Your next car might drive itself. After years of trials on city streets, driverless vehicles are now nearing the live phase. Last moth, a driverless bus began carrying passengers through Lyon, France, Most in the automobile industry think self-driving vehicles will be on the road by 2020 or before.

    Driverless cars will at first be huddled with human-driven cars. But the first places where they will become dominant（统治的）are dense urban areas — precisely the spots most damaged by the automobile age. Many advanced cities are already reducing the role of human-driven cargo. Driverless cars will quicken that process and will bring us enormous benefits.

    Driverless cars will reduce accidents by around 90 percent. That's big—the annual death toll on the world's roads is about 1.2 million a year. Pollution and carbon emissions will drop, because urban driverless cars will be electric. The old, otherwise they would stay at home most of the time and the disabled and teenagers will suddenly gain mobility.

    On the other hand, driverless cars will bring catastrophe. The best thing about the automobile age was that it employed tens of millions of people to make, market, insure and drive vehicles. Over the next 20 years, the mostly low-skilled men who now drive trucks, taxis and buses will see their jobs reduced. Carmakers are especially scared. The few cars of the future might be made by tech companies such as Apple, Baidu and Google. Imaging the impact on Germany, where the automotive sector is the largest industry.

    Dramatic change is coming, and driverless cars could arrive by 2020. But governments have barely begun thinking about it. Only 6 percent of the biggest US cities have factored them into their long-term planning.

    A decade ago anyone hardly saw the Smartphone coming. It has bought an epidemic of mass addiction. Let's hope we do a better job of handling the driverless car.

    Computer programmer David Jones earns $35.000 a year designing new computer games, yet he cannot find a bank ready to let him have a credit card. Instead he has been told to wait another two years until he is 18. The 16-year-old works for a small firm in Liverpool where the problem of most young people of his age is finding a job. David's firm releases two new games for the fast growing computer market each month.

    But David's biggest headache is what to do with his money. Even though he earns a lot he cannot drive a car, take out a mortgage（抵押贷款）, or get credit cards. David got his job with the Liverpool-based company four months ago, a year after leaving school with six O-levels and working for a time in a computer shop. “I got the job because the people who run the firm knew I had already written some programs”, he said. David spends some of his money on records and clothes and gives his mother 50 pounds a week. But most of his spare time is spent working.

    “Unfortunately, computing was not part of our studies at school”, he said “But I had been studying it in books and magazines for four years in my spare time. I knew what I wanted to do and never considered staying on at school. Most people in this business are fairly young, anyway.” David added, “I would like to earn a million and I suppose early retirement is a possibility. You never know when the market might disappear.”

    Still seeking a destination for your weekend break? There are some places which are probably a mere walk away from your college.

King's Art Centre

    A day at the Centre could mean a visit to an exhibition of the work of one of the most interesting contemporary artists on show anywhere. This weekend tees the opening of an exhibition of four local artists.

You could attend a class teaching you how to 'learn from the masters' or get more creative with paint —- free of charge.

    The Centre also runs two life drawing classes for which there is a small fee.

The Botanic Garden

    The Garden has over 8,000 plant species; it holds the research and teaching collection of living plants for Cambridge University.

    The multi-branched Torch Aloe here is impressive. The African plant produces red flowers above blue-green leaves, and is not one to miss.

    Get to the display house to see Dionaea muscipula, a plant more commonly known as the Venus Flytrap that feeds on insects and other small animals.

    The Garden is also a place for wildlife-enthusiasts. Look for grass snakes in the lake. A snake called 'Hissing Sid' is regularly seen lying in the heat of the warm sun.

Byron's Pool

    Many stories surround Lord Byron's time as a student of Cambridge University, Arriving in 1805, he wrote a letter complaining that it was a place of "mess and drunkenness". However, it seems as though Byron did manage to pass the time pleasantly enough. I'm not just talking about the pet bear he kept in his roans. He spent a great deal of time walking in the village.

It is also said that on occasion Byron swam naked by moonlight in the lake, which is now known as Byron's Pool. A couple of miles past Grantchester in the south Cambridgeshire countryside, the pool is surrounded by beautiful circular paths around the fields. The cries of invisible birds make the trip a lovely experience and on the way home you can drop into the village for afternoon tea. If you don't trust me, then perhaps you'll take it from Virginia Woolf一—over a century after Byron, she reportedly took a trip to swim in the same pool.

    Reducing plastic waste isn't easy because the cheap material is found in almost every household item. Now, a delicious and nutritious solution has come up to help reduce our dependence on this environmental hazard.

    David Christian, the co-founder of Evoware, says the idea of creating the biodegradable (生物降解的) products came from concern at the country's high pollution rate. Indonesia is home to four of the world's worst polluted rivers. Since single-use packaging is a large contributor to the problem, Evoware decided to deal with that first.

    After investigating various materials, the company settled on seaweed. Unlike com, commonly used for biodegradable containers, seaweed does not require resources like water or large amounts of space. Since Indonesian farmers already harvest more seaweed than they can sell, it's easy for the company to find the material.

    Though they will not reveal their production process, Evoware says the seaweed packaging contains no chemicals and is safe to consume. The company has also invented single-use cups, which can break down 30 days after they're thrown away.

    While replacing plastic with the seaweed products may seem appealing to most of us, it is a hard-sell in Indonesia. According to Christian, “The awareness to reduce single-use plastic is still very low. This makes our bioplastic unnecessary.” Also a factor is the cost, which is higher than using plastic. Hopefully, Evoware will succeed in convincing Indonesians and people worldwide that switching to their products will be helpful to protecting our beautiful planet.

    Apple announced its new iPhones last week, but competitors' mobile phones can do many of the same things for less money.

    The new iPhone 8 and X have wireless charging, edge-to-edge glass screen and double cameras. But all of these features are already available in smart phones from China's Huawei and Oppo, and Korea's Samsung. While Apple asks buyers to pay $1,000 for its high-end model, some Asian phone makers can offer similar features for less.

    At one time, Chinese manufacturers copied features and designs from others to produce low-cost phones. But they have now added high-end features to their phones and they control nearly half the global mobile phone market.

    Media MarktSaturn is Europe's biggest electronics seller. A spokesperson for the store told Reuters that,“Huawei is seen as a relevant competitor to Apple and Samsung by covering all major price points and placing big investments in marketing and sales. '' She also said that the Chinese companies Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo and TCL were among the top-10 best-selling smart phones in its stores.

    Chinese manufacturers' fast growth has been fueled by strong sales in China. But they now export 40 percent of their smart phones. That is almost double the number from just three years ago, according to the Hong Kong investment company CLSA.

    Huawei is currently the world's third largest phone maker behind Samsung and Apple. According to research company Canalys, the Chinese company is getting closer to second-place Apple and might overtake it later this year.The Chinese company even made fun of Apple's new facial recognition feature with a Facebook video called "Real AI phone." Huawei plans to show its top-of-the-line Mate 10 phone on Oct. 16. The phone will have artificial intelligence features such as instant translation and image recognition and will cost less than $1,000.    Other Chinese companies are looking to enter the high-end smart phone market.

    Bad news sells. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news. Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers. But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By tracking people's e-mails and online posts, scientists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

    "The 'if it bleeds' rule works for mass media," says Jonah Berger, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. They want your eyeballs and don't care how you're feeling. But when you share a story with your friends, you care a lot more how they react. You don't want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer."

    Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication—e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations—found that it tended to be more positive than negative, but that didn't necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things? To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times' website. He and a Penn colleague analyzed the "most e-mailed" list for six months. One of his first findings was that articles in the science section were much more likely to make the list than non-science articles. He found that science amazed tines' readers and made them want to share this positive feeling with others.

    Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that inspired negative feelings like anger or anxiety, but not articles that left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused one way or the other, and they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared, as Dr. Berger explains in his new book, "Contagious: Why Things Catch on."