresponding lexical entities, utilizing a mere 61 hours of ambient visual recordings and auditory data—previously amassed from an individual known as Sam during the years 2013 and 2014. Though this represents but a minuscule fraction of a child's developmental chronicle, it transpires that this was sufficiently informative to incite the AI in discerning the significance of select vocables.

These revelations intimate that the process of linguistic acquisition may be more straightforward than hitherto presumed. It is conceivable that the juvenile mind does not necessitate a tailor-made, sophisticated linguistic apparatus to adeptly apprehend the essence of words, posits Jessica Sullivan, an adjunct professor of psychology at Skidmore College. "This is an exceptionally elegant inquiry," she articulates, as it presents corroborative evidence that rudimentary data extracted from a child's perspective is sufficiently abundant to initiate the processes of pattern recognition and lexical assimilation.

The recent scholarly endeavor also illustrates the plausibility of machines emulating the learning modalities inherent to human cognition. Vast linguistic models are typically nurtured on colossal datasets encompassing billions, if not trillions, of lexical permutations. In stark contrast, human beings manage with a significantly reduced informational intake, as articulated by the principal scribe of the study, Wai Keen Vong. With the appropriate genre of data, the chasm separating machine and human learning could be substantially bridged.

Nevertheless, further investigation is warranted in select dimensions of this pioneering research. The savants concede that their findings do not conclusively elucidate the mechanisms by which children amass vocabulary. Additionally, the study's purview was confined to the identification of nouns pertaining to tangible entities.

Despite these limitations, this represents a stride toward a more profound comprehension of our own cognitive faculties, which may ultimately contribute to the enhancement of human pedagogical practices, according to Eva Portelance, a scholar in computational linguistics. She remarks that AI research has the potential to shed light on enigmatic queries about our essence that have persisted over time. "We can harness these paradigms in a salutary manner, to the advantage of scientific discovery and societal progress," Portelance further elaborates.