Self-driving vehicles have been proposed as a solution for the rapidly increasing number of fatal traffic accidents, which now cause 1.3 million deaths each year.

    While we have made great progress in advancing self-driving technology, we have yet to explore how autonomous vehicles will be programmed to deal with situations that endanger human life, according to a new study published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

    To understand how self-driving cars might make these judgments, the researchers looked at how humans deal with similar driving dilemmas.

    When faced with driving dilemmas, people show a high willingness to sacrifice themselves for others, make decisions based on the victim's age and turn onto sidewalks to minimize the number of lives lost. Ethical（伦理的）guidelines tend to disagree with human instincts（本能） in this case, saying that no life should be valued above another.

    “The technological advancement and adoption of autonomous vehicles are moving quickly but the social and ethical discussions about their behavior are lagging behind,” says lead author Lasse T. Bergmann from University of Osnabrück, Germany.

    Automated vehicles will eventually outperform their human counterparts, but there will still be circumstances where the cars must make an ethical decision to save or possibly risk losing a human life.

    The study is especially relevant considering earlier this year a self-driving Uber car struck and killed a passenger in Arizona, in an incident widely regarded as the first death resulting from an autonomous vehicle.

    An ethics commission launched by the German Ministry for Transportation has created a set of guidelines, representing its members' best judgement on a variety of issues concerning self-driving cars. These expert judgments may, however, not reflect human instinct.

    Bergmann and colleagues developed a virtual reality experiment to examine human instinct in a variety of possible driving situations. It was based on the well-known ethical thought experiment—the trolley problem.

    In this experiment, there is a trolley running down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up, unable to move, and the trolley is headed straight for them. A person is standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever（操作杆）.If he pulls this lever, the trolley will turn to a different set of tracks. However, there is one person tied up on the side track. Does the person choose to pull the lever and kill one person, or do nothing and let five people die?

    Bergmann recognized that the majority of people would not approve of the proposal made by the ethics commission that a passenger in the vehicle should not be sacrificed to save more people. “We find people chose to save more lives, even if this involves turning onto the sidewalk, endangering people uninvolved in the traffic incident,” said Bergmann, “Furthermore, subjects considered the factor of age, for example, choosing to save children over the elderly.” He also realized further discussion and research were needed. “Driving requires a complex weighing of risks versus rewards, for example, speed versus the danger of a critical situation,” Bergmann explained.

    With the development of science and technology, people find it increasingly difficult to keep pace with the most fashionable smart phones in the world, especially when smart phones are connected with robots. If any robot can take over the world, it's RoBohon. He has all the information you put in your smart phone and can read human feelings. So everyone probably wants to own the cutest smart robot phone.

    RoBohon is very useful. He can project photographs and films, tell you he loves you if he senses you are crying and do everything your smart phone can do.

    RoBohon was created by Japanese electronics company SHARP. The robot phone, with a 2-inch screen fitted into its back, stands 20cm tall and weighs 390 grams. Most surprisingly, he can walk on his own legs around your home and act as a super cute personal assistant. He can even dance. He reads your text messages, announces phone calls, dries your tears and wakes you up. He can even recognize your face and call your name when you enter the room. He will be always at your side keeping you company and providing you with great comfort.

    RoBohon can also serve as an alarm clock. The robot can be a wonderful partner in a small conversation. Though he is expensive, more than double the price of iPhone, who wouldn't want a small personal assistant?

    In the depths of the French Guianese rainforest, there still remain unusual groups of (土著的）people. Surprisingly, these people live largely by their own Laws and their own social customs. And yet, people in this area are in fact French citizens because it has been a colony of the French Republic since 1946. In theory，they should live by the French law. However, their remote locations mean that the French law is often ignored or unknown, thus making them into an interesting area of “lawlessness” in the world.

    The lives of these people have finally been recorded thanks to the effects of a Frenchman form Paris called Gin. Gin spent five months in early 2015 exploring the most remote comers of thin area, which sits on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, with half its population of only 250,000 living in its capital, Cayenne.

    “I have a special love for the French Guianese people. I have worked there on and off for almost ten years," says Gin. "I've been able to keep firm friendships with them. Thus I have been allowed to gain access to their living environment. I don't see it as a lawless Und. But rather I Me it as an area of freedom."

    “I wanted to show the audience a photographic record touching upon the uncivilized life," continues Gin. “I prefer to work in black and white, which allows me to show different specific worlds more clearly.”

    His black-and-white pictures present a world almost lost in time. These pictures show people seemingly pushed into a world that they were unprepared for. These local citizens now have to balance their traditional self-supporting hunting lifestyle with the lifestyle offered by the modern French Republic, which bring with it not only necessary state welfare, but also alcoholism, betrayal and even suicide.

    Lucy, whose skeleton（骨骼） was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, died shortly after she fell out of a tree, according to a new study published Monday in the British journal Nature.

    For their research, Kappelman and Dr. Richard Ketcham used a CT scanner to create more than 35,000 "slices" of Lucy's skeleton. Scientists named her Lucy from the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was played at the camp the night of her discovery.

    The following analysis of the slices showed sharp, clean breaks seen at the end of Lucy's right humerus （肱骨） are similar to bone breaks seen in victims of falls.

    The researchers concluded that these and other breaks in her skeleton show that Lucy, who is believed to have stood about 3 feet 6 inches and weighed about 60 pounds, fell feet first and used her arms to support herself﹣but that the injury was too severe to have been survivable.

    The researchers estimate that Lucy was going about 35 miles an hour when she hit the ground after falling from a height of roughly 40 feet, according to the statement.

    That sounds plausible. But other scientists are doubtful. "There are countless explanations for bone breaks," Dr, Donald C, Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins and one of the scientists who discovered Lucy, said, "The suggestion that she fell out of a tree is largely a just﹣so story and therefore unprovable." Johanson said it was more likely that Lucy's breaks occurred long after she died, saying that "elephant bones appear to have the same kind of breaks, It's unlikely they fell out of a tree.

    But the new research focused on "a small number of breaks" that are consistent with "high﹣energy bone﹣to﹣bone influences" and which differ from the sorts of breaks commonly seen in other collected bones. Kappelman responded in an email, "These appear to have occurred at or near the time of death."

    Why do so many Americans distrust what they read in their newspapers? The American Society of Newspaper Editors is trying to answer this painful question. The organization is deep into a long self-analysis known as the journalism credibility project.

    Sad to say, this project has turned out to be mostly low-level findings about factual errors and spelling and grammar mistakes, combined with lots of head-scratching puzzlement about what in the world those readers really want.

    But the sources of distrust go way deeper. Most journalists learn to see the world through a set of standard patterns into which they report each day's events. In other words, there is a traditional story line in the newsroom culture that provides a backbone and a ready-made narrative structure for otherwise confusing news.

    There exists a social and cultural disconnect between journalists and their readers, which helps explain why the "standard patterns" of the newsroom seem foreign to many readers. In a recent survey, questionnaires were sent to reporters in five middle-size cities around the country, plus one large metropolitan area. Then residents in these communities were phoned at random and asked the same questions.

    Replies show that compared with other Americans, journalists are more likely to live in upscale neighborhoods, have maids, own Mercedeses, and trade stocks, and they're less likely to go to church, do volunteer work, or put down roots in a community.

    Reporters tend to be part of a broadly defined social and cultural elite (精英), so their work tends to reflect the traditional values of this elite. The alarming distrust of the news media isn't rooted in inaccuracy or poor reportorial skills but in the daily conflict of world views between reporters and their readers.

    This is an explosive situation for any industry, particularly a declining one. Here is a troubled business that keeps hiring employees whose attitudes vastly annoy the customers. Then it sponsors lots of symposiums (讨论会) and a credibility project devoted to wondering why customers are annoyed and fleeing in large numbers. But it never seems to get around to noticing the cultural and class prejudices that so many former buyers are complaining about. If it did, it would open up its diversity program, now focused narrowly on race and gender, and look for reporters who differ broadly by outlook, values, education, and class.

    There are many programs for high school students today that help isolated teenagers cope with loneliness. However, loneliness is not only an issue for teens but also an important and rarely acknowledged one in the elderly.

    In Britain, Tracey Crouch was appointed to be the first Minister of Loneliness in order to address the issues caused by loneliness. This is the first time such a position has been created.

    In Britain, there are around 9 million people who say they are lonely frequently. In Germany, a study conducted by Ruhr University Bochum found that 20 percent of people over the age of 85 felt lonely, and 14 percent of those between age 45 and 65 felt socially isolated. In the United States, more than 25 percent of the population lives alone, more than 50 percent are unmarried.

    Isolation is generally associated with cardiovascular disease, depression, obesity, and anxiety. Additionally, the stress from loneliness can cause your cells to change on a molecular(分子)level that reduces its abilities to defend your body against diseases. In fact, doctors believe having feelings of loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day in regard to its impact on health!

    In Britain, the new Minister of Loneliness will help establish government policies on the issue and fund charities to devote their efforts towards aiding loneliness. There are charities that link lonely seniors to high school students in order to give them a line of communication whenever they feel lonely!

    The possibilities for the new Minister of Loneliness are endless. For example, she can provide education services to household businesses so that they can identify lonely customers if they see one. Loneliness fits into the category of being a social issue that must be monitored by the entire community in order to help those in need. Hence, government involvement in medical services and care for seniors and others is essential for happy seniors.