When a leafy plant is under attack ，it doesn't sit quietly. Back in 1983, two scientists, Jack Schultz and Ian Baldwin,reported that young maple trees getting bitten by insects send out a particular smell that neighboring plants can get. These chemicals come from the injured parts of the plant and seem to be an alarm.What the plants pump through the air is a mixture of chemicals known as volatile organic compounds,VOCs for short.

Scientists have found that all kinds of plants give out VOCs when being attacked .It's a plant's way of crying out.But is anyone listening?Apparently.Because we can watch the neighbours react.

    Some plants pump out smelly chemicals to keep insects away.But others do double duty .They pump out perfumes designed to attract different insects who are natural enemies to the attackers. Once they arrive, the tables are turned. The attacker who was lunching now becomes lunch.

    In study after study,it appears that these chemical conversations help the neighbors .The damage is usually more serious on the first plant,but the neighbors ,relatively speaking ,stay safer because they heard the alarm and knew what to do.

Does this mean that plants talk to each other? Scientists don't know. Maybe the first plant just made a cry of pain or was sending a message to its own branches, and so, in effect, was talking to itself. Perhaps the neighbors just happened to “overhear” the cry. So information was exchanged, but it wasn't a true, intentional back and forth.

    Charles Darwin, over 150 years ago, imagined a world far busier, noisier and more intimate(亲密的) than the world we can see and hear. Our senses are weak. There's a whole lot going on.

    In the movie Alice in Wonderland, Alice comes across a Cheshire cat and asks the cat which road she should take. The cat responds, “Well, that depends on where you're trying to get to.” Alice replies, “I don't know.” The cat responds, “Then any road will do.”

    You see, knowing where you're going increases your chances dramatically of getting there, and there is no better way of “GETTING THERE” than setting your goals for the upcoming year. Think of your goals as destinations and the action steps as your GPS guiding and directing you. If you are like many other people, for years you have resisted the need to set goals and even laughed at the thought that setting goals and, even more importantly, committing them to writing have positive effects on your life. However, a closer look might convince you that setting goals is a sensible thing to do.

    In 1979, a class of Harvard MBA students was asked: Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made an action plan to accomplish them? The following will astonish you. Only 3 percent of the class had written goals and a plan in place, 13% just had goals, and an amazing 84% had no specific goals at all.

    Ten years later the numbers of the class were interviewed once again and the following results will no doubt give the reason for our setting goals. The findings were that the 13% who had goals were earning, on average, twice as much as the 84% who had no goals at all. And the 3 percent who had clear, written goals with a plan to achieve them were achieving ten times as much as the entire 97% combined.

    Goal setting will increase your chances of arriving successfully at your destination. Remember, always set SMART goals. Goals should be: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound!

    Program fools humans

    Have you ever been so bored that you started a conversation with a “chatbot (聊天机器人)”? You probably discovered quickly that it wasn't much fun, because the things it says hardly ever make any sense and chatting with it doesn't provide the same kind of back-and-forth as a human conversation.

    That might have made you wonder: will a computer ever be able to talk like a human?

    That day is certainly getting closer now. A computer program named “Eugene Goostman” has successfully passed the Turing test – by fooling people into thinking it was a 13-year-old boy, reported AFP on June 9.

    While you may have never heard of the Turing test, it means a lot in the world of artificial (人工的) intelligence.

    According to USA Today, the test was first invented in 1950 by Alan Turing, a British computer expert best known for his code-breaking work during World War II. In his test, a group of human judges take turns having keyboard conversations for five minutes with two subjects – a human and a piece of computer software. If up to 30 percent of the judges fail to tell the two apart, the program is considered to have passed the test.

“If a machine is indistinguishable (无法区分的) from a human, then it could be said to be ‘thinking',” wrote Turing in his paper Computing, Machinery & Intelligence back in 1950.

    No computer had ever passed the Turing test before. But this time, Eugene Goostman, developed by two Russian scientists to simulate (模拟) a 13-year-old boy, managed to convince 33 percent of judges that it was human.

    Machines are close to “reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way that we are comfortable with”, Professor Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading, UK, told The Telegraph. “This brings closer the time in which robots start to play an active role in our daily lives.”

    Some people feel a bit disturbed by the news. They worry that computers will outsmart humans in the near future and take over the world. But Warwick said that it is unlikely that this will happen any time soon. After all, computers have only just learned to have a five-minute conversation, while we humans can do so much more than that.

    Having a smart phone may not be as smart as you think. They may let you surf the Internet, listen to music and take photos wherever you are…but they also turn you into a workaholic（工作狂）,it seems.

    A study suggests that, by giving you access to emails at all times, the smart phone adds as much as two hours to your working day. Experts found that British people work an additional 460 hours a year on average as they are able to respond to emails on their mobiles. The study shows the average UK working day is between 9 and 10 hours, but 2 more hours is spent responding to or sending work emails, or making work calls.

    Almost one in ten admits spending up to three hours outside their normal working day checking work emails. Some workers say they are on call almost 24 hours a day. Nearly two-thirds say they often check work emails just before they go to bed and as soon as they wake up, while over a third have replied to one in the middle of the night. The average time for first checking emails is between 6 a.m and 7 a.m, with more than a third checking their first email in the period, and a quarter checking them between 11 p.m.and midnight.

    Ghadi Hobeika, marketing director of Pixmania, said: “The ability to access millions of Apps has made smart phone invaluable for many people. However, there are disadvantages. Many companies expect their employees to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and smart phones mean that people cannot get away from work. The more frequently in contact we become, the more is expected of us in a work capacity.”

    A latest research led by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has found a clear link between the color of a taxi and its accident rate. An analysis of 36 months of detailed taxi, driver and accident data from two fleets of yellow and blue taxis in Singapore suggested that yellow taxis have fewer accidents than blue taxis. The higher visibility of yellow makes it less difficult for drivers to avoid getting into accidents with yellow taxis, leading to a lower accident rate.

    The study was led by Prof Hou. To test whether there was a relationship between the color of a taxi and the number of accidents the taxi had, the research team analyzed data collected by the largest taxi company in Singapore. The researchers found that yellow taxis have about 6.1 fewer accidents per 1,000 taxis per month.

    They also studied the economic effect of changing the color of the entire fleet of taxis to yellow. The Singapore taxi company involved in the study owns about 16,700 taxis in a ratio (比例) of one yellow to three blue taxis. If a commercial decision is made to switch from blue to yellow taxis, 76.6 fewer accidents will occur per month or 917 fewer accidents per year.

    Assuming an average repair cost of $1,000 per car and a downtime of six days, the color of all taxis to yellow could produce an annual saving of $2 million.

    "We are eager to continue to validate(证实) the findings of our study by looking at the use of yellow in other types of public transport, such as school buses. For example, we hope to compare the accident rates of yellow school buses against those of other colors to find out if yellow is indeed a safer color for school buses. Besides, we're also interested to look at private-hire vehicles and do a comparison of the accident rates of vehicles that are of different colors, "explained Prof Hou.

    My first introduction to Chinese art was an early morning walk in Beihai Park in Beijing. There, I saw elderly people writing on the pavement with paintbrushes which were a metre long! I soon learned that they were doing water calligraphy − writing in water. The words have meanings, but they are also art. The calligraphy quickly disappears, of course. But tomorrow, the old people will be back.

    Temporary art like this is very popular in China. Every winter, Harbin, in northern China, is visited by sculptors and tourists from around the world. They come for the Harbin Ice Festival, when the city has huge sculptures made out of ice. The sculptures are bigger than houses, and they take weeks to make. Harbin's freezing winter temperatures make it very difficult for the artists to work outside. But the weather also means that the sculptures will be protected until the spring.

    Of course, not all Chinese art is temporary − some of it has been around for a very long time! Near the city of Xi'an, I visited the amazing terracotta warriors, or soldiers. In 200 BC, 8,000 statues of soldiers were made by sculptors out of a material called terracotta. They are as big as real people and they all have different faces. An important king had the statues produced to protect his body after he died. They stayed under the ground with the dead king for over 2,000 years, until they were discovered by a farmer in 1974.

    At the China Art Museum, in Shanghai, I saw wonderful 16th-century Chinese paintings of tall mountains, trees and cliffs. The paintings were beautiful, but they didn't look very realistic to me at the time. 'Mountains aren't like that,' I thought. But that was before the last stop on my trip: the mountains of Zhangjiajie National Park.

    These mountains were used by film director James Cameron in his sci-fi film Avatar because they look like something from another planet. On my last weekend in China, I took a cable car up into the mountains there. Trees grew on the sides of hundred-metre cliffs, and strange towers of rock appeared out of the morning fog. It looked just like the pictures in the China Art Museum. For a moment, I felt like I was inside a Chinese painting!