Alaska's state fair, which runs until September 5^th, began as a celebration among residents of the Mantanuska Colony, a project under which 200 farm families were moved to Alaska to see whether agriculture could be possible in the coldest state. The state fair lives on, but little more than a decade after the start of the project most of the participants had abandoned their farms. The project was widely seen as a flop.

    In this state, glaciers cover 300 times more acres than farms. Only 5% of the food consumed is grown locally, compared with 81% nationwide. The growing season is short and summer temperatures chilly. Tomato plants wither(凋谢). Fruit trees, in most parts of the state, are just a dream.

    Enter the high tunnel: a greenhouse consisting of a metal frame with plastic stretched across it. Its few millimeters of plastic separate crops inside from the great outdoors. But this is enough for Alaskan growers to produce tomatoes as well as sweetcorn, peaches and kiwi fruit, and to boost production of crops by a quarter or more.

    In a place where no one blinks(眨眼) if you call yourself a fisherman, boat captain or gold miner, an increasing number of Alaskans are thinking of themselves as people who grow food. Since the start of the programme, the number of farms registered(登记)with the state has nearly doubled. Local restaurants have begun shaping their menus around what neighboring farms can grow.

    Eight decades ago, the Mantanuska Colony tried to turn farmers into Alaskans. Today, the high tunnels are turning Alaskans into farmers.

    ARNOLD Schwarzenegger is back, once again taking on his iconic killer robot role, the T-800, in August's new movie Terminator Genisys. While the T-800 model—even if it can be evil—has a fond place in moviegoers' hearts, the reality of autonomous machines is no joke, according to scientists.

    Autonomous weapons use artificial intelligence (AI) to choose targets without human help. They were described as “the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms” in an open letter signed by over 1,000 important technology figures in July. The list included British scientist Stephen Hawking and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. They asked governments around the world to ban autonomous weapons, warning that killer robots could start ethnic cleansings and an arms race.

     “They will look like tanks. They will look like battleships. They will look like jet fighters,” UK robotics professor Noel Sharkey told CNET, a leading technology website.

    But unlike these machines, which require a human hand in their action, so-called “killer robots” would have some decision-making abilities and the ability to act on their own.

     “If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is almost inevitable,” said the letter released at the 2015 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

    The idea of an automated killing machine was made famous by Schwarzenegger's first Terminator movie in 1984. While no red-eyed robots have been sent after human beings, the idea of AI being used as a weapon has gotten much more likely in the years ever since. The US military is already developing autonomous flying vehicles that can carry out all the steps of a strike mission without a human controlling them, according to a May report in Nature magazine.

    Scientists have even painted a destructive picture of autonomous weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or warlords hoping to carry out ethnic cleansings.

     “The development of full artificial intelligence could lead to the end of the human race,” Hawking said to the BBC in 2016.

Authorities are gradually waking up to the risk of robot wars. Last May, for the first time, the United Nations brought governments together to begin talks on autonomous weapons systems.

    Still, a ban on autonomous weapons is “easier said than done”, commented The Guardian. The dual (双重的) uses of the AI technology—for harm and for good—is difficult to manage. This is because the exact same technology can be used in a wide range of ways, the paper said.

Noticeboard

    For centuries, dolphins have got our admiration, and it is easy to see why. They are beautiful, cute and smart sea animals. Dolphins are not fish, but warm-blooded animals. They live in groups, and speak to each other in their own language. In this way, they are like other animals, such as bees and birds. But dolphins are very different from almost all land animals. It is said that dolphins are the world's second brightest creatures after humans and have many brain features related to intelligence. Their brain is nearly the same size as our own, and they live a long time at least twenty or thirty years.

    Like some animals, dolphins use sound to help them find their way around. They also make these sounds to talk to each other and to help them find food. We now know they do not use their ears to receive these sounds, but the lower part of the mouth, called the jaw.

    Strangely, dolphins seem to like man, and for thousands of years there have been stories about the dolphin and its friendship with people.

    There is a story about sailors in the 19th century. In a dangerous part of the sea off the coast of New Zealand, they learnt to look for a dolphin called Jack. From 1871 to 1903, Jack met every boat in the area and showed it the way. Then in 1903 a passenger on a boat called The Penguin shot and wounded Jack. He recovered and for nine years more continued to guide all ships through the area－except for The Penguin.

    Today, some people continue to kill dolphins, but many countries of the world now protect them and in these places it is against the law to kill them.

    Life can be so wonderful, full of adventure and joy. It can also be full of challenges, setbacks and heartbreaks. Whatever our circumstances, we generally still have dreams, hopes and desires —that little something more we want for ourselves and our loved ones. Yet knowing we can have more can also create a problem, because when we go to change the way we do things, up come the old patterns and pitfalls that stopped us from seeking what we wanted in the first place.

    This tension between what we feel we can have and "what were seemingly able to have is the niggling suffering, the anxiety we feel. This is where we usually think it's easier to just give up. But we're never meant to let go of the part of us that knows we can have more. The intelligence behind that knowing is us—the real us. It's the part that believes in life and its possibilities. If you drop that, you begin to feel a little "dead" inside because you're dropping "you".

    So, if we have this capability but somehow life seems to keep us stuck, how do we break these patterns?

    Decide on a new course and make one decision at a time. This is good advice for a new adventure or just getting through today's challenges.

    While, deep down, we know we can do it, our mind—or the minds of those close to us—usually says we can't.

    That isn't a reason to stop, it's just the mind, that little man or woman on your shoulder, trying to talk you out of something again. It has done it many times before. It's all about starting simple and doing it now.

    Decide and act before over-thinking. When you do this you may feel a little, or large, release from the jail of your mind and you'll be on your way.

    Have you ever found yourself in this situation: You hear a song you used to sing when you were a child — a bit of nostalgia (怀旧) or “blast from the past,” as we say. But it is not a distant childhood memory. The words come back to you as clearly as when you sang them all those years ago.

    Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied the relationship between music and remembering a foreign language. They found that remembering words in a song was the best way to remember even one of the most difficult languages.

    Here is what they did. Researchers took 60 adults and randomly divided them into three groups of 20. Then they gave the groups three different types of “listen-and-repeat” learning conditions. Researchers had one group simply speak the words. They had the second group speak the words to a rhythm, or beat. And they asked the third group to sing the words.

    All three groups studied words from the Hungarian language for 15 minutes. Then they took part in a series of language tests to see what they remembered.

    Why Hungarian, you ask? Researchers said they chose Hungarian because not many people know the language. It does not share any roots with Germanic or Romance languages, such as Italian or Spanish. After the tests were over, the singers came out on top. The people who learned these new Hungarian words by singing them showed a higher overall performance. They did the best in four out of five of the tests. They also performed two times better than those who simply learned the words by speaking them.

    Dr. Katie Overy says singing could lead to new ways to learn a foreign language. The brain likes to remember things when they are contained in a catchy or memorable tune.

    Dr. Ludke said the findings could help those who struggle to learn foreign languages. On the University of Edinburgh's website Dr. Ludke writes, “This study provides the first experimental evidence that a listen-and-repeat singing method can support foreign language learning, and opens the door for future research in this area.”