C

    After a long day's study at school, you are very tired. So after school you go home to relax. When you get home, a robot greets you. He's happy to see you and helps you take your school things to your room. He listens to you talk about your school life and tells you a new joke. And he tells you to call your cousin and to say happy birthday. And then he helps you with your homework.

    This is your future, and the robot's name is NAO. NAO has a small body, big eyes and a large head. He can walk and dance. He listens and talks, and he even learns and thinks for himself. His creators(创造者) predict that the robot will be in people's homes before 2040.

    This $16,000 robot knows who you are. NAO can even express emotions(表达情感). He is a self-guided robot. A self-guided robot can sense(感觉), think and act. Other robots might do two out of the three. For example, a robot might sense things using cameras and think using computers, but with no arms, he can't act. Another robot can move and sense things, but he can't think for himself. These aren't self-guided robots. But NAO can do them all.

C

    This year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine is from Japan. According to his research, cells (细胞) sometimes "eat" themselves to keep healthy. In other words, cells can break down old ones and use the useful parts to make new cells, or to fight off viruses (病毒). This new finding could help scientists fight many diseases.

Small machines

    Three scientists from France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands (荷兰) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on small machines. How small? Well, they are a thousand times thinner than a strand (缕) of hair. We can't see them with only our eyes! This technology will open a whole new world for us. For example, we could make very small robots in the future. A doctor could put them into our body. Like policemen, the robots look for the ill parts in our body, and send the medicine right there.

Super-state

As teachers said in your physics class, most things in the world are in three states: solids (固体), liquids (液体) and gases . But at very low or high temperatures, things can turn into a strange state. For example, break down things to their smallest pieces and we get "atoms" (原子). Like Lego building blocks, atoms usually add up to become a 3-D thing, like a box. But atoms in the strange state don't. They stay together and become a flat thing, like a piece of paper.

    This is a new finding of three British-born scientists. And they won the Nobel Prize in Physics this year. They hope to use things in this strange state to make new materials.

About the Prize

    The Nobel Prize was started by Swedish inventor, Alfred Nobel in 1895. It gives prizes to great science research and the people behind it. Every year in October, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decides who wins. It includes six prizes: chemistry, physics, physiology (生理学) or medicine, peace, literature (文学) and economic. This year each winner gets a medal and prize money of more than 6 million yuan.

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    Thousands of years ago, people couldn't live for long. Most people only lived to be twenty-five or thirty years old. 20% of people died before they were twelvemonths old and another 30% could not live to be five years old.

    Today, people can live much longer. One reason is that the water we drink is cleaner. Clean water does not cause diseases（疾病）. Besides, medical treatment is better today. More and more people live to be over eighty.

    Women often live longer than men. For example, in Japan, women usually can live to be eighty-five, but men can only live to be eighty.

    In the future, people will probably live longer than today. Here are many things we can do to help people live longer. For example, we can make sure that everyone has enough medicine to fight against diseases. Also, it is necessary for everyone to have enough to eat. Today many people die because they do not have enough food.

    Welcome to the 26^th century! Cyborg technology is a way of life. People with human brains and artificial (人造的) bodies are everywhere.

    This is the future world shown in the film Alita: Battle Angel.US director James Cameron made the film. The movie came out in the Chinese mainland theaters on Feb 22.

    The story is based on Japanese manga artist Yukito Kishiro's popular manga series of the same name. The main character, a cyborg, is a girl named Alita.

    One day, she wakes up in wreckage and finds that she has lost her memory. Luckily, a doctor saves her. As she starts her new life, Alita finds she has superhuman abilities. She decides to find the truth behind her origin. She started a journey that leads her through a dark world.

    In Cameron's own words, the movie is "not like any of the films that I've done before". Its visual effects are especially impressive. The film's actors used the latest motion-capture (动作捕捉) technology. They wore special suits that record their movements. Later, motion-capture editors use these movements to make special effects. Rosa Salaza plays Alita. She wore a suit with more than 7, 000 pieces and layers. It can capture human movement. The model that was used for her face was changed nearly 5, 000 times to make it more lifelike.

    We sometimes call the lion "the king of the forest", because it is stronger and more dangerous than other animals. It can 1 faster than many animals and hunt the best. It is the highest animal in the 2 food chain.

    In the sea, the shark is one of the animals at the top of the food chain. It can swim faster than 3 other sea animals, and it can use its big teeth to eat them.

    What is at the top of the world's food chain? People are! We are not the biggest or fastest, but we are the 4. We could not run faster than cheetahs(猎豹), so we 5 cars and now we can move the fastest. We could not fight better than lions, so we invented guns. Now we can hunt the best.

    People's inventions are clever, but they can be 6, too. For example, people built 7, and now they make the air and rivers dirty. This can make terrible changes. Dirty rivers kill fish. 8 bears cannot eat the fish. If we kill one part of the food chain, other parts also will die. Remember that we are a part of the food chain, 9 we are in danger, too! If we protect animals, we are protecting 10! We could and we should do something for the world!

    A black hole is a place in outer space with very strong gravity. Gravity is a great force(力量) that shapes the universe. On Earth, gravity makes apples fall from trees. It keeps your feet planted on the ground. The gravity in a black hole is much stronger. It is so strong that nothing around it can get away from it, not even light.

    Black holes are invisible. We can't actually see them because they don't throw back light. But scientists can find them with space telescopes(望远镜)and special tools. The strong gravity makes nearby stars move in a certain way. By studying how the stars move, scientists can find out if they are flying around a black hole. Strange things happen around black holes. This makes black holes a popular subject of science fiction(科幻)stories, although they are very real.

    A black hole forms when a star dies. The star falls in on itself and turns into a very small point. Because of its small size and huge mass(质量), the gravity will be so strong that it will pull light in and become a black hole. Black holes can grow huge as they continue to pull other things in and "eat" them. Many scientists believe that there are super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, including the Milky Way.

    The idea of the black hole was first suggested by two different scientists in the 18th century: John Michelle and Pierre-Simon Laplace. In 1967, a physicist named John Archibald Wheeler came up with the name “black hole". Studying black holes can tell us many things about our galaxy and help scientists answer questions about the universe.