The Indian government may use 3D paintings as virtual (虚拟的) speed-breakers on major highways and roads, in an attempt to check speeding and careless driving, and eventually make its deadly roads a little safer. “We are trying out 3D paintings used as virtual speed breakers to avoid unnecessary requirements of speed breakers (减速带),” India's transport minister Nitin Gadkari tweeted.

    The visual illusions (幻象) are supposed to encourage drivers to slow down automatically. Earlier this month, India bad ordered the removal of all speed breakers from highways, which are considered to be a danger to safety for high-speed vehicles.

    India has the highest number of road accident deaths in the world According to the World Health Organization, over 200,00 people are killed by road accidents due to poor application of road safety laws. This is considerably higher than its official figures of 141,526 for 2014.

    The use of visual illusions as speed breakers was first pioneered in the American city of Philadelphia in 2008, as part of a campaign against speeding motorist. The technique has also been tried out in China to create floating 3D crossings.

    India, cities such as Ahmadabad and Chennai have already experimented with 3D zebra crossings in the last one year. In Ahmadabad for instance, two artists, mother and daughter have painted 3D crosswalks in the first few months of this year. The artists say their motto is “to increase the attention of drivers”, and that the concept has been successfully tested in zones where accidents easily occur on a highway.

    However, critics argue that once divers know that these speed briers are visual illusions, they may ignore them. Others also point out that India's decision does not consider the safety of a large walkers. In the end, the new policy may be just one step towards improving road safety.

    Popular music in America is what every student likes. Students carry small radios with earphones and listen to music before class, after class, and at lunch. Students with cars buy large speakers and play the music loudly as they drive on the street.

    Adult(成年人) drivers listen to music on the car radio as they drive to work. They also listen to the news about sports, the weather, and the life of American people. Most of the radio programmers（节目）are music.

    Pop or popular music singers make much money. They make a CD or tape which radio stations use in many places. Once the popular singer is heard all over the country, young people buy his or her tapes. Some of the money from these tapes goes to the singer. Wherever the singer goes, all the young people want to meet him or her. Now the singer has become a national star.

    There are other kinds of music that are important to Americans. One is called folk music. It tells stories about the common life of Americans. Another is called western or country music. This is started by cowboys（牛仔）who would sing at night to the cows they were watching. Today, any music about country life and the love between a country boy and his girl is called western or country music.

    Here's an idea whose time has come: A flu shot that doesn't require an actual shot.

    For the first time, researchers have tested a flu vaccine patch (疫苗贴) in a human clinical trial and found that it delivered as much protection as a traditional injection with a needle. Doctors and public health experts have high hopes that it will increase the number of people who get immunized (免疫的) against the flu.

    Seasonal flu is responsible for up to half a million deaths around the world each year according to the World Health Organization. A team led by Georgia Tech engineer Mark Prausnitz has come up with an alternative method that uses “microneedles”. These tiny needles are so small that 100 of them, arranged in order on a patch, can fit under your thumb (拇指).Yet they're big enough to hold vaccine for three types of flu.

    None of the study volunteers had serious side effects. The groups that got patches had mild skin reactions that were not seen in the regular needle group, while the volunteers in the regular needle group were more likely to experience pain. Overall, 70 percent of the volunteers who got vaccine patches said they'd rather use them again than get a traditional flu shot. The study authors declared it a success on all fronts.

    The biggest beneficiaries could be people in low- and middle-income countries, where flu vaccines are hard to come by. Reducing pain is nice, but other benefits—the patch costs less，is easier to transport, doesn't require refrigeration, can be self - administered and doesn't cause waste of needles—are even better.

    “Microneedle Patches have the potential to become ideal candidates for vaccination programs,” wrote Katja Hoschler and Maria Zambon of Public Health England.

    Ownership used to be about as straightforward as writing a cheque. If you bought something, you owned it. If it broke, you fixed it. If you no longer wanted it, you sold it or threw it away. In the digital age, however, ownership has become more slippery. Since the coming of smartphones, consumers have been forced to accept that they do not control the software in their devices; they are only licensed to use it. As a digital chain is wrapped ever more tightly around more devices, such as cars and thermostats, who owns and who controls which objects is becoming a problem. Buyers should be aware that some of their most basic property rights are under threat.

    The trend is not always harmful. Manufacturers seeking to restrict what owners do with increasingly complex technology have good reasons to protect their copyright, ensure that their machines do not break down, support environmental standards and prevent hacking. Sometimes companies use their control over a product's software for the owners' benefit. When Hurricane Irma hit Florida this month, Tesla remotely updated the software controlling the batteries of some models to give owners more range to escape the storm.

    But the more digital strings are attached to goods, the more the balance of control leans towards producers and away from owners. That can be inconvenient. Picking a car is hard enough, but harder still if you have to dig up the instructions that tell you how use is limited and what data you must give. If the products are intentionally designed not to last long, it can also be expensive. Already, items from smartphones to washing machines have become extremely hard to fix, meaning that they are thrown away instead of being repaired.

    Privacy is also at risk. Users become terrified when iRobot, a robotic vacuum cleaner, not only cleans the floor but also creates a digital map of the inside of a home that can then be sold to advertisers (though the manufacturer says it has no intention of doing so). Cases like this should remind people how jealously they ought to protect their property rights and control who uses the data that is collected.

    Ownership is not about to go away, but its meaning is changing. This requires careful inspection. Devices, by and large, are sold on the basis that they enable people to do what they want. To the extent they are controlled by somebody else, that freedom is compromised.

    Jim Denevan is an amazing artist whose work is admired by all, but owned by none — that's because all of Jim's art is created on an unusual canvas(画布)— the soft sand. He sometimes spends days working on a piece, only to see it washed away by the sea or a storm and that is just the way he likes it.

    Denevan discovered his artistic talents about ten years ago, when he was wandering aimlessly on the beach with a stick. He ended up drawing a 12-foot-long fish. Since then, Jim has traveled over 1,800 miles while creating over 600 pieces of sand art.

    Over the years, his drawings have become bigger, but the tools he uses haven't changed — All he needs is a stick, a garden rake (耙子)and most importantly, his lively imagination!

    Just like any good artist, Jim is quite particular about the "quality" of his canvas, sometimes walking for miles, looking for perfect sand. His latest piece of work, which is also the world's largest freelance (自由职业的)drawing, was created in the desert sand of Nevada. It took Jim three trips, eight days and over 100 miles of walking to create this 3-mile work of art. It took the storm just one night to destroy it! However, Jim says he actually enjoys watching the waves or rain, wash his paintings away.

    Jim's art has become very popular over the years and was even the topic of a documentary named "Sandman" in 2015. Jim Denevan is not just about art in the sand — he is also an excellent chef and founder of an organization called "Outstanding in the Field", whose mottois to celebrate food at its source. Accordingly, group dining events are held outdoors on farms, with the diners being treated to a delicious meal. The events, which are held in different farms throughout America, are always sold out the minute the schedule is announced.

What made it particularly terrifying was its similarity to the mandrake, a plant that thought to have come from Hell. What earned the plant its awful reputation was its roots which looked like a dried-up human body occupied by evil spirits. Though the tomato and the mandrake were quite different except that both had bright red or yellow fruit, the general population considered them one and the same, too terrible to touch.

Cautious Europeans long ignored the tomato, and until the early 1700s most of the Western people continued to drag their feet. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well-known plant expert wrote that the most interesting part of an afternoon tea at her father's house had been the" introduction of this wonderful new fruit - or is it a vegetable?" As late as the twentieth century some writers still classed tomatoes with mandrakes as an "evil fruit".

But in the end tomatoes carried the day. The hero of the tomato was an American named Robert Johnson, and when he was publicly going to eat the tomato in 1820, people journeyed for hundreds of miles to watch him drop dead. "What are you afraid of?" he shouted. "I'll show you fools that these things are good to eat!" Then he bit into the tomato. Some people fainted. But he survived and, according to a local story set up a tomato-canning factory.