A T-shirt that constantly monitors the heart's activity and detects abnormalities could help protect people against stroke. The T-shirt, which can be washed up to 35 times before it needs replacing, has been developed to improve the detection of dangerous heart conditions like atrial fibrillation( 心房颤动), which causes an irregular heart rhythm and raises the risk of stroke.

    At least one million people in Britain are known to have this condition; however, it's estimated that at least another 500,000 have it but haven't yet been diagnosed because they have no obvious symptoms. Some will have symptoms such as chest pain, dizziness and fatigue; but a large number of people have no idea they're ill until they suffer a stroke.

    Detecting atrial fibrillation involves carrying out an ECG(心电图). Conventional ECGs are done in a hospital and involve highly trained teams of staff attaching up to 24 separate electrodes(电极) to different parts of the body to measure electrical signals. But most patients experience abnormal rhythms only intermittently(间歇地). This means the chance of picking them up during a short hospital check is slim.

    Doctors sometimes issue patients with a device called a Holter monitor to wear under their clothes to try to pick up cardiac( 心脏的) problems. This is an electronic box which clips onto your waistband and is connected to a series of electrodes worn on the upper part of your body. But the box itself is quite bulky, hard to hide beneath clothing and involves a dozen or more wires being attached to the patient's chest.

    The Cardioskin T-shirt, which is made from cotton, could be a much more convenient alternative and can be worn 24 hours a day — meaning it is more likely to pick up any abnormal rhythms in the patient's heart. It has 15 tiny electrodes woven into the material which are strategically placed around the chest area to track the electrical signals from the heart as they travel across the main part of your body.

    The electrodes are powered by a battery which can be removed easily when you need to wash the T- shirt and feed results to a microchip which then sends them out wirelessly to an app. This converts( 转换) the data into an easy-to-read chart showing if the heart rate is abnormal. The results are shared with the patient's doctor so they can check the patient's heart without having to call them into the hospital.

    Martin Cowie, a professor of cardiology at Imperial College London, said, “Cardioskin could be an important development for cardiologists.”

    The national environmental watchdog has declared that boosting efforts to cut air pollution in northern China, especially winter smog from the burning of coal, is a mission for this year.

    Burning coal for winter heating has been listed as one of the primary causes of air pollution, Chen Jining, minister of environmental protection, said on Monday at the annual meeting on environmental protection in Beijing.“As much as 60 percent of smog content is caused by coal burning in the starting phase of each smog”, said Fang Li, an official with Beijing's Environmental Protection Bureau. Therefore, Beijing has declared that it will wipe out coal use in its most rural areas by 2020.

    To start with, Beijing will replace coal-fired heating stoves with those powered by electricity or gas in 400 villages this year, before taking the campaign to the districts of Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai and Shijingshan by 2017,said Guo Zihua, a municipal rural development official. Beijing's downtown districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng eliminated coal burning last year, officials said.

    The capital and other places in northern China experienced several smog alerts in November and December, when peak readings were many times higher than the national safety level. Obviously, the situation is deteriorating, and will become a norm. So the government came up with a “smog subsidy (津贴)” for those who work outdoors, and 95 percent of the respondents to a survey support it.

    The Trade Union in Zhengzhou City surveyed subscribers to its official WeChat account and found that 88 percent of nearly 400 respondents said priority should be given to outdoor workers on smoggy days But 9 percent said air pollution affects everyone so it would be unfair to only address the concerns of people who work outdoors.

    Over half of the respondents think the extra subsidy, if applied, could come in the form of protective tools or cash. Twenty-two percent said money is the easiest way. To finance the proposed subsidy, 53 percent think the government and companies should jointly pay the bill, while 44 percent said central and regional governments should be responsible.

    The goings-on in the consulting room have become more transparent(透明的）recently. Thank goodness. We know more than the lines supplied by the movies in which the therapist knows all and gives wisdom to those who, sitting on a couch, consult with them. Therapists are interested in how the individual, the couple or the family experiences and understands their difficulties. That has to be a starting place. We can be of value if our first port of call is to listen, to gradually feel ourselves into the shoes of the other, to absorb the feelings that are being conveyed and to think and then to say some words.

    The thinking and talking that I do inside the consulting room is at odds with many features of ordinary conversation. Not that it is mysterious, but it isn't concerned with traditional ways of sharing or identifying. The therapist makes patterns and theories, but they are also reflecting on the words that are spoken, how they are delivered and how the words, once spoken, affect the speaker and the therapist themselves.

    Words can give voice to previously unknown feelings and thoughts. That's why it's called the talking cure. But just as words reveal so, too, can they obscure, and this gets us to the listening and feeling part of the therapy. Whatever and however the words are delivered, they will have an impact on me as a therapist. I might feel hopeless, I might feel energized, I might feel pushed away, I might feel demanded of, I might feel pulled to find solutions.

    The influence of the other is what makes any relationship possible or impossible. A therapist is trained to reflect on how those who consult with them affect them. As I try to step into the shoes of the other and then out again, my effort is to hold both those experiences, plus an awareness of my ease or discomfort with what I encounter in the relationship.

    Feelings are the bread and butter of our work in the consulting room. They inform or modify our ideas and they enable us to find an emotional bridge to what can so hurt for the people we are working with. Along with the more commonly thought-about theories and ideas we have about the psyche, they are an essential part of the therapist's toolkit, certainly for me. The talking cure means talking, yes. It also means the therapist is listening, thinking and feeling.

    Self-driving cars have been backed by the hope that they will save lives by getting involved in fewer crashes with fewer injuries and deaths than human-driven cars. But so far, most comparisons between human drivers and automated vehicles have been unfair.

    Crash statistics for human-driven cars are gathered from all sorts of driving situations, and on all types of roads. However, most of the data on self-driving cars' safety have been recorded often in good weather and on highways, where the most important tasks are staying in the car's own lane and not getting too close to the vehicle ahead. Automated cars are good at those tasks, but so are humans.

    It is true that self-driving cars don't get tired, angry, frustrated or drunk. But neither can they yet react to uncertain situations with the same skill or anticipation of an attentive human driver. Nor do they possess the foresight to avoid potential perils. They largely drive from moment to moment, rather than think ahead to possible events literally down the road.

    To a self-driving car, a bus full of people might appear quite similar to an uninhabited corn field. Indeed, deciding what action to take in an emergency is difficult for humans, but drivers have sacrificed themselves for the greater good of others. An automated system's limited understanding of the world means it will almost never evaluate (评估) a situation the same way a human would. And machines can't be programmed in advance to handle every imaginable set of events.

    Some people may argue that the promise of simply reducing the number of injuries and deaths is enough to support driverless cars. But experience from aviation (航空) shows that as new automated systems are introduced, there is often an increase in the rate of disasters.

    Therefore comparisons between humans and automated vehicles have to be performed carefully. To fairly evaluate driverless cars on how well they fulfill their promise of improved safety, it's important to ensure the data being presented actually provide a true comparison. After all, choosing to replace humans with automation has more effects than simply a one-for-one exchange.

    A Japanese telecom company has designed a robot that it says has emotions (情绪). But rather than run in fear from it, we've welcomed it into our homes: Pepper, the "emotional robots" sold out within a minute of going on sale.

    Created by Aldebaran Robotics and Japanese mobile giant SoftBaok, Pepper went on sale to the general public in Japan on June 20. It is "the first humanoid (类人的) robot designed to live with humans, " Aldebaran says on its website. Pepper costs about $ 1, 600. And like all good mobile products, there's a $ 120 per month data fee, as well as an $80 per month damage insurance fee. According to a news report, Pepper can pick up on human emotions and create his own using a "multi - layer neural (神经的) network." Pepper's touch sensors and cameras are said to influence its mood, which is displayed on the tablet-sized screen on its chest.

    Pepper will sigh when unhappy, and can go around your house recording your family's daily activity. Aldebaran says Pepper can feel "joy, surprise, anger, doubt and sadness," but it doesn't say how strongly it can feel these emotions. What happens when Pepper is having a bad day? Will it, like many humans, become uncooperative? Will it ask for some time alone? What happens if it knows that its purpose in life is just to take part in small talk? Thankfully, Pepper is only about four feet tall, with roller balls instead of legs, so if it is angry with and even turns on its owners, you'll be safe if you can make it upstairs.

    Aldebaran says in reality, they're probably quite a few years away from artificial intelligence that could create real emotions. Aldebaran wasn't immediately able to tell when Pepper will be available out of Japan, but additional sales are scheduled for July after the first 1, 000 units sell out. SoftBank currently uses the robots in its stores as greeters, and it plans to offer Pepper to other stores in the future. Hopefully "boredom" is not an emotion Pepper can feel.

    A woman in Pulaski, Virginia, says she was stopped by a squirrel, who pulled on her leg repeatedly and led her to help its injured baby.

    Tia Powell was walking in Kiwanis Park when she was "approached by a squirrel", the Pulaski Police Department wrote on Facebook. The squirrel stood in her way on the path. After realizing that the squirrel did not mean any harm and wasn't going to leave her side, Powell turned around and the squirrel led her down the path to a baby squirrel with an injured leg.

    At one point, Powell wasn't sure she could help and she began walking and the squirrel followed her again and actually pulled her trouser leg! So, she fed the squirrels a sandwich she had with her and watched them try to Jump up into a tree. When she realized the baby squirrel was still struggling to get up the tree, she decided to call in backup. Powell called the Pulaski Police Department.

    Powell didn't know how the baby squirrel got injured, but she thought a nearby street cat was the culprit (肇事者). So, the group of rescuers decided to move the squirrels to safer area. "We were able to get the baby and mother to a different area with more trees and it was able to climb all the way up and they looked very happy," Powell said.

    She went back a few days later to show her kids where it all went down. In the trees, Powell spotted two squirrels staring at her, and couldn't help but wonder if they were the same squirrels she rescued.