How fit are your teeth? Are you lazy about brushing them? Never fear: An inventor is on the case. An electric toothbrush senses how long and how well you brush, and it lets you track your performance on your phone.

    The Kolibree toothbrush was exhibited at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. It senses how it is moved and can send the information to an Android phone or iPhone via a Bluetooth wireless connection.

    The toothbrush will be able to teach you to brush right (don't forget the insides of the teeth!) and make sure you're brushing long enough. “It's kind of like having a doctor actually watch your brushing on a day-to-day basis,” says Thomas Serval, the French inventor.

    The toothbrush will also be able to talk to other applications(应用) on your phone, so developers could, for example, create a game controlled by your toothbrush. You could score points for beating monsters(怪物) among your teeth. “We try to make it smart but also fun,” Serval says.

    Serval says he was inspired by his experience as a father. He would come home from work and ask his kids if they had brushed their teeth. They said “yes,” but Serval would find their toothbrush heads dry. He decided he needed a brush that really told him how well his children brushed.

    The company says the Kolibree will go on sale this summer, for $99 to $199, depending on features. The U.S. is the first target market.

    Serval says that one day, it'll be possible to replace the brush on the handle with a brushing unit that also has a camera. The camera can even examine holes in your teeth while you brush.

    Animals have been used, and sometimes abused(虐待), in movie-making since the early days of the industry. However, the American Humane Association has worked for many years to protect animals in films. And, the digital age might make animal actors unnecessary.

    The new film “Dolphin Tale” tells about a dolphin that loses her tail because of an injury from a crab-trap. A doctor provides her with an artificial tail that saves her life. The film is based on a real event. And the star of the film, Winter, is a real dolphin that lost her tail. The American Humane Society worked with the movie's makers to make sure Winter stayed safe and healthy during filming. The animal protection group does this for all animal actors in America.

    A thick book of rules and guidelines tells Hollywood moviemakers how to treat animals. Karen Rosa leads the American Humane Society's film and television group. He said, “Everything from the smallest insect to the largest mammal shall be protected. We believe that for the sake of entertainment, everybody should go home alive.

    This was not always the policy in the early days of film. In 1939, a horse was forced off a mountain, falling to his death, in the movie “Jesse James.” The next year, guidelines were established to guarantee safe and healthy conditions for animals in movies.

    A new film “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” tells about the creation of super intelligent apes through science. However, no real animals were among the performers. Computer generated imagery provided the chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans that movie goers see. Clare Richardson is the president of the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund. She says computer generated imagery should decrease the use of animals in the film industry. She praises movie makers for the use of computer-made animals.

    Could the device, smartphone or PC，which you're using affect the moral decisions you make when using it? To test it, researchers presented multiple dilemmas to a sample set of 1,010 people. The participants were assigned a device at random.

    One case of the questions participants were asked is the classic “trolley (有轨电车) problem”: A runaway trolley is headed towards five people tied up on a set of train tracks. You can do nothing, resulting in the deaths of five people, or push a man off a bridge, which will stop the trolley. The practical response is to kill one man to save five lives, which 33.5 percent of smartphone users chose, compared to 22.3 percent of PC users.

    “What we found in our study is that when people used a smartphone to view classic moral problems, they were more likely to make more unemotional, reasonable decisions when presented with a highly emotional dilemma, ”Dr Albert Barque-Duran, the lead author of the study, told City, University of London. “This could be due to the increased time pressure often present with smartphones and also the increased psychological distance which can occur when we use such devices compared to PCs.”

    As for why the researchers started this study, Dr Barque-Duran noted, “Due to the fact that our social lives, work and even shopping take place online, it is important to think about how the contexts where we typically face moral decisions and are asked to engage in moral behavior have changed, and the impact this could have on the hundreds of millions of people who use such devices daily.” It's clear that we need more research on how our devices affect our moral decision making because we're using screens at an ever-increasing rate.

There's a song by the great Jamaican singer Bob Marley called So Much Trouble In The World. Marley understood that part of the reason why there are so many problems in the world is the lack of tolerance between people. The UN understands this too — that's why it made Nov 16th "International Day for Tolerance".

But first of all, what is tolerance? According to French philosopher Voltaire, tolerance "s the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty (脆弱) and error; let us pardon each other's fool — that is the first law of nature."

    Very often, people don't realize that they're intolerant. This is because intolerance has a lot to do with ignorance. For example, the UN's campaign is in part about the treatment of females by males. But often, the behavior of men toward women is intolerant because men don't put themselves in the shoes of women.

    It's worth thinking a little about the words "tolerance" and "intolerance". Are they the best words to describe the evils of which we're speaking here? To agree to be "tolerant" of someone isn't necessarily a very respectful thing. When someone is tolerated, it implies that there's something wrong with them.

    Still, what Voltaire said stands: We humans are not perfect and this weakness is something that we all share. That's the reason we should be tolerant. It's a little like generosity. We can give things to another person, and we can also give our forgiveness.

    My color television has given me nothing but a headache. I was able to buy it a little over a year ago because I had my relatives give me money for my birthday instead of a lot of clothes that wouldn't fit. I let a salesclerk fool me into buying a discontinued model (型号). I realized this a day later, when I saw newspaper advertisements for the set at seventy-five dollars less than I had paid. The set worked so beautifully when I first got it home that I would keep it on until stations signed off for the night. Fortunately, I didn't get any channels (频道) showing all-night movies or I would never have gotten to bed.

    Then I started developing a problem with the set that involved static (静电) noise. For some reason, when certain shows switched (转换) into a commercial (商业广告), a loud noise would sound for a few seconds. Gradually, this noise began to appear during a show, and to get rid of it, I had to change to another channel and then change it back. Sometimes this technique (技巧) would not work, and I had to pick up the set and shake it to remove the sound. I actually began to build up my arm muscles (肌肉) shaking my set.

    When neither of these methods removed the static noise, I would sit helplessly and wait for the noise to go away. At last I ended up hitting the set with my fist, and it stopped working altogether. My trip to the repair shop cost me $62, and the set is working well now, but I keep expecting more trouble.

    Every morning my father buys a newspaper on his way to work. Every evening my mother looks through magazines at home. And every night, I look at the posters with photos of David Beckham and Yao Ming on my bedroom wall before I go to sleep. Can we imagine life without paper or print?

    Paper was first created about 2,000 years ago, and has been made from silk, cotton, bamboo, and, since the 19th century, from wood. People learned to write words on paper to make a book. But in those days, books could only be produced one at a time by hand. As a result, they were expensive and rare. And because there weren't many books, few people learned to read.

    Then printing was invented in China. When printing was developed greatly at the beginning of the 11th century, books could be produced more quickly and cheaply. As a result, more people learned to read. After that, knowledge and ideas spread quickly.

    Today information can be received online, downloaded from the Internet rather than found in books, and information can be kept on CD-ROMs or machines such as MP3 players.

    Computers are already used in classrooms, and newspapers and magazines can already be read online. So will books be replaced by computers one day? No, I don't think the Yao Ming poster on my bedroom wall will ever be replaced by a computer two metres high!