On a Saturday morning earlier this September, the world got its first look at the Strati. This electric vehicle is unlike any other currently on the road. It rolls on four wheels, but its body and chassis(底盘) weren't built in a factory. Instead, Strati's designers used a technology called 3-D printing. It created those parts of the car in one piece, from the ground up.

    “Compared to a typical vehicle on the road, the Strati definitely looks different,” says Greg Schroeder, a senior research engineer at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. He did not work on the new car. His organization studies trends and changes in th e auto industry.

    It took 44 hours to print the new car at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago. Over the next few days, the car's designers installed additional parts. These included the car's engine, brakes and tires. Then, early on September 13, Jay Rogers climbed into the car, started its engine and drove the vehicle onto the street. Rogers helped found Local Motors. It's the Arizona-based company behind the Strati. Two weeks later, his team printed a second Strati, and just as fast, at a fair in New York City.

    Justin Fishkin, a local Motors official, sees the Strati as a window into the future. Today, car buyers are limited in their choice of a vehicle. They can order only what car companies have already designed. But in the future, he says, you may be able to design your own car online and then get it printed to order.

    Manufacturing experts say 3-D printing has begun to revolutionize how they make things. The technology has been around for decades. But these machines used to be so expensive that only large companies could afford them. In the last few years, though, that has changed. Many of the machines are now inexpensive enough for small companies—or even individuals —to own. Some local libraries make them available to the public. High Schools are beginning to use them in classrooms. Wide access to these printers means people can now design and print a wide variety of new things.

    The car's printer is a one-of-a-kind device.

    The technology behind the 3-D printer used in Chicago is an example of additive manufacturing. This proce ss builds solid objects, slice by slice, from the bottom up. (“Strati” means layers, in Italian.) A mechanical arm moves a nozzle from one side to another, back and forth. As it moves, the nozzle deposits a liquid—often melted plastic or metal (but it could be food, concrete or even cells) —that quickly hardens or bonds to become solid or semi-solid. This creates a single, thin layer. Once a layer is complete, the printer starts depositing the next one.

     “There's a lot of interest in 3-D printing in the auto industry,” says Schroeder. Right now, the technology is particularly useful for building models of cars or car parts.

    To compete with current auto manufacturers, the 3-D printer would have to increase in a hurry, Schroeder says. By contrast, he notes, a Ford F-150 pickup truck rolls off an assembly line at a rate of roughly one per minute. To print as many Stratis would require many more printers. Schroeder says he doesn't see 3-D printing soon taking over for such high-volume manufacturing. But, he adds, “Who knows what will h appen in the long term?”

    Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee designed the 3-D printer used in Chicago. Lonnie Love, a research scientist at the lab, led the effort.

    Additive manufacturing often is slow and expensive. It also may produce materials that are unreliable, Love says. So for two years, his team searched for ways to make 3-D printing better. They built new machines and tested them over and over.

    All of that work paid off: their new machine is fast and uses less expensive material than earlier printers. In addition, it prints a plastic embedded with fibers of carbon to produce a stronger material. This helps ensure the material won't crack or break under pressure.

    US president Donald Trump has popularized the phrase “fake news” But not too long ago these words in combination would have meant little to everyday English speakers.

    Anatoly Liberman, a German, writes about the origins of the word “fake”. The word, it turns out, has a very dark past. The best guess for how “fake” became mainstream, argues Liberman, is that it was a kind used by thieves in the London underworld. But“how it got there, nobody in the world knows, and probably nobody will ever know,” he tells Quartz.

    Liberman is a professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of Word Origins and How We Know Them. He writes that early records of “fake” as an English adjective appeared around the middle of the 18th century. The word likely comes from cant, or thief jargon(行话).

    The OED mentions “fake” as a verb starting in 1819, which basically meant'to do”in jargon, but also“to kill , wound, or rob”. An entry from a dictionary that year reads :

    “To fake any person or place, to rob them ;to fake a person may also imply to shoot, wound, or cut; to fake a man out and out, is to kill him.”

    Liberman traces the word next to Chares Dickens, who used “cly-faker”，where “cly” means pocket, in Oliver Twist. This is how he believes knowledge of “fake”as a word that means to steal, spread. Eventually it became a commonplace English word.

    The quick action of Nick helped five people escape a fire on Hope Road. Nick said he usually left his house about 5:30 a.m. to do morning exercises, but that day he decided to stay at home to get his daughter ready for school. As he looked at his neighbor's house, he realized that it was on fire. "I saw smoke and flames and ran over and started beating on the side of the house shouting, 'Your house is on fire! Your house is on fire!'" Nick remembered it was at about 9 a.m. that the firefighters put out the fire.

    Beverly Penny and her husband, Clark, along with their younger daughters, were sleeping in the living room, next to the kitchen, when they heard Nick beating on the walls. She opened the bedroom door and black smoke came in. She managed to get her kids out. Her dog tried to hide under the bed, but Penny caught it by the leg and threw it out of the door. However, chickens in one of the rooms weren't so lucky.

    Firefighters got the call at about 7:05 a.m. "When we arrived with our fire trucks, there were heavy flames outside on the house," Jerry said. He called Nick a hero, saying that without his quick responses(回应) the result could have been much worse. "The firefighters were fast," Nick said. "They arrived here within about three minutes."

    "They did a great job, and I can't thank them enough," Penny said, then looked at what remained in the house and shook her head as tears rolled down in her eyes. "Everything I have is gone. Luckily nobody was hurt in the fire." She said the fire could have been caused by an electrical problem. "We've been having problems with mice, so that we could have had something to do with it," she added.

    Not all of George H.W. Bush's extended family members were invited to his Washington D.C. memorial service.

    Nearly a week after many paid their respects at the Washington National Cathedral, Sharon Bush, who was married to the 41st president's son Neil from 1980 to 2003, told Page Six that she was allegedly unable to attend the funeral after she was told by her ex-husband's secretary that there were not enough seats.

    "I was going to take the train down. I wanted to pay my respects. But I paid my respects by raising three wonderful children during a 23-year marriage," Sharon told the Outlet.

    Neil and Sharon share three children: son Pierce and daughters Ashley and Lauren Bush Lauren, who gave a reading at the funeral, where the father of three attended with his second wife Maria Andrews, whom he wed in 2004.

    While the D.C. memorial service was taking place, Sharon recalled having lunch with Lady Gaga's mother Cynthia Germanotta and publishing heiress Anne Hearst.

    Though she was snubbed from the funeral, Sharon shared photos on Instagram to honor her former father-in-law. "My girls Lauren and Ashley read scriptures at their grandfather's funeral. I feel so proud of them. May he RIP." The mother of three captioned a photo of Lauren and Ashley.

    "May he RIP," Sharon also posted on Instagram, speaking of their children's upbringing. Sharon credited herself for raising them to be charitable and public servants. "I taught them everything they know about 'points of light' by taking them to soup kitchens and homeless shelters from the time they were 4 years old. I didn't want them spoiled," she said, referencing the public service nonprofit — Points of Light, for which her ex-husband serves as chairman of the board of directors. "I did this. Neil was never around. He was always traveling," Sharon added.

    About 6 years ago, I was on a plane next to a woman. I was tired and wanted to take a nap. But before I could go into "ignore pattern", she tapped me on the shoulder to introduce herself.

    "Hi, my name is Helga!"

    We got to talking and eventually it came up that I had started an organization in high school called R.A.K.E.(Random Acts of Kindness, Etc.). As I described what we did, Helga got very serious and told me that she admired me for that. She told me a story about the last time she had flown. She was on the way to Arizona because she had gotten sudden news that her dad's health was on the decline. Later her father's physician called to inform her that her dad had rather suddenly passed away. For the 3-hour plane ride, she sat in silence around strangers.

    When she arrived at the airport in Arizona, she walked to the nearest wall, sat down, and cried. And here is the part I'll never forget about Helga's story. For 2 hours she sat and wept while thousands walked to and fro in the airport. Helga looked at me and said, "Houston, not a single person stopped and asked if I was okay that day." It was that day that I realized how much we need each other. It was that day I realized that kindness isn't normal.

    Kindness isn't normal. That has stuck with me all these years especially now. I work in schools nationwide speaking about sympathy, kindness, empathy (同理心) and love. I'm reminded all the time that, for many of us, kindness is not usually our default setting. We spend so much time worrying about our problems, our lives, our insecurities, getting to our flight so we walk by or ignore people in need of help.

    So, I've made it my mission to do my part in sharing stories with students, teachers, and parents about our need for character and sympathy. I'm always be on the lookout for the little opportunities that surround me every day to do something nice.

    Metal-organic frameworks(MOFs) are compounds that are set to solve some tough challenges: producing water in the desert, removing greenhouse gases from the air and storing dangerous gases more safely.

    The Arizona desert is really dry. Anyone stuck in it without water would die from dehydration (脱水) within three days. Unless, that is, they had one of Omar Yaghi's next-generation water harvesters. Although daytime humidity(湿度)is only about 10 per cent, this rises to 40 per cent at night, which means there's enough water in the atmosphere to support life — if it can be transformed into liquid form.

    That's exactly what Yaghi's device does. It's a box about the size of a small microwave oven designed to suck the humidity from the air at night and turn it into drinking water the next day using only the heat of the sun as its power source. What makes it work is a special material called a metal-organic framework (MOF), which at normal temperatures attracts water molecules (分子) onto its surface of its internal pores(细孔). Warm it up and the water is released, each harvest producing one-third of a cup of pure drinking water.

    "With further improvements, a device, the size of a washing machine, could produce enough water for the basic needs of a household," says Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California. One-third of the world's population lacks safe drinking water; for them such a device could be a lifesaver.

    These crystalline cluster(结晶群)of metals, such as aluminum or magnesium, linked by organic molecules can be made into materials with an extremely high absorption ability, attracting specific molecules to their surface. In this way, MOFs cling to a variety of liquids and gases.

MOFs work thanks to their unique structure—large quantities of nanometer-sized internal spaces. In fact one MOF has so many pores that they would cover an area as large as six football fields. MOFs are also extremely stable light and have many different uses: their molecular structure can be varied to attract specific molecules, such as water, and their pores can be designed to best store them. Adding a small amount of heat or pressure causes the MOF to release what it is holding. More than 70,000 different MOFs have been produced to date for various applications.