Suddenly another thought went through Kate's mind like an electric shock. An express train was due to go past about thirty minutes later. If it were not stopped, that long train, full of passengers, would fall into the stream. “Someone must go to the station and warn the station-master,” Kate thought. But who was to go? She would have to go herself. There was no one else.

    In wind and rain she started on her difficult way. Soon she was at the bridge that crossed the Des Moines River, a bridge also built of wood, just like the bridge across Honey Creek. The storm had not washed this away, but there was no footpath across it. She would have to cross it by stepping from sleeper(枕木) to sleeper. With great care she began the dangerous crossing, sometimes on her hands and knees, hardly daring to look down between the sleepers into the wild flood waters below. If she should slip, she would fall between the sleepers, into the rapidly flowing stream.

    At last-she never knew how long it had taken her-she felt solid ground under her feet. But there was no time to rest. She still had to run more than half a mile and had only a few minutes left. Unless she reached the station before the express did, many, many lives would be lost.

    She did reach the station just as the train came into sight. Fortunately the station-master was standing outside. “The bridge is down! Stop the train! Oh, please stop it!” Kate shouted breathlessly.

    The station-master went pale. He rushed into the station building and came back with a signal light. He waved the red light as the train came into the station. It was not a second too early.

    News anchors(主播) must have been reluctant to read out the following news: Xin Xiaomeng began working as the world's first female artificial(人工的) intelligence news anchor at Xinhua News Agency on Sunday, three months after a male robot joined the profession.

    Unlike previous news robots though, Xin does not read news like a cold machine; she reads it almost like a human being. The muscles on her face stretch and relax-and her reactions change-as she continues reading. That's why many news anchors were worried: Will AI replace us in the near future?

    To find the answer, we have to analyse the technologies that support Xin at her job. Three key technologies are used to support Xin. First, samples of human voices are collected and synthesized (合成). This is followed by the collection and synthesis of human muscle movement samples. And third the voices and movements are married in a way that when the Al news anchor reads, the micro -electric motors behind her face move to make her expressions seem more human.

    Yet we need a thorough knowledge of deep leaning technology to make a robot imitate a person's voice. The developer needs to collect tens of thousands of pieces of pronunciations, input them into the machine and match them with the text or the Al to lean and read. The process for imitating facial movements is similar. The developer has to analyse the movements of the 53 muscles in the human face, make a model set from the collected data for the AI news anchor to lean, and imitate the movements of facial muscles via programs

    Both the technologies used to make Xin's performance impressive are mature. The real difficulty lies in the third -the technology to match the pronunciations with facial movements so that Xin expressions vary according to the content of the news report. In fact, Xins expressions don't always change according to the content. As a result, her expressions look anything but human. Actually. AI is still no match for human qualities.

    If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America-and their Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic- wrapped snacks, their plastic waste would likely still be around four centuries later. Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world's oceans today, waiting to be eaten by some fish or oyster, and finally perhaps by one of us.

    Because plastic wasn't invented until the late 19th century, and its production only really took off around 1950, we have a mere 9.2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a surprising 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin-the figure that shocked the scientists who published the numbers in 2017.

    No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean, the earth's last sink. In 2015, Jenna Jam beck a University of Georgia engineering professor, caught everyone's attention with a rough estimate between 5.3 million and 14 million tons of plastic waste each year just come from coastal regions.

    Meanwhile, ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine(海洋的）animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it. Some are harmed visibly, stuck by abandoned things made of plastic. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, now eat microplas-tics, the bits smaller than one-fifth of an inch across.

    "This isn't a problem where we don't know what the solution is, "says Ted Siegler, a Vermont resource economist who has spent more than 25 years working with developing nations on garbage." We know how to pick up garbage. Anyone can do it. We know how to deal with it. We know how to recycle. "It's a matter of building the necessary institutions and systems, he says, ideally before the ocean turns into a thin soup of plastic.

    We have encountered a crisis around the corner. You mean global warming? The world economy? No, the decline of reading. People are just not doing it anymore, especially the young. Who's responsible?

Actually, it's more like, what is responsible? The Internet, of course, and everything that comes with it – Facebook, Twitter. You can write your own list.

    There's been a warning about the imminent death of literate civilization for a long time. In the 20th century, first it was the movies, then radio, then television that seemed to spell doom for the written world. None did. Reading survived; in fact it not only survived, it has flourished. The world is more literate than ever before – there are more and more readers, and more and more books.

    The fact that we often get our reading material online today is not something we should worry over. The electronic and digital revolution of the last two decades has arguably shown the way forward for reading and for writing. Take the arrival of e-book readers as an example.

    Devices like Kindle make reading more convenient and are a lot more environmentally friendly than the traditional paper book.

    As technology makes new ways of writing possible, new ways of reading are possible. Interconnectivity allows for the possibility of a reading experience that was barely imaginable before. Where traditional books had to make do with photographs and illustrations, an e-book can provide readers with an unlimited number of links: to texts, pictures, and videos. In the future, the way people write novels, history, and philosophy will resemble nothing seen in the past.

    On the other hand, there is the danger of trivialization. One Twitter group is offering its followers single-sentence-long "digests" of the great novels. War and Peace in a sentence? You must be joking. We should fear the fragmentation of reading. There is the danger that the high-speed connectivity of the Internet will reduce our attention span—that we will be incapable of reading anything of length or which requires deep concentration.

    In such a fast-changing world, in which reality seems to be remade each day, we need the ability to focus and understand what is happening to us. This has always been the function of literature and we should be careful not to let it disappear. Our society needs to be able to imagine the possibility of someone utterly in tune with modern technology but able to make sense of a dynamic, confusing world.

    In the 15th century, Johannes Guttenberg's invention of the printing press in Europe had a huge impact on civilization. Once upon a time the physical book was a challenging thing. We should remember this before we assume that technology is out to destroy traditional culture.

    We spend a great amount of time listening to music. Most college students listen to music at least three or four times a week, and more than 50 percent of them go to at least one concert per year.

    According to new research, we may be born liking music, because human beings are born to find certain combinations of sounds attractive. For example, young children can recognize a familiar Song even when its key is changed. Similarly, they respond with more emotions to their mothers' singing than to their mothers' speech. Careful analysis of mothers' child-directed songs indicates that each mother's songs remain stable from one "performance" to the next, and this may encourage children's engagement with the songs.

    Research with adults suggests that music catches our attention by activating(激活) brain pathways that are most suited to processing music than to processing other kinds of sound. Specifically, music appreciation relies on the auditory cortex(听觉皮层) on the right side of the brain, which is specialized to process sound that characterizes music-in contrast to the left auditory cortex, which processes the stop-and-start bursts of sound that characterize speech.

    Although some Psychologists remain skeptical about whether music may have powerful effects on our thinking, a number of studies have shown that listening to music can increase people's spatial reasoning abilities Furthermore, It is clear that music can greatly influence our emotions. Personally significant music activates areas of the brain associated with pleasure and reward, the same areas that are activated by sex and good food.

    Researchers do not agree about how humans' abilities to process and enjoy music have come into being. Anyway, the next time you enjoy listening to a piece of music, remember that the most complex pieces of audio equipment are the ones between your headphones.

    Science is finaly beginning to embrace animals who were, for a long time, considered second-class citizens.

    As Annie Potts of Canterbury University has noted, chickens distinguish among one hundred chicken faces and recognize familiar individuals even after months of separation. When given problems to solve, they reason: hens trained to pick colored buttons sometimes choose to give up an immediate food reward for a slightly later (and better) one. Healthy hens may aid friends, and mourn when those friend die.

    Pigs respond meaningful to human symbols. When a research team led by Candace Croney at Penn State University carried wooden blocks marked with X and O symbols around pigs, only the O carriers offered food to the animals. The pigs soon ignored the X carriers in favor of the O's. Then the team switched from real-life objects to T-shirts printed with X or O symbols. Still, the pigs walked only toward the O-shirted people: they had transferred their knowledge to a two-dimensional format, a not inconsiderable feat of reasoning.

    I've been guilty of prejudiced expectations, myself. At the start of my career almost four decades ago, I was firmly convinced that monkeys and apes out-think and out-feel other animals. They're other primates(灵长目动物), after all, animals from our own mammalian(哺乳动物的) class. Fairly soon, I came to see that along with our closest living relatives, whales too are masters of cultural learning, and elephants express profound joy and mourning with their social companions. Long-term studies in the wild on these mammals helped to fuel a viewpoint shift in our society: the public no longer so easily accepts monkeys made to undergo painful procedure kin laboratories, elephants forced to perform in circuses, and dolphins kept in small tanks at theme parks.

    Over time, though, as I began to broaden out even further and explore the inner lives of fish, chickens, pigs, goats, and cows, I started to wonder: Will the new science of "food animals" bring an ethical (伦理的) revolution in terms of who we eat? In other words, will our ethics start to catch up with the development of our science?

    Animal activists are already there, of course, committed to not eating these animals. But what about the rest of us? Can paying attention to the thinking and feeling of these animals lead us to make changes in who we eat?