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    The main aim is a fully autonomous car that gets rid of the cause of most accidents: the driver, Hodgson points out, ＂For the sake of safety, the faster you can remove humans, the better, even if there are unfortunately a few accidents from new causes. It's a question of balancing the number injured or killed by autonomous vehicles with the people whose lives are potentially saved.＂

    It's a theme that Elon Musk, head of electric car company Tesla Motors, has long supported. His company is determined to be the first to deliver a fully autonomous vehicle to consumers. Last year, Musk announced that Tesla's 2017 goal was ＂to do a demonstration ( 示 范 ) drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York...and have the car park itself.＂

    However, even Tesla admits that there are problems to overcome — the software needs further confirmation and the appropriate regulatory (监管的) approval needs to be in place. Indeed, recent crashes of Tesla vehicles and Google cars confirm that the software isn't ready yet.

    The UK government appears determined to encourage the development of autonomous vehicles. It's supporting four city trials, publishing the Modern Transport Bill to reduce red tape around their introduction and adapting the legal system to take into account issues such as insurance liability when a human isn't in control of a vehicle.

    The insurance industry is similarly keen to promote increasing autonomy in cars. As the Association of British Insurers (ABI) points out: ＂More than 90 per cent of road accidents are attributed to human errors.＂ This costs motor insurers a surprising £20 per day in claims.

    Life-Changing Science Discoveries

    Here's a look at some discoveries that have changed the world. It's impossible to rank their importance, so they're listed in the order they were discovered

Micro-organism

    Before French chemist Louis Pasteur began experimenting with bacteria in the 1860s, people did not know what caused disease. He not only discovered that disease came from micro-organisms, but also realized that bacteria could be killed by heat and disinfectant(消毒剂). This idea caused doctors to wash their hands and disinfect their instruments, which has saved millions of lives.

Penicillin

    Antibiotics are powerful drugs that kill dangerous bacteria in our bodies that make us sick. In 1928, British Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic, penicillin, which he grew in his lab. Without antibiotics, infections like strep throat could be deadly

DNA

    On February 28, 1853, James Watson of the United States and Francis Crick of England made one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history. The two scientists found the structure of DNA. Our genes are made of DNA and determine how things like what color hair and eye we'll have. In 1962, they were awarded the Nobel Prize for this work . The discovery has helped doctors understand diseases and may someday prevent some illnesses like heart disease and cancer.

X-rays

    Wilhelm Roentgen, a German physicist, discovered X-rays in 1895. X-rays go right through some substances, like flesh and wood, but are stopped by others, such as bones and lead. This allows them to be used to see broken bones or explosives inside suitcases, which makes them useful for doctors and security officers. For this discovery, Roentgen was awarded the first-ever Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

    Are you sick of going to bed late and waking up tired? Then grab your hiking boots and a tent. A new study suggests that camping in the great outdoors for a couple of days can reset your body clock and help you get more sleep.

    The body clock is an internal system that tells our bodies when it's time to go to sleep and when it's time to wake up. Scientists track this clock by measuring the amount of melatonin (褪黑激素) circulating in a person's blood at any given time.

    In a healthy sleeper, melatonin levels rise a few hours before bedtime, stay high through the night, and then settle back down when it's time to wake up.

    In our modern society, however, most of us stay up many hours past sunset and would probably sleep in many hours after sunrise if we could. And the trouble is, your melatonin levels may still be high when your alarm clock goes off in the morning, which leads to fatigue. It may also have other health consequences as well, such as diabetes (糖尿病), overweight and heart disease.

    Professor Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado in the US wanted to see if our body clocks can be reset by a short stay in nature. His team recruited (招募) fourteen physically active volunteers in their 20s and 30s. Nine went on a weekend camping trip, while the other five stayed home. At the end of the weekend, the researchers reported that in just two days, the campers' body clocks had shifted so that their melatonin levels began to rise more than an hour earlier than they did before they left on the trip. By contrast, the body clocks of the group that stayed home shifted even later over the course of the weekend.

    “This tells us we can reset our clocks fast,” Wright said.

    Therefore, if you want to change your sleep patterns you could try to increase your exposure to natural light during the day and decrease the amount of artificial light you see at night. And if that doesn't work，there's always camping.

    Should Parents Teach Children How to Tweet?

    Social media is a seemingly endless source of concern for parents, with worries that it weakens their children's confidence and attention spans. But others counter that it could also be broadening their horizons.

    The latest round of worry was sparked by a study of the impact of social media use on 8-12- year-olds published by Anne Longfield, Children's Commissioner for England. The report focused on 32 children, who said they used social media to stay connected with friends and family and to have fun, by watching videos for example. But they also described pressures from constant contact, online comments that weaken their self-esteem, and the need to shape offline activities to make them shareable. "You see your friends going ice skating, partying or talking about how much revision they have done, and it can make you feel inadequate," says Bea, a junior school student from Bristol, UK. "It's just so hard to get away from."

    Children have to take risks on their journeys to adulthood, and desires to fit in and be popular existed before Mark Zuckerberg came along with Facebook. However, in previous generations these pressures came largely from people they knew, and they mostly stayed outside the home. Now the pressures could come from any one of the nearly 3 billion people online, and follow them from school to home, and can even continue through the night.

    The pressures do get on parents' nerves, among which the utmost concern is how their children can be protected from harms, given that social media is now integral to the way many young people interact. A good starting point is a basic understanding of childhood development milestones.

    Broadly, children have a high dependency on carers for security and guidance up to the age of 5, increasing independence and self-care from 6 to 11, and increasing autonomy and growing reliance on peers from 12-18 years old. Against this background, the suitability of social media for children of different ages should be considered respectively.

    According to Longfield's study, children should be taught about online safety from an early age, better before secondary school. There is growing evidence that efforts need to be extended to provide earlier guidance on less extreme but more common risks, including oversharing, low selfesteem, addiction and insomnia. The evidence suggests she is right. However, approaches that focus merely on the potential negatives are unlikely to work.

    "My school has tried to do a lot, but it often involves trying to drill into us how bad social media can be," says Bea. "People of my age really like social media, so I think a better approach would be if they said ‘Although it is good, here are some negatives'."

    Misael is three times the size of other children at his age due to a symdrome(综合症 状) which means he is unable to stop eating.

    He is so heavy that he often stops breathing while sleeping — leaving his parents fearing that one day he may not wake up. His dad Manoel Abreu, 38, said, "Everything is hard for him — he is a baby carrying an adult's weight. His heart must be working under a lot of pressure. If he doesn't get the treatment he requires, there is a very good chance that he will pass away."

    Miseal, from Sanot, Brazil, was born a healthy 6lb 6oz, but immediately he started piling on the pounds. Doctors believe he may be suffering from Prader-Willi symdrome, a rare genetic condition that leaves him with greed. He now weighs a heavy 178lb and is still gaining despite following a low-fat diet and walking for 40 minutes each day.

    Mum Josiane, 37, said, "He has been putting on a lot of weight since he was a baby—even when I was breastfeeding him. But it was only when he was one and a half years old that we began to worry. He was gaining 3kg a month and was starting to get very heavy. We know we could lose him at any time. Sometimes when he is sleeping, I watch him to see if he is breathing. I cry a lot because we want to help him. But I am also very proud of him because he doesn't surrender(投降)."

    Misael visits a doctor every three months to try to control his condition, but currently there is no cure for Prader-Willi symdrome. Paediatric neurologist(儿科神经科专家)

    Lucio said, "Every time we meet, he has put on a lot of weight — sometimes up to 5 kg. I think Misael could get help from someone outside Brazil — both medically and financially — so that he can get the laboratory and genetic testing he needs."

Robins(知更鸟) are considered as a symbol of the festive season and are known for their lively, curious nature around humans. But even robins get road rage because they can become aggressive when there's noise, a new study shows.

Researchers from the UK found that the sound of traffic made rural robins—not urban robins—"more aggressive". The study was conducted by experts at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Human activity has a colossal effect on wildlife, including on their social behavior," the team said in their paper.

For their study, the team investigated the behavior of male European robins living in urban parks and rural forests in Istanbul. They measured aggression towards another robin intruder, which wasn't a real robin but instead a model in the shape of an adult bird. The fake robin was equipped with a speaker, through which the team could play audio, and then attached to trees at the parks and forests. The audio consisted of recordings of robin songs, while additional traffic noise was added through another separate speaker nearby.

After recording the birds' behavior during interactions with the fake intruder, they found the urban robins typically displayed more physical aggression than rural robins. However, rural robins became more aggressive with the addition of traffic noise—possibly because they're less used to traffic noise than urban birds, which are already living in noisier habitats. What's more, physical displays of territoriality could increase because the traffic noise interferes with their birdsong. "In normally quiet surroundings, we found that additional traffic noise leads to rural robins becoming more aggressive," said Dr Caglar Akcay at ARU. "We believe this is because the noise is interfering with their communication."

Overall, by comparing urban and rural robin reactions, the study provides a valuable glimpse into how urban-living species adapt to "life in a noisy world". "Our results show that human-produced noise can have a range of effects on robins, depending on the habitat they live in," said Dr Akcay.