C

    This month, Germany's transport minister, Alexander Dobrindt, proposed the first set of rules for autonomous vehicles(自主驾驶车辆). They would define the driver's role in such cars and govern how such cars perform in crashes where lives might be lost.

    The proposal attempts to deal with what some call the “death valley” of autonomous vehicles: the grey area between semi-autonomous and fully driverless cars that could delay the driverless future.

    Dobrindt wants three things: that a car always chooses property(财产) damage over personal injury; that it never distinguishes between humans based on age or race; and that if a human removes his or her hands from the driving wheel — to check email, say — the car's maker is responsible if there is a crash.

    “The change to the road traffic law will permit fully automatic driving,” says Dobrindt. It will put fully driverless cars on an equal legal footing to human drivers, he says.

    Who is responsible for the operation of such vehicles is not clear among car makers, consumers and lawyers. “The liability(法律责任) issue is the biggest one of them all,” says Natasha Merat at the University of Leeds, UK.

    An assumption behind UK insurance for driverless cars, introduced earlier this year, insists that a human “ be watchful and monitoring the road” at every moment.

    But that is not what many people have in mind when thinking of driverless cars. “When you say ‘driverless cars', people expect driverless cars.”Merat says. “You know — no driver.”

    Because of the confusion, Merat thinks some car makers will wait until vehicles can be fully automated without operation.

    Driverless cars may end up being a form of public transport rather than vehicles you own, says Ryan Calo at Stanford University, California. That is happening in the UK and Singapore, where government-provided driverless vehicles are being launched.

    That would go down poorly in the US, however. “The idea that the government would take over driverless cars and treat them as a public good would get absolutely nowhere here,” says Calo.

    “I would say, no matter what people tell you, anything can happen.” That's the message Internet singer Austin Mahone says at We Day, an event for young people in Canada.

    When he was 14，Austin and a friend began uploading pop songs to musical websites.“I was just doing it because we had nothing to do, living in a small town.”

    “I'd check different websites for the hottest songs, and I'd record my own videos,” he explains. “That's how people began to find me online.”His videos got millions of hits and he signed with a record company. The result was the release of Austin's first album, Junior Year. While it seems like a sudden rise for the teenager, Austin admits the early days were not always fun. He says a lot of people thought badly of him for posting his videos online. Yet this didn't put him off.“I kept working hard. ”And the hits on his videos kept coming.

    Austin's achievement and spirit make him a perfect fit for the message of We Day. After all, Free the Children, the creator of the event, was founded to “enable youth to make changes.” Even Austin's unusual rise by way of the Internet fits with the way Free The children works and raises money.

    Because of Austin, his four million followers will learn about Free the Children. While Austin's presence certainly helps We Day, it's good for him, too. Austin gets to show himself as someone who volunteers his time and talent for a worthy cause and show that he cares about making the world a better place.

    Given that many people 's moods(情绪)are regulated by the chemical action of chocolate, it was probably only a matter of time before somebody made the chocolate shop similar to a drugstore of Chinese medicine. Looking like a setting from the film Charlie& the Chocolate Factory, Singapore's Chocolate Research Facility (CRF) has over 100 varieties of chocolates. Its founder is Chris Lee who grew up at his parents' comer store with one hand almost always in the jar of sweets.

    If the CRF seems to be a smart idea, that's because Lee is not merely a seasoned salesperson but also head of a marketing department that has business relations with big names such as Levi's and Sony. That idea surely results in the imagination at work when it comes to making different flavored (味道)chocolates.

    The CRF's produce is “green” made within the country and divided into10 lines, with the Alcohol Series being the most popular. The Exotic Series—with Sichuan pepper, red bean (豆), cheese and other flavors also—does well and is fun to taste. And for chocolate snobs, who think that they have a better knowledge of chocolate than others, the Connoisseur Series uses cocoa beans from Togo, Cuba, Venezuela , and Ghana, among others.

    Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been making changes to my brain. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Involving myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. That's rarely the case any more.

    I think I know what's going on. For over a decade, I've been spending lots of time online. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes by a few Google searches. Even when I'm not working, I'm scanning headlines or just tripping from link to link.

The Net is becoming a universal medium where information flows through my eyes and ears and into mind. The perfect recall of silicon memory (硅制存储器) can be a blessing to thinking. But that comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall Mcluhan pointed out, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is weakening my ability for concentration. Once I was a driver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a flying swallow.

I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to acquaintances, Bruce Friedman, a blogger, also has described how the Internet has changed his mental habits. His thinking has taken on a "staccato (破碎)" quality. "I can't read War and Peace any more" he admitted, "I've lost the ability to do that."

A recently published study suggests that when reading online, we tend to become "more decoders (解码器) of information". We are not only what we read; we are how we read.

    Finding a mountain goat resting high on a cliff(悬崖) might thrill many of the millions of tourists who visit Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park every year, but park officials say it might be time for the bearded animals to go.

    The problem, according to the park, is that Grand Teton's 100 or so mountain goats threaten about 80 bighorn sheep. The bighorn sheep numbered as many as 125 just a few years ago. The strong goats spread disease and compete with bighorn sheep for food. Unlike small-sized bighorn sheep, Grand Teton's mountain goats aren't native to the park. They were introduced to the park in the 1960s.

    Grand Teton spokeswoman Denise Germann said, “We've got a management responsibility to protect the native species. After hearing from the public on the proposal (建议) in January, park officials expect to decide as soon as mid-February on what to do about the mountain goats.”

    The goats are reproducing rapidly. Now might be the best time to reduce the animals before they're too many to bring under control, according to the Park Service.

    One wildlife biologist who studies bighorn sheep praised the proposal. Mountain goats' original habitat is nowhere close to where they've been introduced in the U.S. to provide hunting opportunities, said Rob Roy Ramey II, with Nederland, Colorado-based Wildlife Science International, Inc.

    Wildlife managers should get rid of mountain goats not only in Grand Teton but elsewhere to help struggling bighorn sheep, Ramey said. “Unfortunately, state wildlife agencies sell nonnative wildlife viewing opportunities to the public,” Ramey said. “This is not a zoo in the wilderness. It should really be for native wildlife.”

    Don't we all know a "Happy Meal" when we see one—the famous boxed meal that includes a hamburger, kid-sized French fries, fruits and milk, served with a toy that's extremely popular with children who love to collect them?

    A Happy Meal is a form of kids' meal sold at a certain fast-food chain since 1979. A toy is included in the meal, both of which are usually contained in a box or paper bag. However, collectors of these little toys will not get them any longer, since the company will replace toys with books and each of these books will mainly pass on nutritional messages.

    Happy Meals are extremely popular with kids, especially for their collectable toys, when you consider that over 1.3 billion of these packages are sold each year. These packages have been very controversial. Health supporters believe that drawing kids to these meals with toys is clever way of promoting unhealthy food choices. They see it as an advertising strategy of "catching its customers young"—a move that has paid off very well for the fast-food company.

    Child development experts say that food habits get formed in children by age six and continue through to their adult life. Fatty and sugary foods such as those served in Happy Meals are believed to play a big role in growing health problems such as obesity and diabetes. Public health care costs have gone up and untold amounts of money have been spent on coping with these health problems. On November 2, 2010, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a law requiring that children's meals sold in restaurants must meet certain nutritional standards before they could be sold with toys, to overcome the problem of childhood obesity—in other words, the State of California tried to ban the toys in Happy Meals. However, it was strongly opposed by some as being heavy-handed, and the ban was thrown out by the government.

    While some people believe that the fast-food company, with its large following of children, can create a powerful message through the books, others believe its actions are contradictory. Anyway, the company is trying to spread the message of nutrition while it is serving food that is anything but healthy.