It is sad to learn that fewer of us now own pets. According to Mintel, just 56% of UK households（家庭）today include a pet, compared with 63% in 2012. It is down to our smaller homes. The housing crisis（危机）is taking away one of our life's joys: pets.

    Pets can help us get over serious illness. Pets lessen our anxiety. Pets can be a godsend for people experiencing various forms of mental disorders. As if all that were not enough, pets also help their owners get a date because of complex psychological reasons.

    There do, of course, remain oppositions to the very idea of pets. The charity PET A puts it thus: “This selfish desire to own animals and receive love from them causes immeasurable suffering, which results from selling or giving them away casually, and taking away their opportunity to enjoy their natural behavior.” This is undoubtedly true in some situations. But seen from a different point of view, there's something quite lovely about the story of people and their companion animals.

    What was once a relationship based only on the animal's functional effects—its ability to kill pests（害虫）, guard houses, and the like—has developed into something much more about care and love.

    We share 84% of our DNA with dogs. We share 90% of our DNA with mice, for good ness sake. I have no idea how that works. But still pets remind（提醒）us we're part something bigger. Pets break down the barriers between us and the animal kingdom. We may teach pets to roll over, stand up, order takeaways and so on. But they teach us much more: that life is actually really quite short and so should be filled as much as possible with life-giving experiences.

    When we were very small, we realized that having friends was important. Some of us even had imaginary(想象中的)friends. The need for friends continued as we grew into our teens. Friends played a big part in forming our personalities(性格). As adults, it is still important for us to have friends.

    True friends are people who like us though we made mistakes and who listen to us and tell us the truth. Friends support our decisions and tell us when we're foolish. They laugh with us and share our sadness. They are our partners and share interests with us. They stimulate us when we are feeling down. They are people we aren't afraid of telling our secret wishes to or what is really on our minds.

    Friends are our supporters. When you can depend on friends, you feel safe and warm. Friends offer acceptance and emotional(情感的)support. At times, they also help with our everyday lives, cooking a meal, doing chores, or giving us a lift when we need one. Friends also are there to offer advice, an ear to listen, or a shoulder to cry on.

    Friends also help us reduce stress. Not only do they listen to us when we feel stressed, but they also discuss what is stressing us. Sharing interests and doing activities with friends help us forget about problems at work or at home. For a short time, we can lose ourselves in a pleasant activity and perhaps laugh and breathe more easily.

    Adopting (领养) a new pet should be an exciting and rewarding experience. But just as all families are different, so are all pets. Learn what to consider before you find your new furry family member.

    All pets require their owner's time, so Theisen, an expert in pet care, says how much time you can give to the pet is the top thing to consider. "If you adopt a 4-year-old cat, she's not going to need the same amount of care as a 9-week-old dog". says Theisen.

    Like dating and finding the perfect partner, you want a pet that shares your interests and activity levels, particularly if you're looking for dogs. "Consider activity levels in the family," says Theisen. "If you're a couch potato, or in other words, a homebody, look for a pet that matches that activity level."

    Some dogs, like Dalmatians and Terriers, can be loud and noisy and demand a more active lifestyle and room to be outside; they might not fit as well in close living situations as more sedentary pets. The Humane Society of the United States encourages potential owners to research books and websites and talk to other pet owners when considering adopting a new pet.

    Theisen says that potential owners should go beyond the first impression of loveliness and watch how the animals interact with them. "There are dogs that will jump to the gate to meet you," says Theisen. "And there are dogs that sit there with their sad doggy eyes — you know they're not going to be high-energy dogs".

    Some exotic pets, like tortoises and parrots, are likely to live longer than dogs and cats — and even their human owners. They can also grow to be much larger than they were when they first came to live with their owners. Owners should make sure that their living situations should be continually updated and also prepare for the animal's future.

    On a recent spring morning. Susan Alexander, a retired government intelligence analyst, left her Maryland home, climbed into her Volkswagen Passat and drove about three miles to pick up two strangers. She battled rush-hour traffic on the Capital Beltway and George Washington Memorial Parkway before dropping them off at Reagan National Airport. She didn't earn a cent for her trouble, and that was the point.

    Alexander is a member of the Silver Spring Time Bank-one of more than 100 such exchanges around the world trying to build community by exchanging time credits for services instead of dollars and cents. "I have time," she said. "I like giving the gift of time to other people."

    In Alexander's case, passengers Mary and Al Liepold were grateful for the ride, but it wasn't charity. Mary, a retired writer and editor for nonprofit organizations, used time credits she banked for editing work and baking. Senior citizens who don't drive, the Liepolds cashed in their credits to catch a flight to Montreal for a five-day vacation.

    Without money changing hands or shifting between virtual accounts, the airport drop-off was more like a coffee party than a taxi ride. Driver and passengers chatted about projects they've completed for the time bank, and no one raised an eyebrow when Mary said she likes "to avoid the conventional economy."

    "The beauty of this is that you make friends," Mary Liepold said. "You don't just get services."

    The Silver Spring Time Bank formed in 2015 and has about 300 members, said co-founder Mary Murphy. Last year, she said, l,000 hours were exchanged for basic home repairs, dog walking, cooking and tailoring, among other services, without the exchange of money. "You get to save that money that you would have spent," she said. "You get to meet somebody else in your community and get to know that person. That's a bonus that's part of an exchange."

    A deal performed partly to make friends would seem to go against classical economics and one of Benjamin Franklin's most memorable sayings: "Time is money." To those at the forefront of modem time-banking, that is the appeal.

    Whales, like all mammals(哺乳动物),need air, and come to the surface to breathe through a blowhole. A drone(无人机)that floats over the blowholes of humpback whales as they are making annual journey along Australia's east coast is being used by Australian scientists for collecting nasal mucus(鼻腔粘液)of whales.

    Vanessa Pirotta, a biologist at Macquarie University says that nasal mucus indicates the health of the whale. "It is the biological mixture that you see as a whale takes a breath as it surfaces from the water," she said. You can hear sounds of sharp breaths as a whale breathes because, after all, they are animals like you and I. So as they take a breath it is a lot of lung bacteria coming out from their lungs, which we can collect to provide a brief idea of whale health.

    Australian researchers have attached a special dish that is used in scientific tests to a drone which flies through the whale's nasal mist. As a whale comes to take a breath—you can actually see it coming to the surface on really good weather days —the drone then lowers, the dish is then opened, collecting nasal mucus for later research.

    The research could help to solve one of the secrets of another impressive creature of the deep —the Southern right whale. Its numbers have recovered on Australia's west coast since hunting became suppressed but its population on the eastern seaboard remains stubbornly low.

    In the past, studies into whale health had to rely on examining whales that were either killed or those whales that had been trapped on a beach. Drones allow scientists to collect nasal mucus from free-swimming whales to gather information in a safe way.

Advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled authentic-sounding speech synthesis (语音合成) to the point that a person can no longer distinguish whether they are talking to another human or a deepfake (深度伪造). If a person's own voice is "cloned" by a third party without their agreement, bad guys can use it to send any message they want.

Computer scientist and engineer Ning Zhang has developed a new method to prevent unauthorized speech synthesis before it takes place: a tool called AntiFake.

Traditional deepfake detection methods only work after the damage is done. However, AntiFake prevents voice data from being synthesized into an audio deepfake beforehand. This tool turns the tables on cybercriminals (网络罪犯) by using similar voice cloning techniques they employ, but for voice protection. The software complicates voice data extraction and feature identification crucial for voice synthesis. "We're using an opposite AI technique originally used by cybercriminals, but now we're using it against them," Zhang explained. "We slightly change the recorded audio, just enough to make it unusable for voice clone training while still sounding natural to humans."

Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at University of Chicago, says that the software, like all digital security systems, will never provide complete protection. But, he adds that it can raise the bar and limit the attack to a smaller group of individuals with significant resources.

AntiFake can already protect shorter voice recordings against cloning. The creators of the tool believe that it could be extended to protect larger audio documents or music from misuse. But the methods and tools that are developed must be continuously adapted because cybercriminals will learn and grow with them.