Macao is only forty miles from Hong Kong and it is easy to reach. You can get there by sea. It is an interesting place and it has a long history. Macao is part of China and most people living there are Chinese.

    The first Europeans in Macao came from Portugal. More than four hundred years ago the Portuguese went there to trade with China. Some settled and made their homes there. They built strong forts（要塞）to guard the city and the harbor. They also built churches, schools, hospitals and other places. Slowly the city grew. People from many other countries came to live and work in Macao.

    Today many people live in Macao. Some only go there to watch dog-racing or motor-racing or to gamble（赌博）with their money. But Macao is a quiet and peaceful place. It is pleasant just to walk around and look at the old buildings and forts. You feel you are back in the old days. Of course，some of the buildings are now in ruins. The Church of St. Paul has only the front wall with many steps leading up to it. But it is still interesting to see.

    When you are hot and tired, there are small cool gardens to rest in. When you are hungry, there are good restaurants with many kinds of food. Nearby are some islands, which are also nice to visit and are easy to get in. There are certainly a lot to see and to do in Macao.

    If you want to become a fluent English speaker you should take some advice: There are four skills in learning English. They are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The most important thing you must remember is that if you want to improve your speaking and writing skills you should first master the skills of reading and listening.

    Read as much as you can. But your reading must be active. It means that you must think about the meaning of the sentence, the meaning of the unfamiliar words, etc. There is no need for you to pay much attention to grammars or try to understand all the unfamiliar words you come across ， but the fact that you see them for the first time and recognize them whenever you see them, for example, in other passages or books, is enough. It would be better to prepare yourself a notebook so you can write down the important words or sentences in it.

    As for listening, there are two choices: besides reading, you can listen every day for about 30 minutes. You can only pay attention to your reading and become skillful at your reading, then you can catch up on your listening. Since you have lots of inputs in your mind, you can easily guess what the speaker is going to say. This never means that you should not practice listening.

    For listening you can listen to cartoons or some movies that are specially made for children. Their languages are easy. Or if you are good at listening you can listen to VOA or BBC programs every day. Again the thing to remember is being active in listening and preferably taking some notes.

    If you follow these pieces of advice, your speaking and writing will improve automatically, and you can be sure that with a little effort they will become perfect.

    Getting more followers is something we usually associate with social media or micro messaging apps. But soon we could all have a new type of follower—a robotic one.

    Dozens of robots and technology fans gathered in Boston, US, earlier this month for the Robot Business conference. The latest developments in the world of robotics were shown to the public, and this time the trend was robots following people.

    Perhaps the most exciting development on show was the ability of drones (无人机) to follow you from the air, acting as your own personal cameraman or photographer. One example is 3-D Robotics' Iris+ drone, developed by a US-based company.

    The drone is fitted with cameras and has a “follow me” function. It connects with your GPS-enabled Android device, like a mobile phone. Then it flies and follows you around, shooting action film of you from above. The software in the drone makes sure that you're always in the center of the frame.

It can keep working for 15 minutes, as long as there aren't too many trees for it to crash into. This could be exciting for anyone who loves action sports or wants to be the star of their own short film.

    But what if you want to be one of those celebrities (名人) who have helpers carrying all their bags and doing all their chores? A robot called Budgee can help.

    Budgee, made by 5 Elements Robotics, is literally a basket on wheels.It is designed to help elderly and disabled people, or simply anyone who doesn't have enough arms for grocery bags, Wired magazine reported.It can carry up to 22.7 kg of items.

    To make Budgee follow them, its owner will have to wear a small device and use an app to set the distance between themselves and the robot.Budgee even sends a text message when it can't keep up with its owner.

     “I want you to look at the robot like he's your buddy, he's your friend. There's a relationship you develop with the robot,” Wendy Roberts, CEO of 5 Elements Robotics, told gigaom.com.

    It might not be quite the same as robotic assistants we've seen in movies such as Disney's Wall-E, where robots cater for our every need, but that idea doesn't seem quite so far-fetched now.

    Ever wondered whether punishment actually makes people cooperate (合作)? A team of scientists created an experiment to figure it out and the results were pretty unexpected.

    To understand what they found, you have to know why these scientists were studying punishment. They were trying to figure out why people cooperate when it's often so easy to profit at others expense. Why don't friends steal from each other? Why do parents bother to feed their children? If the answer to these questions is obvious to you, congratulations, you are ahead of scientists. They're still trying to figure it out.

    In this experiment, researchers had 225 Chinese students play a game, where if the students cooperated, they'd all get a number of points. But if one defected (变节) and everyone else cooperated, the defector would get a lot of points, and the cooperators would lose out. This game represents a lot of real life situations where you struggle with a decision: work together and do OK, or run off with the rewards, ruining everybody else's day.

    This is actually a pretty ordinary economic experiment. But the researchers added two changes to see if they could mimic(糢拟)the real world better. Change one: some students played many rounds together, so they'd learn who they could trust. Change two: people could punish each other, sacrificing a point or two to destroy another player's score.

    In the end, the researchers found that playing multiple rounds made people cooperate more, which definitely mimics human society. But the whole punishment thing led to a surprise: punishing didn't actually make people cooperate more. In fact, it made them cooperate less.

    So the scientists still don't know why people cooperate, though it looks like it has more to do with groups sticking together than it does with punishment.

Ammaar Reshi, 28, has been fascinated by technology since he was a child. One day, when he was experimenting with an AI-powered chatbot, he began to consider how artificial intelligence could be used to create a basic children's book to give to his friends. Without ever picking up a pen and paper, he created a 12-page picture book. 

Just 72 hours later, Reshi self-published his book on Amazon's digital bookstore. The next day he got the paperback（平装书）, which was made available for free through another Amazon service called KPD. 

Reshi said he paid nothing to have the book created and published, although he has already paid for a $30-per-month Midway subscription. Impressed by the speed and results of his project, Reshi shared the experience in a Twitter thread that attracted more than 2,000 comments and 5,800 retweets（转发）. 

Reshi stated that he received great feedback（反馈）from users, who lauded his creative work at first. But the next day, the replies were negative. "There was this incredibly passionate reaction," Reshi said. "At 4 am, I was woken up by my phone ex ploding every two minutes with a new tweet saying things like ‘We hate you'. "

Reshi was taken aback by the outpouring of emotion in response to what was supposed to be a present for some friends' children. He didn't realize he had landed in the heart of a much broader argument. 

Some artists have expressed concern that AI art generators are stealing their work in response to Reshi's book. And some artists claim that their work has been used without their permission to train Al picture generators. 

"I wouldn't even call myself an author," Reshi said. "The AI is essentially the ghostwriter（代笔者）, and the other AI is the illustrator. " But he thought the process was creative. 

While conquering the world's swimming pools in the late 1990s and the 2000s, Amanda Beard had already included breathing exercises in her training. Several years after the end of her athletic career, she discovered walking meditation. Today the seven-time US Olympic medalist practices walking meditation in nature, around the house, or while walking the dog. It's a daily practice with the focused mindfulness of meditation that contributes positively to every aspect of her life, she says. 

You don't need equipment or a designated space to start. The idea of a walking meditation is to pay attention to the way your body feels, noticing things like the sky, trees, tuning into all of your senses. This means you can meditate "on the go" in the countryside, in the city, in your backyard, and virtually anywhere. A simple, 10-minute walking meditation for beginners requires that you just start at ease. Consider what you hear, smell and see. Think about how your feet touch the ground. Fully focus on these feelings. 

A report in Health Promotion Perspectives also found that walking meditation can improve your balance, adjust your heart rate, boost your mental focus, and help you battle anxiety and depression. "The benefits of meditation are many," says Dr. Schramm, a board-certified family physician and meditation teacher. "When we do this over and over again, we train the brain to focus on only one thing at a time and this increases both our blood flow and actual neuronal (神经元) changes within our brains. "

"The magic of meditation is to be able to help you connect with yourself; meditation shouldn't feel a certain way," says Tara Stiles, a yoga and wellness expert. It's a common mistake in meditation: People fear a wandering mind. "A wandering mind is completely normal," Stiles says. "Even experienced meditators aren't sitting there never having a thought, but when they have the thought they choose to guide themselves back to their breath instead of getting frustrated.