The human brain contains 10 thousand million cells and each of these may have a thousand connections. Such enormous numbers used to discourage us and cause us to dismiss the possibility of making a machine with human-like ability, but now that we have grown used to moving forward at such a pace we can be less sure. Quite soon, in only 10 or 20 years perhaps, we will be able to assemble a machine as complex as the human brain, and if we can we will. It may then take us a long time to render it intelligent by loading in the right software (软件)or by altering the architecture but that too will happen.

    I think it certain that in decades, not centuries, machines of silicon (硅) will arise first to compete and then do better than their human ancestors. Once they do better than us they will be capable of their own design. In a real sense they will be able to reproduce themselves. Silicon will have ended carbon's long control. And we will no longer be able to claim ourselves to be the finest intelligence in the known universe.

    As the intelligence of robots increases to match that of humans and as their cost declines through economies of scale we may use them to improve environments. Thus, deserts may bloom and the ocean beds be mined. Further ahead, by a combination of the great wealth this new age will bring and the technology it will provide, the construction of a vast, man-created world in space, home to thousands or millions of people, will be within our power.

    The best way of learning a language is using it. The best way of learning English is talking in English as much as possible. Sometimes you'll get your words mixed up (混合) and people will not understand you. Sometimes people will say things too quickly and you can't understand them. But if you keep your sense of humor, you can always have a good laugh at the mistakes you make. Don't be unhappy if people seem to be laughing at your mistakes. It's better for people to laugh at your mistakes than to be angry with you, because they don't understand what you are saying. The most important thing for learning English is: "Don't be afraid of making mistakes because everyone makes mistakes."

    After decades of playing catch-up with the U.S. and Russian space programs, China did something neither nation nor any other had done this December: land a spaceship on the dark side of the moon.

    Strictly speaking, of course, the moon has no dark side. But because of the way it orbits Earth, our natural satellite shows us only one side－the other is hidden from our view. No one even saw the far side until 1959, when the Soviet Luna 3 spaceship flew around for a look and sent back photos. No astronaut or spaceship went there until this December, when the China National Space Agency (CNSA) launched a 2,500-pound lander called Chang'e-4 to the southern end of the lunar far side.

    Chang'e-4 operated a small rover (探测车) to survey the geography there for the first time ever. By examining the geography of its landing area, Chang'e-4 could solve longstanding puzzles about the moon, including how it formed 4.5 billion years ago. Chang'e-4 also carried a very small lunar biosphere (生态圈) containing silkworm eggs and a tiny greenhouse designed to grow potatoes in order to study the growth of the seeds on the moon.

    Besides Chang'e-4, China plans to launch Chang'e-5 in 2019. Its mission will be to gather moon rocks using an orbiter, a lander or collector, an ascent stage (上升器) and a capsule that will separate from the orbiter and return the rocks to the earth. ―With these missions, the Chinese will have shown complete mastery of flight in the space between the earth and the moon, said Paul Spudis, an experienced lunar researcher based in Houston.

    CNSA has already outlined ideas for Chinese astronauts to follow the robots to the moon. Pei Zhaoyu, deputy director of CNSA's Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center, told that China plans a permanent robotic lunar station in about 10 years and suggested a human presence on the moon another decade or so after that. Spudis said China's ambitious Chang'e-4 and Chang'e-5 missions should send human's plans for lunar return into rapid development.

    In a big room on the second floor of the New York City Department of Sanitation's East 99th Street garage, 63-year-old Manhattan native Nelson Molina was listening to a Frank Sinatra CD he found in the trash. "The Way You Look Tonight" was playing through a music player. In fact, the entire space was filled with items strangers threw away. "My family kept everything," said Molina. "Nowadays, people throw it all away." Molina, during his 34 years as a sanitation worker （环卫工人）, gave these items a second life.

    Molina grew up in a housing project with his parents and five other kids in the family and had a habit of picking up unused items at a young age. "My family was poor, so we didn't get much for Christmas," he said. "I'd go out to look for a toy for my sisters, maybe a truck for my brothers." He kept his early morning habit secret from his friends, but not out of embarrassment: "I didn't want the competition."

    On the job, Molina had his sixth sense for finding items. "I could tell, sometimes just by the sound, whether a bag was filled with bottles or a different kind of glass," he said. He kept special finds on the truck, and then put them in out-of-the-way places in the sanitation garage. After almost 10 years, he began showing his discoveries. "It's not a normal practice." said NYC Department of Sanitation assistant chief Keith Mellis. Recently, a team of New York University students has taken on the task of cataloging （分类） the tens of thousands of objects, in hopes that the collection, which has hardly been open to the public, might one day be shown in an official sanitation museum.

    If humans pump enough carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere, the stratocumulus clouds(层积云) could disappear, and the earth's temperature could climb sharply to heights not predicted in current climate models. It would burn the planet. That's the conclusion of a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience and described in detail by Natalie Wolchover for Quanta Magazine.

    As Wolchover explained, clouds have long been one of the great uncertainties of climate models. Computer models that easily capture the complexity and detail of most climate systems just aren't powerful enough to predict worldwide changes in cloud behavior. But clouds are important. They reflect sunlight away from the earth's surface. And stratocumulus clouds are those white blankets you might have seen as you looked out the window of arm airplane, rolling out below you and hiding the ground Researchers suspect that certain sudden, past jumps in temperature may have been caused by changes to clouds like these.

    For the new research, scientists modeled just a small patch of sky using a supercomputer. They found that if carbon dioxide levels reach about 1, 200 parts per million(ppm) in the atmosphere, stratocumulus clouds break up. That's a very high carbon dioxide concentration.  Right now, levels have climbed past 410 ppm--a dangerous change from 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution.

    But humans put more and more CO₂ into the atmosphere every year. If current trends continue, the earth could reach 1, 200 ppm within 100 to 150 years. This could happen if our society doesn't follow through on any of its commitments to reduce emissions(排放), Wolchover reported. And even if it does, the result would be another 8 degrees Celsius of heat added to the global average, on top of the dangerous changes already underway due to greenhouse gases.

    That's an enormous change, and it goes beyond predictions of worldwide ice melt and catastrophic sea level rise. And, once the stratocumulus clouds are gone, Wolchover reported, they likely wouldn't reappear until atmospheric carbon dioxide levels dropped below where they are currently.

    There's still some uncertainty in the data. The 1, 200 ppm figure could change as scientists look into the issue further.

In 1998, people in Na Doi, a quiet village in northwest Thailand, noticed that their fish catches in the nearby Ngao River were declining. The fish they did manage to net were also getting smaller. Together, Na Doi's 75 households decided to try a new solution: they would set aside a small stretch of river to be strictly off-limits to fishing.

The rules are usually simple: no fishing of any kind in an agreed-upon area marked by flags or signs. While freshwater reserves won't solve everything, in places where fish populations are under pressure, they can give species much-needed breathing room to rebuild their numbers, ultimately making them better able to weather other environmental problems.

Na Doi was the second village in the Ngao River valley to adopt this pioneering approach to freshwater fisheries management. Since the late 1990s, at least 50 other villages there have done the same. As a whole, the entirely grassroots-led reserves have been surprisingly successful, according to findings recently published in Nature. Most importantly, the Thailand case provides probably the best real-world proof that fisheries reserves can benefit not just oceans, but freshwater, too

In 2012. Aaron Koning, then a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, began investigating the Ngao River valley reserves to see how widespread and successful they truly were. Koning found, not surprisingly, that older and bigger reserves were more successful, because they offered more time and space—including more kinds of habitat—in which to rebuild fish populations and re-establish rare species. But even reserves established in the last couple of years showed clear benefits from being spared intense fishing pressure. "Reserves that were located closer to a village tended to have an advantage," Koning says, "probably because villagers were better able to enforce the rules."

By comparing different systems and approaches around the world, Koning and his colleagues hope to identify common factors for success that could be tailored to diverse rivers and lakes.