A chip inserted in a young quadriplegic's (四肢麻痹患者) brain is already improving his quality of life. Soon the benefits may be more widespread.

    A 25-year-old man unable to move from the neck down recently did what many assumed impossible. After a knife attack that had left him paralyzed, all he could move was his head, which he used to push a switch and call for a nurse. And he could turn his wheelchair by blowing into a straw near his face. That was it.

    Then last June, a Foxborough (Mass.) company called Cyber Kinetics opened the man's skull and inserted a special chip no larger than a baby aspirin. That insert has given him a few additional and precious abilities. When connected to a special computer via a cable, the chip translates the young man's thoughts into commands that let him move a cursor across a PC screen and open e-mail. He can draw a circle with a computer painting program. And he can use a robotic hook(钩) to perform simple tasks like picking up a candy and sliding it across a table.

    All he has to do is to think.

    Several new studies have begun or been completed in the past year. In fact, more than half of the scientific papers in this field, called brain-to-computer interaction (BCI), have been published in the past two years, notes Jonathan Wolpaw, a research physician at Wadsworth Center, the New York State Health Dept.'s research laboratory.

    Brain surgeries (手术) are no longer rare: Thousands of Parkinson's disease patients have had special devices inserted in their brains to ease uncontrollable shaking and other symptoms. The inserts themselves have improved, so the body doesn't reject them as furiously(猛烈地). And significant development has been achieved in software used to interpret the brain's signals and change them into commands understood by computers.

    But increased demand for thought technology remains the biggest reason for the field's progress. Today, 4 million Americans live with paralysis according to the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.

    Scientists hope that thought technology will reduce the impact of such disabilities. People with spinal-cord injuries, for example, often lose their ability to walk because the communications network between their brain and their legs has been interrupted. The brain still commands the leg muscles to move, but they don't hear its orders.

    Thought technology, scientists hope, will bridge this communications gap. "Our goal is for you to see paralyzed people eating at a restaurant and for you not to know that they are paralyzed," says John Donoghue, founder and chief scientific officer at Cyber Kinetics.

    Childhood is a happy time, right? Not necessarily. Consider these facts.

Depression(抑郁症) may occur in as many as 1 in 33 children.

    Once a child has an episode of depression, he or she has a 50 percent chance of experiencing another episode in the next 5 years.

    Suicide(自杀) is the 6th leading cause of death for 5-to-15-year-olds.

    If your child experiences 5 or more of these signs or symptoms for at least 2 weeks, he or she may be experiencing depression or mental illness.

    Sometimes, a child who causes problems at school or at home may actually be depressed, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

    If you think your child may be depressed, it's important to have your child treated. Discuss your child's problems with his or her doctor. The doctor may suggest a referral to a children's psychologist or psychiatrist.

    The year is 2094. It has been announced that a comet (彗星) is heading towards the Earth. Most of it will miss our planet, but two pieces will probably hit the southern half of the Earth.

    On 17 July, a piece four kilometers wide enters the Earth's atmosphere with a massive explosion. About half of the piece is destroyed, but the remaining part hits the South Atlantic at 200 times the speed of sound. The sea boils and a huge hole is made in the sea bed.  Huge waves are created and spread outwards from the hole. The wall of water, a kilometer high, rushes towards southern Africa at 800 kilometers an hour. Cities on the African coast are totally destroyed and millions of people are drowned.

    Before the waves reach South America, the second piece of the comet lands in Argentina. Earthquakes and volcanoes are set off in the Andes Mountains. The shock waves move north into California and all around the Pacific Ocean. The cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Tokyo are completely destroyed by earthquakes. Millions of people in the southern half of the earth are already dead, but the north won't escape for long. Because of the explosions, the sun is hidden by clouds of dust, temperatures around the world fall to almost zero. Crops are ruined. The sun won't be seen again for many years. Wars break out as countries fight for food. A year later, no more than 10 million people remain alive.

    Could it really happen? In fact, it has already happened more than once in the history of the Earth. The dinosaurs were on the Earth for over 160 million years. Then 65 million years ago they suddenly disappeared. Many scientists believe that the Earth was hit by a piece of object in space. The dinosaurs couldn't live through the cold climate that followed and they died out. Will we meet the same end?

    If you want to become a fluent English speaker you should take some advice. There are four skills in learning English. They are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The most important thing you must remember is that if you want to improve your speaking and writing skills, you should first master the skills of reading and listening.

    Read as much as you can. But your reading must be active. It means that you must think about the meaning of the sentence, the meaning of the unfamiliar words, etc. There is no need for you to pay much attention to grammars or try to understand all the unfamiliar words you come across, but the fact that you see them for the first time and recognize them whenever you see them, for example, in other passages or books, is enough. It would be better to prepare yourself a notebook so you can write down the important words or sentences in it.

    As for listening, there are two choices: besides reading, you can listen every day for about 30 minutes. You can only pay attention to your reading and become skillful at your reading, then you can catch up on your listening. Since you have lots of inputs in your mind, you can easily guess what the speaker is going to say. This never means that you should not practice listening. For listening you can listen to cartoons or some movies that are specially made for children. Their languages are easy. Or if you are good at listening you can listen to VOA or BBC programs every day. Again the thing to remember is being active in listening and preferably taking some notes.

    If you follow these pieces of advice, your speaking and writing will improve quickly, and you can be a fluent English speaker one day.

Dear Sir,

    There is a plan to build a new supermarket on the edge of the Whitefields housing estate(住宅区), on the land where the local library now is. I live at Whitefields, and I would like to express my concern about this plan. It is not that I am completely against the idea of building a supermarket—I just think that as a community we need to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages before committing ourselves.

    It is clear that the library is under-used and in poor condition. It is also clear that there are very few shops near here and a supermarket would be a good thing to have. But the people who want to build the supermarket seem to think that no one wants the library any more, and that it isn't a must because of the Internet and so on. Is this necessarily true, especially for elderly people? What about young people who don't have the Internet at home and need to go to the library to do their homework? Where can they study if they have to share a room with a younger brother or sister?

    On the other hand, there is an argument that a new supermarket would not only bring more choice of shopping and more convenience for local people, but it would also bring some much-needed jobs for younger people in the town—and this is a good point. What we need to do is consider the effect a supermarket will have on our quality of life. Certainly local people, including me, will find shopping a lot easier and more convenient. But there will also be extra traffic. In a few years from now, the roads in and around will be full of cars in the daytime and delivery lorries at night, and not only that—we will have got used to it, too. Are more jobs and more convenience worth such an influence on our daily lives? Perhaps, but this is what we have to ask ourselves.

    I believe that all the people of Whitefields, and the authority, need to discuss this question in an open-minded way—and I hope that by the time a decision is taken, we will have had a full and fair discussion of the issues involved, and that the local authority will have really listened to everyone's view. Is that too much to ask?

Yours faithfully,

Tom Watkins

Video calls are a common occurrence, but have you imagined being able to touch the person on the other end of the line? Scientists are making this a reality.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales, Australia, have invented a soft skin stretch device (SSD), a haptic device that can recreate the sense of touch. Haptic technology can mimic the experience of touch by stimulating localized areas of the skin in ways that are similar to what is felt in the real world, through force, vibration or motion.

Vibration is the most common haptic technology today and has been built into many electronic devices, such as one attached to the back of a trackpad in laptops. However, haptic feedback with vibration becomes less sensitive when used continuously. The existing technology also has great difficulty recreating the sense of touch with objects in virtual environments or located remotely.

The new technology overcomes issues with existing haptic devices. The research team introduced a novel method to recreate the sense of touch through soft, artificial "muscles".

It works like this: imagine you call a friend in Australia. You wear a haptic glove with the SSDs and your friend also wears a glove with 3D force sensors. If your friend picks up an object, it will physically press against your friend's fingers. And the glove with 3D force sensors will measure these interactions. The force signals can be sent to your glove so your device will generate the same 3D forces, making you experience the same sense of touch as your friend.

The haptic devices could be used in various fields, allowing users to feel objects inside a virtual world or at a distance. This could be especially beneficial during such times like the COVID-19 pandemic when people rely on video calls to stay connected with loved ones. Or it could be used in medical practices. Doctors can feel a patient's organ tissues without touching them.