Better think twice before choosing a password for e-mail, online bank or shopping. Simple passwords are easy to be stolen.

A password is like a key to your home. If someone steals it, he'll get chances to steal something else. We use passwords everywhere in our life. We are so used to passwords that we don't pay any attention to them until we lose or forget one.
A study of 28,000 passwords recently stolen from a popular website showed that people often do the easy thing. It found that 16 percent took a first name as a password. Another 14 percent used the easiest keyboard combinations such as “12345678” or QWERTY. Five percent of the stolen passwords were names of television shows or stars popular with young people. Three percent of the passwords expressed feelings like “I don't care,” “Whatever,” “I love you,” or their opposite, “I hate you.”
Robert Graham, who did the study, advises people to choose a password that is longer than eight characters with one capital letter(大写字母) and one symbol.
Of course, safe passwords don't mean those hard to remember. Forgetting your password is sometimes a big headache for you. Maybe, the perfect password is easy for you and hard for others.

    You may get the idea once or twice a year. You come home on a hot summer day, hoping to have a cool bath, and find out there is no water. Then you see how important water is in your everyday life. However, in many parts of the world, water is not just about one's everyday needs.

    In countries like Tanzania, water is hard to get, and the job of collecting water falls on women's shoulders. Girls are often kept home from school to collect water while their brothers stay at school studying. More time spent collecting water means less time for learning. For these girls, "Knowledge is power" is not just words; it is a sad fact in real life. With less time spent at school, their chances of getting well-paid jobs are small. And they often have no voice in important matters, like who to marry. These girls are often married into poor families. They have little money or knowledge to take care of their children, so the children often die young. For the baby girls who are lucky enough to live, their life may still center around "water," just like it did for their mothers.

    Artificial intelligence (AI, 人工智能) can help us make phone calls. It can guide us to where we want to go. It can play games. And now, AI can do even more things.

    Researchers from Microsoft have created the first machine translation system that can translate news articles from Chinese to English, Business Standard reported.

    According to Microsoft's official website, researchers tested the system by asking it to translate hundreds of sentences taken from news stories. Then, language experts compared the results to two translations that were done by humans. The experts concluded that the system's translations were as good as the human translations.

    Machine translation is always challenging. This is partly because different words can be used to express the same meaning. It can be hard to say which word is more “correct”.

    Experts used several methods to improve the system's translation abilities. “Much of our research is really inspired (得到启发) by how we humans do things,” lead researcher Liu Tieyan said.

    One method is called dual learning. In this method, the system translates every sentence from Chinese to English, as well as translates the sentences back from English into Chinese. This way, the system can improve itself and learn from its own mistakes. This is similar to what humans do to make sure their translations are accurate (准确的).

    Another method makes use of deliberation networks . The researchers taught the system to repeat the process of translating the same sentence over and over. Gradually, the system can improve the quality of its translations. This is similar to how people revise their own writing by going through it again and again.

    Thanks to software like Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana, it's easier than ever to do something on our phone or computer. All we have to do is "talk", and our favorite song starts playing a few seconds later. But in the neat" future, asking our phone to play a song by using our voice will seem as old--fashioned. That's because US tech company Microsoft recently applied for a patent* for a "brain control interface"(BCI): meaning that soon, we may be able to control our phone and computer with our thoughts.

    BCI technology works by changing brain signals into computer commands. This technology isn't brand new, however. Last year, for example, it was reported that scientists were able to help a disabled man from the US, 53-year-old Bill Kochevar, to move again. To do this, Kochevar was fitted with BCI technology, as well as equipment to make his muscles move. After a few weeks of getting used to it, Kochevar was able to use his thoughts to "tell" the BCI to move his muscles, meaning he was able to feed himself for the first time in years.

    Apart from helping disabled people, it's hoped that BCI technology will improve the daily lives of other people too. US social networking platform Facebook announced last year that it was working off BCI technology to help people type by using their brain. By 2020, the company hopes to have created a system that will allow people to type up to 100 words per minute just by thinking about them.

    However, many people are worried that technology that tan read our thoughts will create privacy problems, especially if social media companies are included. But Facebook researcher Regina Dugan said at a meeting last year that the company has no interest in reading people's private thoughts. "That might be more than any of us care to "know. And it's not something any of us should have a right to know," she said.

    Once people thought that dinosaurs were brown or gray in colour, but the answer is to be found out. After examining the remains of a dinosaur, scientists say the colour of the feathers is bright. American and Chinese scientists rebuilt the feathers of a flightless(不能飞的)dinosaur

that lived about 150 million years ago, and researchers studied melanosomes(黑素体)in the feathers. The researchers compared them to the melanosomes that control the colour of feathers on modern birds. They were then able to make out the colours of dinosaurs' feathers. Richard Prum, a biologist(生物学家)at Yale University, said the dinosaur would be a beautiful creature if it were still alive. The discovery is useful to scientists in another way. It helps them better understand not only how dinosaurs looked but also how they lived in their daily life. Some researchers plan to use this way to study the colours of other feathered dinosaurs.