You have probably been told by your high school instructor that writing is an important and practical skill. However, you may not be convinced that the ability to write will be important in your own future. If so, you will be surprised at the results of a recent survey by the National Institute of Education. More than four thousand working men and women who had graduated fifteen years earlier were asked to name the courses they would have taken in college if they had known better. The designer of the survey expected people to name courses in computer science, mathematics, or business. But the course most often mentioned was writing.

    If you already have a job, you are probably not surprised at their answers. Many jobs require the ability to write. Despite the increasing use of the telephone and the computer, much information must be communicated in writing.Some ten million people—managers, engineers, sales representatives, and many others— write regularly as part of their jobs. Summaries, reports, reports, letters and speeches are required in today's work world. The ability to write, therefore, is an important skill. The successful individual is almost always the one who can communicate successfully in writing.

    Writing communicates your thoughts and feelings to others; it also tells you something about yourself. Maybe this is what Eldridge Cleaver had in mind in his autobiography, “I started to write... to save myself...I had to seek out the truth... I had to find out who I am and what I want to be ,what type of man I should be ,and what I could do to become the best of which I was capable.”

    AlphaGo is a computer program that plays the board game Go.

    In March, 2016, the pride of humankind was crushed (粉碎) by a computer. Google's AlphaGo defeated the South Korean grandmaster (围棋大师) Lee Sedol four games to one, as the world looked on with shock and awe (敬畏). Artificial intelligence (AI, 人工智能) had suddenly reached a new and unexpected height.

    But as smart as AlphaGo is, it's no longer the best Go “player” in the world. Google's artificial intelligence group, DeepMind, has created the next generation of its Go-playing program, called AlphaGo Zero. The new AI program is unique in the way it learned to play Go. Instead of learning from thousands of human matches, as its predecessor (前任) did, AlphaGo Zero mastered Go in just two days without any human knowledge of the game and defeated AlphaGo by day three, reported The Guardian. It then went on to defeat AlphaGo 100 games to zero.

    To learn how to play Go, AlphaGo Zero played millions of matches against itself using only the basic rules of the game to rapidly create its own knowledge of it. Like the previous version, it used “reinforcement (增强) learning to become its own teacher,” according to DeepMind's website.

    “It's more powerful than previous approaches,” David Silver, AlphaGo's lead researcher, told The Guardian, “because by not using human data, or human expertise in any fashion, we've removed the constraints (约束) of human knowledge and it is able to create knowledge itself.”

    AlphaGo Zero's approach to self-learning is a significant advancement in AI that could be applied to help solve some of the world's biggest problems, according to a recent research report published in the journal Nature. For example, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis argues that AlphaGo Zero could probably find cures for a number of serious diseases within weeks, according to The Telegraph. Indeed, the AI is now being used to study protein folding, which is connected to diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

    So now that AI has exceeded (超过) the bounds of human knowledge, perhaps the question is not about what AI can learn from humans, but what humans can learn from AI. We can only wait and see.

    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.

    Should you work out in the gym in the morning instead of in the evening? It all depends. Of course, there are advantages of working out(运动) in the morning.

    You will increase your energy for the rest of the day. “Morning workouts result in better energy levels throughout the day and give you more mental sharpness,” says Dr. Cedrie Byrant, Chief Science Officer of the American Council on Exercise.

    Here is another advantage. In 2017, health researchers found that exercising in the morning helps you sleep better at night. According to the study, in all cases, those who exercised at 7:00am experienced about a 10 percent drop in blood pressure that carried through the rest of the day. They also had about a 25 percent drop in blood pressure at night, slept longer and had more beneficial sleep cycles than when they exercised at other times of the day.

    However, there are disadvantages, too.

    If you are not an early riser, getting out of the bed in the morning can be very difficult. Byran says that if you're not used to exercising in the morning and force yourself to get up, you may not put as much effort into the exercise as you would later in the day. Also, if you aren't careful, you can damage your sleep schedule, which can lead to insufficient sleep.

    Besides, hitting the gym before work can cause a challenge in terms of scheduling. If you work a 9-to-5 job, getting ready for work and going to work can cut your morning workout short, Byrant notes.

    To sum up, it has both advantages and disadvantages. If it suits you better to work out in the morning, you can do so.

    Standing in line for the latest iPhone at the Apple store, queuing for tickets to the match or even just waiting at the post office might just have got a lot easier.

Japanese car-maker Nissan announces that it has just the thing to relieve the painful legs of tired queuers.

    The new system of self-driving chairs is designed to detect when someone at the front of the queue is called, and automatically move everyone else one step forward in line.

    The new invention is shown in a company video, which shows a busy restaurant with customers waiting outside. In the video, diners are sitting in a row of chairs, but will not have to stand when the next hungry diner is called to a table. Instead, the chairs, equipped with autonomous technology that detects the seat ahead, move along a path toward the front of the line. When the person at the front of the queue is called, the empty chair at the front can sense it is empty and so moves out of line. Cameras on the remaining chairs then sense the movement and follow automatically.

    "The system, which is similar to the kind used in Nissan's autonomous vehicle technology, will be tested at select restaurants in Japan this year," Nissan said. "It appeals to anyone who has queued for hours outside a crowded restaurant: it rids the boredom and physical pain of standing in line," Nissan added.

    Although Tokyo has some 160,000 restaurants, long queues are not uncommon. Chosen restaurants that meet the criteria will be able to show the chairs outside their restaurants next year. Nissan also released a short video showing the chairs being used in an art gallery, moving slowly in front of the various paintings to let viewers appreciate the art without the need to stand up.

    One of the great concerns that ornithologists have is that climate change will throw the nesting activities of birds out of sync (同步) with the availability of food for the raising of chicks. For one species, the pied flycatcher, a new study shows that some of its clan are proving to be remarkably adaptable.

    Upon returning to Europe from their African wintering grounds, the flycatchers time their egg-laying to the short period when juicy caterpillars (毛毛虫) are most abundant. During the past three decades this caterpillar peak has advanced by three weeks. Pied flycatchers initially had difficulty adjusting, but over time have started laying their eggs earlier to grab the caterpillars. Some, though, are doing a lot more to improve their reproductive chances of success, according to a study in the Journal of Avian Biology led by Christian Both of the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands.

    Like most bird species, pied flycatchers have long been thought to lay a single clutch of eggs during the breeding (繁殖) season. This was widely considered to be a trait that wouldn't change. Then, in 2007, a Swiss team led by Dr Ravussin began to suspect that clutch numbers were flexible. They discovered a female pied flycatcher that immediately produced a second brood with a new male after raising an early set of chicks. Aware of Dr Ravussin's findings, Dr Both wondered whether this was just a single, odd instance or if second broods might be happening on a larger scale driven by the arrival of earlier springs. So, they cooperate to delve into the data to find out.

    The team studied pied-flycatcher populations in the Netherlands and Switzerland that were known to be among the earliest nesting members of the species. In total, they tracked the egg-laying times and hatchling-rearing success of 8,848 breeding pairs in the Netherlands and1, 372 in Switzerland between1980 and 2018. They found that since 2006, 11 cases of second broods were observed, all of them among the earliest breeders in both populations.

    Further studies ruled out that the birds were making up for a failed first attempt at raising chicks or that the second group of nestlings suffered.

    With no obvious downside to laying a double clutch, Drs Both and Ravussin conclude that the birds are attempting to double their annual reproductive output. While this behavior is still rare, they argue that if the tendency is driven by heritable genes (which it may well be), then a succession of early springs could make the strategy much more common.