There have been claims that warming on Mars(火星) and Pluto(冥王星) is proof that the recent warming on Earth is caused by an increase in solar activity, and not by greenhouse gases. But we can say with certainty that, even if Mars, Pluto or any other planet has warmed in recent years, it is not due to changes in solar activity.

The Sun’s energy output has not increased since direct measurements began in 1978. If increased solar output really was responsible, we should be seeing warming on all the planets and their moons, not just Mars and Pluto.

    Our solar system has eight planets, three dwarf planets and quite a few moons with at least a thin atmosphere, and thus a climate of sorts. Their climates will be affected by local factors such as orbital variations, changes in reflectance and even volcanic eruptions, so it would not be surprising if several planets and moons turn out to be warming at any one time.

    One theory is that winds have recently swept some areas of Mars clean of dust, darkening the surface, warming the Red Planet and leading to further increases in windiness --- a positive feedback effect.

Observations of the thickness of Pluto’s atmosphere in 2002 suggested the dwarf planet was warming even as its orbit took it further from the Sun. The finding confused astronomers at the time, and the cause had yet to be determined.

It has since been suggested that this is due to a greenhouse effect: As it gets closer to the Sun, Pluto may warm enough for some of the methane ice on its surface to turn into a gas. This would cause further warming, which would continue for a while even after Pluto’s orbit starts to take it away from the Sun.

With its incredibly long neck, giraffe looks like no other animal on Earth. But how did this mammal come to get its famously huge neck? Well, scientists have been asking themselves this question for centuries.

The most commonly believed answer is that the massive neck – which measures on average 180 centimeters and weighs about 270 kilograms – evolved to allow the animal to reach the leaves of tall trees. British scientist Charles Darwin was one of the first people to propose this idea in the 1800s.

Yet, there are other theories.

According to a paper published in September in the Journal of Arid Environments, the giraffe’s neck evolved to increase its surface-area-to-volume ratio (表面积—体积比). Because the animal’s neck increases its body’s surface area, it makes it easier for it to keep cool, the paper’s authors wrote.

This phenomenon can be seen everywhere in nature. For example, this is why elephants have such large ears.

Meanwhile, some believe that competition is the answer.

A 1996 study by two South African zoologists argued that the male giraffes with the biggest necks are the ones who “win” access to females to reproduce, as they are better at fighting, meaning that their long necks are passed down through the generations.

So, it seems like there’s still no definite answer to the question.

Shoppers could soon use their mobile phones to check how ripe fruit and vegetables are with an “X－ray vision” camera.

    The HyperCam, based on hyper spectral (高光谱的)imaging, can assess ripeness with 94 percent accuracy and could also be used to check for rotting produce in the fridge at home. Scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle managed to create a portable hyper spectral imaging camera that would cost $ 800 (£520).

     Hyper spectral imaging uses a broader range of the electromagnetic spectrum(电磁波)than an ordinary camera. The researchers are now working on a version of the technology that shoppers could download on to a mobile phone for about $ 50. The technology is already used in satellite imaging, building safety inspection, but is a highly costly process.

    Professor Shwetak Patel, of the University of Washington, said: “It’s not there yet but you can probably imagine putting it in a mobile phone. With this kind of camera you could go to the grocery store and know what produce to pick by looking underneath the skin and seeing if there’s anything wrong inside. It’s like having a food safety app in your pocket.”

    Neel Joshi, a Microsoft researcher, said: “Existing systems are costly and hard to use so we decided to create an inexpensive hyper spectral camera and explore these uses ourselves. After building the camera we just started pointing it at everyday objects, really anything we could find in our homes and offices, and we were amazed at all the hidden information it revealed.”

    Other potential uses for the technology include analyzing blood vessels and identifying individual people by the unique texture (纹理) of their skin.

The year 2114 will be an eventful one for art. In May of that year in Berlin, the philosopher-artist Jonathon Keats’ “century cameras” – cameras with a 100-year-long exposure (曝光）time – will be brought back from hiding places around the city to have their results developed and exhibited. Six months after that, the Future Library in Oslo, Norway, will open its doors for the first time, presenting 100 books printed on the wood of trees planted in the distant past of 2014.

As Katie Paterson, the creator of the Future Library, puts it: “Future Library is an artwork for future generations.” These projects, more than a century in the making, are part of a new wave of “slow art” intended to push viewers and participants to think beyond their own lifetimes. They aim to challenge today’s short-term thinking and the brief attention spans of modern consumers, forcing people into considering works more deliberately. In their way, too, they are fighting against modern culture – not just regarding money, but also the way in which artistic worth is measured by attention.

In a similar fashion, every April on Slow Art Day, visitors are encouraged to stare at five works of art for 10 minutes at a time – a tough task for the average museum visitor, who typically spends less than 30 seconds on each piece of art.

Like the Future Library, the century cameras are very much a project for cities, since it’s in cities that time runs fastest and the pace of life is fastest. “Since I started living in a city, I’ve somehow been quite disconnected,” Anne Beate Hovind, the Future Library project manager, who described how working on the library drew her back to the pace of life she knew when she was growing up on a farm in her youth, told The Atlantic magazine.

In 2013 alone at least 20,000 African elephants were killed for their teeth. In South Africa over the last two years more than 2,200 rhinos were killed for their horns. These numbers are alarming, because current rates of illegal hunting are faster than birth rates, which could lead to extinction for these ecologically important creatures in their environment. Indeed, some elephant and rhino populations are on track to be locally extinct within the next decade.

If you are reading this, you may already be aware of these facts. But you might not know that wildlife trafficking(走私) not only threatens the existence of elephants and rhinos but is also leading to extinction of other species, such as tigers, tortoises, sea turtles —and the world’s most trafficked mammal—pangolins.

Pangolins are the only mammals that are entirely covered in tough scales(鳞), which makes them look very strong. But actually they are endangered mammals. There are eight different species of pangolins, four in Asia and four in Africa, and all are threatened with extinction. Although pangolins are protected throughout most of the countries where they live, high demand in East Asia, where the delicious pangolin meat is considered a delicacy and where their scales are used in traditional medicines, is driving an illegal trade in both live animals and pangolin parts. The number of pangolin trafficking is shocking. Experts believe that over the last 10 years more than 1 million pangolins were taken from the wild. It is estimated that between 40,000 and 81,250 pangolins were killed for the illegal trade in 2013 alone.

In February, the United States released a plan to deal with wildlife trafficking, which lays out the steps we will take to fight the illegal trade in wildlife, including pangolins. We are strengthening the carrying out of the plan; building international cooperation and contribution to protect wildlife; raising awareness to drive down the demand that is fuelling the illegal trade.

Get involved and remember World Wildlife Day (March 3) by spreading the plan. Use social media and tell everyone that now is the time to get serious about wildlife crime and end the demand that threatens species, big and small, from the huge elephant to the shy pangolin.

The world itself is becoming much smaller by using modern traffic and modern communication means. Life today is much easier than it was hundreds of years ago, but it has brought new problems. One of the biggest problems is pollution. To pollute means to make things dirty. Pollution comes in many ways. We see it, smell it, drink it and even hear it.

Man has been polluting the earth. The more people, the more pollution. Many years ago, the problem was not so serious because there were not so many people. When the land was used up or the river was dirty in one place, man moved to another place. But this is no longer true.

Man is now slowly polluting the whole world.

Air pollution is still the most serious. It’s bad for all living things in the world, but it is not the only one kind of pollution. Water pollution kills our fish and pollutes our drinking water. Noise pollution makes us angry more easily.

Many countries are making rules to fight pollution. They stop people from burning coal in houses and factories in the city, and from putting dirty smoke into the air. Pollution by SO₂ is now the most dangerous kind of air pollution. It is caused by heavy traffic. We are sure that if there are fewer people driving, there will be less air pollution.

The earth is our home. We must take care of it. That means keeping the land, water and air clean. And we must take care of the rise in pollution at the same time.

  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.”