Internet slang refers to a variety of slang languages used by different people on the Internet. It is difficult to provide a standardized definition of Internet slang due to the constant changes made to its nature. However, it can be understood to be a type of slang that Internet users have popularized, and in many cases, have coined. Such terms often begin with the purpose of saving keystrokes or to compensate(补偿)for small character limits. Internet slang consists of a number of different ways of speaking, sub-languages, expressions, spelling techniques and idioms that have obtained most of their meaning on the Internet.

    Love it or hate it, there is no escape from Internet slang. It has become popular among the teenagers. Just like US teenagers use “LOL”(laugh out loud) when commenting on a funny video, China's post-00s generation, a group born between 2000 and 2009, like to use “XSWL” (laughing my head off). Acronyms(首字母缩略词) and shortened expressions may be popular as they offer shorter ways of communicating. For teenagers, they could also allow them to communicate in their own way.

    Understanding the most common acronyms and texting symbols can help to decode and decipher any text message, email or instant message online. Here are some of the most popular symbols, abbreviations, and acronyms you are likely to stumble upon when texting or receiving messages and chatting on line. OMG: Oh my God; BRT: Be right there; TTYL: Talk to you later; JK: Just kidding; G2G: Got to go; NMU: Not much, you? RBAY: Right back at you; IDC: I don't care.

    Some people think that Internet slang affects the language negatively. However, Melbourne University linguist Rosey Billington doesn't agree.

    “When you are able to use language in a creative way, you show you are linguistically knowledgeable because you know the language rules well enough to use words in a different way.”Billington told News.com. Au .Her view is supported by two linguists, Lauren Spradlin and Taylor Jones.

    Cao Yuan, a PhD student from China, had two papers published on strange behaviour in atom-thick layers of carbon that have opened up a new field of physics.

    Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at MIT was already layering and rotating (旋转) sheets of carbon at different angles when Cao joined the lab in 2014. Cao's job was to find out what happened when one graphene (石墨烯) sheet was twisted only slightly wiht respect to the other, which one theory predicted would thoroughly change the material's behaviour.

    Many physicists doubted the idea. But when Cao set out to create the subtly twisted stacks, he spotted something strange. Exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero, the graphene—which ordinarily conducts electricity—became an insulator. That by itself was surprising. But the best was yet to come: with a slight change to the field, the twisted sheets became a superconductor, in which electricity flowed without resistance.

    The ability to get atom-thick carbon into a complex electronic state through a simple rotation now has physics demanding to engineer exciting behavior in other twisted 2D materials. Some even hope that graphene could shed light on how more-complex materials superconduct at much higher temperatures. "There are so many things we can do," says Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University. "The opportunities at hand now are almost irresistible."

    Hitting graphene's “magic angle”—a rotation between parallel sheets of around 1.1°—involved some trial and error, but Cao was soon able to do it reliably. His experimental skill was extremely important, says his supervisor Jarillo-Herrero. Cao pioneered a method of tearing a single sheet of graphene so that he could create a stack of two layers, from which he could then fine-tune alignment (微调校准).

    Cao loves to take things apart and rebuild them. A heart, he is “a tinkerer”, his supervisor says. On his own time, this means photographing the night sky using homemade cameras and telescopes—pieces of which usually lie across Cao's office. "Every ime I go in, it's a huge mess, with computers taken apart and pieces of telescope all over his desk," says Jarillo-Herrero.

    Three months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Rebecca Sell, then 24, a photojournalist for Fredericksburg photographed a New Orleans couple worriedly examining water-spotted photo albums. As she took the photo, something within her clicked. "I told them I could take the ruined pictures, copy them and give them digitally restored (修复) photos," she recalls. Although a bit sceptical, the couple agreed. Rebecca took their photos home, restored them and took them to the couple at their temporary home. "It felt so good to be able to do that for them," says Rebecca.

    When her editor, Dave Ellis, saw the photo of the couple, he suggested they go back and restore damaged photos for even more people. So in January 2006, with paid time off from the paper, the two set up shop in Pass Christian. After posting a notice in the community newsletter, Rebecca and Dave received 500 photos in four days. For each, the pair took a new digital picture, then used high-tech software to erase water spots and restore colors. It just so happened that a popular website linked to Dave's blog about the experience, and soon Operation Photo Rescue, as it came to be known, had emails from hundreds of volunteers, including photographers and restoration experts, eager to help.

    Though digital restoration is a painstaking process, mending irreplaceable family pictures means the world to victims like Emily Lancaster, 71, who took out piles of ruined photo albums after Katrina, never thinking the mess could be saved. But she just couldn't bear to part with a few treasured pictures, including a portrait of her father, who had passed away, and a photo of her husband as a boy. Then she heard about Operation Photo Rescue. "I didn't have a whole lot of hope they could fix them, but they did," Emily says. "Almost every day I think about all the pictures I've lost. I'm so happy to have these two."

    In the five years since Katrina, Operation Photo Rescue has collected thousands of pictures ruined by floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. Volunteers make "copy runs" to disaster areas across the country to gather damaged photos from survivors; operating costs are covered by donations. "It's great to be able to give people some of their history back," says Rebecca. "One person told me that thanks to us, her grandmother got to see her photos again before she passed away. Moments like that remind me why I do this."

    Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe (部落). If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can't expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too.

    The way to change people's minds is to become friends with them, to combine them into your tribe, to bring them into your circle. Now, they can change their beliefs without the risk of being abandoned socially.

    The British philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that we simply share meals with those who disagree with us: "Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them without punishment. Prejudice and conflict between groups of people from different nations or races feed off abstraction. However, during a meal, something about handing dishes around, unfolding napkins (餐巾纸) at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt makes us less likely to hold the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or attacked. For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to ease racial or cultural conflict, there are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together."

    Perhaps it is not difference, but distance that produces tribalism and unfriendliness. As proximity increases, so does understanding. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's quote, "I don't like that man. I must get to know him better." Facts don't change our minds. Friendship does.

    The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami once wrote, "Always remember that to argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right."

    When we are in the moment, we can easily forget that the goal is to connect with the other side, cooperate with them, befriend them, and integrate them into our tribe. We are so caught up in winning that we forget about connecting. It's easy to spend your energy labeling people rather than working with them.

    The word "kind (family and relatives)" originated from the word "kin (old fashion of family and relatives)." When you are kind to someone, it means you are treating them like family. This, I think, is a good method for actually changing someone's mind. Develop a friendship. Share a meal. Gift a book. Be kind first, be right later.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Liebniz was a philosopher and mathematician in search of a model. In the late 1600s Leibniz decided there was a need for a new, purer arithmetic than our common decimal (十进制) system. He got his inspiration from the 5000-year-old book that is at the heart of Chinese philosophy: the I-Ching, or Book of Changes.

This ancient text was such an influence on Liebniz that he titled his article on the new arithmetic "Explanation of a new arithmetic and the ancient Chinese figure of Fu X". Fu Xi was the legendary first author of the I-Ching. The arithmetic that Liebniz described was binary (二进制) code, which is used in almost every modern computer, from iPhones to China's own Tihane-2 supercomputer.

To figure out what Liebniz learned in the I-Ching, we need to understand something that most of us have taken for granted. When we listen to an MP3, look at a digital photo or watch the latest TV drama, we are experiencing a digital representation of reality. That representation is basically just a string of binary signals that are commonly known as 1s and 0s. What Liebniz's gained from the book was that even the most complex reality could be represented in the binary form as 1s and 0s.

In the philosophy of the I-Ching, reality is not entirely real. It is something more like a dream. This dream of reality arises from the binaries of Yin and Yang, as they play out countless combinations, practically everything in the universe. It's not surprising then, from the l-Ching's perspective, that anything in the dream of reality can be represented in a string of 1s and 0s, processed by a computer.

The I-Ching was far more ambitious than the current practical applications of binary code. It is claimed that the I-Ching represents nothing less than the basic situation of human life itself. As a system for predicting the future, the I-Ching might disappoint, but as a way of questioning your own unconscious mind, it can be remarkably useful.

The I-Ching's teachings also contain warnings about our digital revolution. Binary code, powered by modern computers, has an amazing capacity to represent reality. However, the ancient authors of the I-Ching might have understood its potential-and its dangers-even better than we now do.

So when scientific thinkers ask whether computers can create "virtual realities" or "artificial intelligence", they are missing the point. Of course, we can create ever deeper and more complex layers of the dream of reality. The real question is, can we wake up from the dream we're in already?