Noise-cancelling audio instruments have been around for a while now，but one Berlin-based designer believes that blocking “visual noise” is as important，if not more so，as cancelling out unwanted sounds．To this end he has created a simple accessory（配件） called the Focus Cap．

Open work spaces definitely have their benefits，but they come with the drawback of offering employees little to no control over visual distractions(干扰)．With so many people around and so much going on，some of us can easily get disturbed by this information overload and lose focus in what’s really important．That’s where the Focus Cap comes into play．

“As we are still cavemen or mammals kept in an unnatural environment，I believe that only by reclaiming(收回) the normal，stress-free human state through simple tools and techniques can we finally release our actual creative potential and create our meaningful work for a brighter future，”says German designer Hannes Greblin，inventor of the Focus Cap．

After looking at other products designed at minimizing visual distractions，Greblin decided that most of them were either too expensive or too uncomfortable to become mainstream，so he decided to go with something much simpler —a simple cap with a retractable visor (可伸缩的帽沿)．

Greblin’s Focus Cap is really straightforward．You just wear it like a regular cap with the sides of the visor retracted，and just collapse the sides whenever you need to focus on what’s ahead of you．Whether you’re trying to focus on a task in an open work office, trying to study at university，or practicing yoga in a park and trying to ignore stares from strangers，the Focus Cap can help．

To be honest，this whole project sounds like a joke，but the Focus Cap does have its own website where people interested in this unusual accessory can actually sign up for updates on when it will go on sale．Greblin claims it will cost 30 euros($37) plus shipping．

There’s a trend that more city people decide that they want to grow crops and raise some live-stock (家禽). After all, there are few things more satisfying than biting into a bunch of tender, red carrots you grow yourself, or a fresh egg from the backyard.

Most gardeners understand that the soil in big cities is often polluted with lead and know to get their soil tested. But most are pretty clueless about how to prevent other types of pollutants, like heavy metals and asbestos(石棉)from getting into their vegetables.

Part of the problem is that “there might be pollutants that gardeners can’t test for,” says Brent Kim, a program officer. Most soil tests look for lead, cadrniunt(镉)and arsenic(砷). But they don’t test things like chemicals left behind by cars, which might have escaped into the soil.

So if you’re thinking of staring an urban garden, Kim says, once you’ve found a plot of land, you should learn what’s now an empty plot or a backyard might once have been a parking lot, a gas station or a chemical ground. “Knowing its past will give you some idea about what might be in that soil,” he says.

“People tend to think raised beds are going to solve their pollution problem,” Kim says. But polluted soil could easily kicked onto your plants, especially if the beds are low to the ground.

“Another consideration is that you have to be careful about the materials that you’re using to build a raised bed,” Kim says. Recycling wood from an old construction site might seem like a good, eco-friendly idea. But that wood could be treated with chemicals you don’t want touching your fruits and veggies, Kim says. And it’s always a good idea to use gloves while gardening, and wash all your produce thoroughly.

“I see these urban growing spaces as these oases(绿洲)in the middle of these urban environments,” Kim says. “They bring communities together, and they help people save money on fresh produce. Urban growing spaces are amazing. Let’s keep doing this, but let’s do it safely.”

A horse named Nunki died in Bahamian forest in July 2015, marking the end of the Abaco Island horse. But thanks to 21^st-century technology, the extinction may be temporary. Two years on, Milanne Rehor, head of the Wild Horses of Abaco Preservation Society, has received approval from the Bahamian government for an ambitious plan: using Nunki’s DNA to clone the species back into being.

How horses came to the Abaco Islands remains a mystery, but their root can go back to the horses brought by Spanish explorers to the Americas 500 years ago. No Abaco Island horses were born after 1999. When Nunki died, the species disappeared.

“When you get down to the point where there are no more individuals alive of a species, cloning is your only chance,” says Katrin Hinrichs, a vet at Texas A&M University. Cloning extinct animals can work, though it comes with limitations.

Upon Nunki’s death in 2015, Rehor had a vet collect tissue and send the sample to a Texas cloning laboratory, ViaGen.

Cloning is hardly guaranteed, but it is possible. Hinrichs warns, however, that cloning will not save the Abaco Island horse in the long run. Even if it is too late to bring back a herd of pure Abaco Island horses, there’s still value in preserving Nunki’s genes.

Because clones keep genes alive, and cloned horses can breed（繁殖）naturally, “cloning offers an amazing opportunity to improve the gene pool of gene-limited species,” says Hinrichs, Saving Nunki’s genes could one day add outside genetics to a herd that is facing an evolutionary bottleneck. The precise benefits Abaco genes could give aren’t known, says Gus Cothran, a vet at Texas A&M University. However, when Cothran compared the Abaco Island horse’s DNA against a database of horse species, he found it had preserved its Old World genes, Thus, Cothran says, saving the genes is worth the effort. “It’s an insurance policy. You’re trying to keep insurance policy. You’re trying to keep something that you may need in the future, but you don’t yet know that you need it.”

Too Good to Go is a smartphone app which allows restaurants to sell food that would otherwise be thrown away at discount prices from as little as￡2 and a maximum of ￡3.80, ever if the meals are sold from the very finest restaurants in the country. Originally created in Denmark and launched in Brighton and Leeds in June, the service has recently been introduced in the United Kingdom by a couple of young entrepreneurs（企业家）.

       Millions of tons of food are thrown in the trash every year, with restaurants accounting for a large part, so eco-entrepreneurs Chris Wilson and Jamie Crummie came up with the good idea to stop food waste. Using Too Good to Go not only helps restaurants save expense, but gives people in need the chance to order fancy dishes at low prices.

       Too Good to Go is very convenient for users. Restaurants make food available on the Too Good To Go app and website. People can look through the available dishes on the smartphones, pay for them using credit card and pick them up at a set time, an hour before closing time.

       Although Too Good to Go does take a fee from restaurants for each sale, its creators say the end goal is to use it for restaurants to solve their waste management problem, rather than making a profit(利润). Wilson claims, "The idea is that restaurants stop producing the extra food so they don't need to throw it away in the trash, and we really want to put ourselves out of business by stopping food waste."

       Birmingham has become the latest city where restaurants can reduce food waste to the lowest limit by working with the Too Good To Go social enterprise app.

Have you ever suddenly felt that someone you knew was in trouble — and was he? Have you ever dreamed of something that came true later? Maybe you have ESP (超感觉知觉).

ESP stands for Extrasensory Perception. It may be called a sixth sense. It seems to let people know about events before they happen, or events that are happening some distance away.

Here’s an example. A woman was ironing clothes. Suddenly she screamed, “My father is dead! I saw him sitting in the chair!” Just then, a telegram came. The woman’s father died of a heart attack. He died sitting in a chair.

There are thousands of stories like this one on record. Scientists are studying them to find out what’s behind these strange mental messages. Here’s another example — one of hundreds of dreams that have come true.

A man dreamed he was walking along a road when a horse and carriage came by. The driver said, “There’s room for one more.” The man felt the driver seemed dead, so he ran away. The next day, when the man was getting on a crowded bus, the bus driver said, “There’s room for one more.”

Then the man saw that the driver’s face was the same face he had seen in the dream. He wouldn’t get on the bus. As the bus drove off, it crashed and burst into flames. Everyone was killed!

Some people say stories like these are coincidences. Others, including some scientists, say that ESP is real. From studies of ESP, we may some day learn more about human mind.

  Hollywood’s theory that machines with evil(邪恶) minds will drive armies of killer robots is just silly. The real problem relates to the possibility that artificial intelligence(AI) may become extremely good at achieving something other than what we really want. In1960 awell-known mathematician Norbert Wiener, who founded the field of cybernetics（控制论）, put it this way: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot effectively interfere(干预), we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”

  A machine with a specific purpose has another quality, one that we usually associate with living things: a wish to preserve its own existence. For the machine, this quality is not in-born, nor is it something introduced by humans; it is a logical consequence of the simple fact that the machine cannot achieve its original purpose if it is dead. So if we send out a robot with the single instruction of fetching coffee, it will have a strong desire to secure success by disabling its own off switch or even killing anyone who might interfere with its task. If we are not careful, then, we could face a kind of global chess match against very determined, super intelligent machines whose objectives conflict with our own, with the real world as the chessboard.

  The possibility of entering into and losing such a match should concentrate the minds of computer scientists. Some researchers argue that we can seal the machines inside a kind of firewall, using them to answer difficult questions but never allowing them to affect the real world. Unfortunately, that plan seems unlikely to work: we have yet to invent a firewall that is secure against ordinary humans, let alone super intelligent machines.

  Solving the safety problem well enough to move forward in AI seems to be possible but not easy. There are probably decades in which to plan for the arrival of super intelligent machines. But the problem should not be dismissed out of hand, as it has been by some AI researchers. Some argue that humans and machines can coexist as long as they work in teams—yet that is not possible unless machines share the goals of humans. Others say we can just “switch them off” as if super intelligent machines are too stupid to think of that possibility. Still others think that super intelligent AI will never happen. On September 11, 1933, famous physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, with confidence, “Anyone who expects a source of power in the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” However, on September 12, 1933, physicist Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced(中子诱导) nuclear chain reaction.

Virtual reality, VR, is a powerful, new technology. VR software programs are being used in many video games. But others have been developed for education, to train doctors and in military training. VR gives the people who use it an interactive(交互式的) 3D experience. They can see realistic images and hear sounds that are almost like those one experiences in real life.

Khora Virtual Reality opened earlier this year in Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen. It may be the first virtual reality store in the world, where people can learn about virtual reality and create and play it. In the company’s VR game “Cityscape Repairman,” players must take care of the city’s roads and public services to continue playing.

Morten Haulik is the company’s event manager. “It’s super important to give people the experience of actually walking around in the world. It could be the Great Wall of China or the space station or things like that, but if you really need to learn something about it, you actually need to see it in real life, and touch it.”

Lajboschitz, CEO of Khora, says that is what students at the University of Copenhagen experience. “My favorite thing is showing people virtual reality and then, when they take off the goggles (护目镜), it’s like, ‘Whoa, I forgot that I was in this space with white walls and with people around me.’ ”

Clara Lykkegaard is a student at the university. “I have read about virtual reality before, and I’ve seen others trying it, but I have never tried it myself. And it is a brand new world. It’s so magical because you almost forget where you are.”

Khora’s leaders believe helping students get interested in this technology might persuade some of them to work in the industry, and gain a share of what is expected to be a more than 3 billion-dollar market by 2020.  

Recently, the Intelligent Transport team at Newcastle University has changed an electric car into a mobile laboratory (实验室) named “Drive LAB” in order to understand the challenges faced by older drivers and to discover where the problems are.

  Research shows that giving up driving is one of the key reasons for the unhealthy and unhappy state of older people, leading to them becoming more isolated(与世隔绝的) and inactive.

  Led by Professor Phil Blythe, the Newcastle team is developing in-vehicle technologies for older drivers which they hope could help them to continue driving into later life.

  These include custom-made navigation(导航) tools, night vision systems and intelligent speed adaptations. Phil Blythe explains: “For many older people, particularly those living alone or in the countryside, driving is important for keeping their independence, giving them the freedom to get out and about without having to rely on others.”

  “But we all have to accept that as we get older our reactions slow down and this often results in people losing confidence in their driving skills. The result is that people stop driving before they really need to.”

 “We hope that our work will help with technological solutions(解决方案) to ensure that older drivers stay safer behind the wheel.”

The way we get about has a deep influence on the way welive－affecting where we set up home, work and holiday. So what changes might come in the way we get around? What big ideas are out there, and do they have any chance of coming true?

Personal Air Travel

The idea: flying cars

Developments in light small plane technology will make it possible for everyone to own what are, in fact, flying cars. They will have closed cabins, heating, stereos and room for two people.

You will take off from a field near your home and fly to towns and cities. After landing, you will take off the fixed wing and continue your journey by road just as if you were traveling by car.

Fuel efficient engines and the advantage of being able to travel in the sky will keep costs and the environmental influence down.

Flying for Fun

The idea: Jet Packs

The idea was a hit when a stuntman (特技演员) flew around on one during the opening ceremony of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, which was very successful.

You’ll be able to use the equipment—roughly the size of two scuba (呼吸器) tanks fastened to your back－for short journeys.

They will be handy for cleaning hard-to-reach windows, arriving in style at a party and shopping.

Taxis

The idea: driverless taxis

These computer-controlled taxis will take you wherever you want along a fixed route, whenever you want to go.

For the price of one person’s bus fare, several people can ride at speeds of up to 25 mph, and there will be fences to guard against accidents.

There will be little, if any, wait for the use of the taxis, which will leave from stations and will be used by prepaid cards.

The taxis, which will travel on a 1.5 m-wide track, will use 75% less energy per passenger than a car and 50% less than a bus.