Recently there was a major discovery in the scientific research—the mapping of all DNA in a human gene(基因) is complete．Couple of years ago, this seems an impossible task for scientist to accomplish．All this progress in science leads us to believe that the day, when the human being will be cloned, is not far away．Human cloning has always been a topic of argument, in terms of morality or religion．

Taking a look at why cloning might be beneficial, among many cases, it is arguable that parents who are known to be at risk of passing a genetic limitation to a child could make use of cloning．If the clone was free of genetic limitations．then the other clone would be as well．The latter could foe inserted in the woman and allowed to ripen to term．Moreover, cloning would enable women, who canˈt get pregnant, to have children of their own．

Cloning humans would also mean that organs could be cloned, so it would be a source of perfect transfer organs．This, surely would be greatly beneficial to millions of unfortunate people around the world that are expected to lose their lives due to failure of single (or more) organ(s). It is also arguable that a ban on cloning may be unlawful and would rob people of the right to reproduce and limit the freedom of scientists．

Arguments against cloning are also on a perfectly practical side．Primarily, I believe that cloning would step in the normal "cycle" of life．There would be a large number of same genes, which reduce the chances of improvement, and, in turn, development—the fundamental reason how living things naturally adapt to the ever-changing environment．Life processes failing to do so might result in untimely disappearance．Furthermore, cloning would make the uniqueness that each one of us possesses disappear．Thus, leading to creation of genetically engineered groups of people for specific purposes and, chances are, that those individuals would be regarded as "objects" rather than people in the society．

Scientists havenˈt 100 percent guaranteed that the first cloned humans will be normal．Thus this could result in introduction of additional limitations in the human "gene-pool"．

Regarding such arguable topics in "black or white" approach seems very innocent to me personally. We should rather try to look at all "shades" of it．I believe that cloning is only legal if its purpose is for cloning organs; not humans．Then we could regard this as for "saving life" instead of "creating life"．I believe cloning humans is morally and socially unacceptable．

Climbers at Qomolangma are being asked to clean up after themselves.

Qomolangma has earned the nickname（绰号）the Worldˈs Highest Garbage Dump（垃圾场）.

Climbing Qomolangma,the worldˈs highest mountain,just becomes more challenging.The government of Nepal is telling climbers they cannot leave trash on the trails.Each climber will have to come down the mountain with at the least 18 pounds of garbage.Thatˈs the average amount of trash a climber leaves behind on Qomolangma.

Officials say climbers are responsible for their own trash.“We are not asking climbers to pick up trash left by someone else,”said the Nepal Tourism Ministry.“We just want them to bring back what they took up.”

More than 4,000 people have reached the 29,035-foot summit（顶峰）in more than 60 years.Leaving trash along the way helps climbers keep their bags light so they have energy to reach the summit.“The trash problem in Qomolangma is not new.”Burlakoti says.“When the people started to climb the mountain,they started to leave their garbage there.”They have left behind bottles,food boxes and equipment.

The new rule came into effect in April,2014.To make sure it is followed,climbers will have to deposit money（交保证金）before they climb.Once they climb back down the mountain,officials will check climbers at a return camp to make sure they have the required 18 pounds of trash.If they do,their money will be returned to them.If they do not,climbers will not receive their deposit and they will not be given a permit the next time they want to climb Qomolangma.

The goal is to make sure no more litter will be left on Qomolangma."As we offer Qomolangma to all the people of the world they should take responsibility to clean it."Burlakoti says,“After seeing the results from this,we will also apply this rule to other mountains.”

Passenger pigeons（旅鸽）once flew over much of the United States in unbelievable numbers. Written accounts from the 18th and 19th centuries described flocks（群）so large that they darkened the sky for hours.

It was calculated that when its population reached its highest point, there were more than 3 billion passenger pigeons – a number equal to 24 to 40 percent of the total bird population in the United States, making it perhaps the most abundant birds in the world. Even as late as 1870 when their numbers had already become smaller, a flock believed to be 1 mile wide and 320 miles (about 515 kilometers) long was seen near Cincinnati.

Sadly, the abundance of passenger pigeons may have been their undoing. Where the birds were abundant, people believed there was an ever-lasting supply and killed them by the thousands. Commercial hunters attracted them to small clearings with grain, waited until pigeons had settled to feed, then threw large nets over them, taking hundreds at a time. The birds were shipped to large cities and sold in restaurants.

By the closing decades of the 19th century, the hardwood forests where passenger pigeons nested had been damaged by Americans’ need for wood, which scattered（驱散）the flocks and forced the birds to go farther north, where cold temperatures and spring storms contributed to their decline. Soon the great flocks were gone, never to be seen again.

In 1897, the state of Michigan passed a law prohibiting the killing of passenger pigeons, but by then, no sizable flocks had been seen in the state for 10 years. The last confirmed wild pigeon in the United States was shot by a boy in Pike County, Ohio, in 1900. For a time, a few birds survived under human care. The last of them, known affectionately as Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden in September 1, 1914.

Your house may have an effect on your figure. Experts say the way you design your home could play a role in whether you pack on the pounds or keep them off. You can make your environment work for you instead of against you. Here are some ways to turn your home into part of diet plan.

Open the curtains and turn up the lights. Dark environments are more likely to encourage overeating, for people are often less self-conscious(难为情)when they’re in poorly lit places----and so more likely to eat lots of food. If your home doesn’t have enough window light, get more lamps and flood the place with brightness.

Mind the colors. Research suggests warm colors fuel our appetites. In one study, people who ate meals in a blue room consumed 33 percent less than those in a yellow or red room. Warm colors like yellow make food appear more appetizing, while cold colors make us feel less hungry. So when it’s time to repaint, go blue.

Don’t forget the clock----or the radio. People who eat slowly tend to consume about 70 fewer calories (卡路里) per meal than those who rush through their meals. Begin keeping track of the time, and try to make dinner last at least 30 minutes. And while you’re at it, actually sit down to eat. If you need some help slowing down, turn on relaxing music. It makes you less likely to rush through a meal.

Downsize the dishes. Big serving bowls and plates can easily make us fat. We eat about 22 percent more when using a 12-inch plate instead of a 10-inch plate. When we choose a large spoon over a smaller one ,total intake (摄入) jumps by 14 percent. And we’ll pour about 30 percent more liquid into a short, wide glass than a tall, skinny glass.

Australia’s koalas could be wiped out within 30 years unless urgent action is taken to stop the losing in population, according to researchers. They say development, climate change and bush fires have all combined to reduce the number of wild koalas sharply.

       The Australian Koala Foundation said a recent survey showed the population could have dropped by more than half in the past six years. Previous estimates (估计) put the number of koalas at more than 100,000, but the latest calculations (计算) suggest there could now be as few as 43,000.

       The foundation collected field data from 1,800 sites and 80,000 trees to calculate the numbers. In one area in northern Queensland estimated to have 20,000 koalas a decade ago, a team of eight people could not find a single animal in four days of searching.

       The foundation said besides problems caused by cutting down forests, hotter and drier conditions because of global warming had reduced the nutritional (营养的) value of their staple food, eucalyptus leaves, leading to poor nutrition for them.

       Koalas, which live in the forests in Australia’s east and south, are very fussy (爱挑剔的) about what types of the leaves they eat.

       Foundation chief Deborah Tabart said: “The koalas are missing everywhere we look. It’s really no tree, no me. If you keep cutting down trees you don’t have any koalas.”

       She is hoping the new figures will persuade the government’s Threatened Species Steering Committee (TSSC) to list the koala as threatened. But committee chairman Bob Beeton said a decision was not likely recently and the koala’s status as one of the country’s favourite animals would not be a factor. “There’s a number of species which are attractive and people have special feelings towards them. We don’t consider that,” Mr Beeton was reported as saying by the AFP agency.

  We may think we’re a culture that gets rid of our worn technology at the first sight of something shiny and new, but a new study shows that we keep using our old devices (装置) well after they go out of style. That’s bad news for the environment—and our wallets—as these outdated devices consume much more energy than the newer ones that do the same things.

   To figure out how much power these devices are using, Callie Babbitt and her colleagues at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York tracked the environmental costs for each product throughout its life—from when its minerals are mined to when we stop using the device. This method provided a readout for how home energy use has evolved since the early 1990s. Devices were grouped by generation. Desktop computers, basic mobile phones, and box-set TVs defined 1992. Digital cameras arrived on the scene in 1997. And MP3 players, smart phones, and LCD TVs entered homes in 2002, before tablets and e-readers showed up in 2007.

   As we accumulated more devices, however, we didn’t throw out our old ones. “The living-room television is replaced and gets planted in the kids’ room, and suddenly one day, you have a TV in every room of the house,” said one researcher. The average number of electronic devices rose from four per household in 1992 to 13 in 2007. We’re not just keeping these old devices—we continue to use them. According to the analysis of Babbitt’s team, old desktop monitors and box TVs with cathode ray tubes are the worst devices with their energy consumption and contribution to greenhouse gas emissions (排放) more than doubling during the 1992 to 2007 window.

   So what’s the solution (解决方案)? The team’s data only went up to 2007, but the researchers also explored what would happen if consumers replaced old products with new electronics that serve more than one function, such as a tablet for word processing and TV viewing. They found that more on-demand entertainment viewing on tablets instead of TVs and desktop computers could cut energy consumption by 44%.

You’re surrounded by robots and you probably don’t even know it. Most are not all that   (1)   and they won’t come up to you and speak like a friend.   (2)   you’re unaware of them, they know you’re there. Robots are monitoring   (3)   in hospitals, providing banking services,   (4)   people from burning buildings and assisting astronauts in   (5)   . Robots are everywhere.

Are robots   (6)   or deadly enemies? Robotic expert Hans Moravec says intelligent robots today are no smarter than the average insect. But, don’t feel too   (7)   about that. For example, army ants in South America   (8)  everything in their path when they go to war—forests, crops, buildings, people...

In case you   (9)    don’t care about our little mechanical friends,   (10)   this: Robot technology is currently   (11)    at a rate 10 million times faster than the evolution of   (12)   .

Considering the advances in robot technology during the upcoming years, Moravec says that robots must pass through four   (13)   of development before they rule the planet.

First robot technology must achieve the ability to   (14)    as general­ purpose tools with software running at one million instructions per second (MIPS). Those robots will have the   (15)   of reptiles (爬行动物). Next, this happening into 2020, robots will have acquired brains capable of   (16)   300 million MIPS, which will give them the intelligence of smart mice. A hundred billion MIPS will be   (17)    sometime after 2030. By then robots will be provided by their   (18)    (humankind) with monkey­like brains.  (19)   , at the dawn of 2040, robots will   (20)   human intelligence and they will quickly surpass humans and challenge people for supremacy (至高无上) of the planet.

You use her as a shoulder to cry on. She texts you back with casual jokes. But she, Xiaoice, is only a virtual chatbot(虚拟聊天机器人).

      Xiaoice, Microsoft’s latest artificial intelligence robot, was briefly released in 2014, and returned to WeChat in 2015, where she became a big hit. Millions of young Chinese now exchange messages with her daily, The New York Times reported. On WeChat, Xiaoice is an official account. After following it, users can start text-based conversations with Xiaoice.

      “Her incredible learning ability was why people loved to talk with Xiaoice,” Liu Jinchang, a researcher at High-tech Research and Development Center under the Ministry of Science and Technology, told China Daily. Apart from her ability to identify photos and send emojis(表情符号) in conversations, Xiaoice gains 45 percent of her knowledge from interacting with users, China Daily reported.

      Chatbot programs first appeared in the mid-1960s in the US. Driven by top tech companies, they are becoming smarter and more common. For instance, IBM’s latest artificial intelligence program served as an academic consultant at Australia’s Deakin University, answering students’ questions about course schedules and financial aid. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa have been used as voice assistants who can read news, play music and even make jokes for their users.

      These programs are expected to move beyond smartphones, into televisions, cars and living rooms, The New York Times pointed out. However, it may take decades before scientists develop a＂Samantha＂, the advanced chatbot seen in the fiction film Her. In the film, Samantha has a romantic relationship with her user played by US actor Joaquin Phoenix. Many viewers were enthusiastic about this fantasy of virtual soul mates.