激光的特性、原理和用途
What do a DVD player, supermarket scanner, printer, fiber optic internet connection, and industrial metal cutter have in common? They […]
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钟表运转的奥秘
Tick Tock . Tick Tock . The sounds of clocks and timepieces surround me . I’m standing inside the Willard House & Clock Museum in North Grafton, Massachusetts .
人工智能会抢走所有工作吗
Emily Hanley rubs her face, then takes a breath. “I recently lost my job to AI,” she says, in a video she shared on TikTok. She was a copywriter, or someone who writes the text for brands’ webpages, online articles, email campaigns, and other marketing materials. New generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or Baidu’s Ernie excel at generating text for all sorts of purposes, including this one. Generative AI can also write code. And it’s far cheaper than hiring a person to do the same thing. In an article for Business Insider about the ordeal, Hanley wrote, “While I and countless other out-of-work copywriters are the first wave of AI collateral, the collapse of my profession is probably just the tip of the AI iceberg. ”
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关于衰老，动物教会了我们什么
Aging is a fact of life. Even if you avoid bad accidents, injuries, and infections, you won’t stay healthy forever. Your body will break down as you get older. You’ll get wrinkles and achy joints. Your vision and hearing will fade. Your chance of developing cancer, heart disease, and many other ailments will greatly increase. Aging “bedevils us all,” writes Steven N. Austad in his book, Methuselah’s Zoo. He defines aging as “the progressive deterioration over time of bodily functions and defenses along with increasing susceptibility to diseases.”
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时间的开始与结束
No stars . No planets . Not even any atoms . At the moment of its birth, the universe was emptiness. Then, in a burst of inflation—a bit like a balloon blowing up—a very tiny area grew much, much larger. This happened when the age of the universe was just “a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second”, says Alexei Filippenko. He’s an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. The dramatic period is extremely brief. During inflation, the universe’s size doubled around at least 100 times.
基因编辑技术—合成生物学的基本工具
Inside a living cell, something remarkable is happening. A very tiny machine cuts the cell’s DNA. Next, the cell repairs the broken DNA, but the segment where the cut happened no longer works the same way. The tiny machine has edited the DNA—the code of life.
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为什么我们要关注经济学
Amanda was three years old and had no interest in learning to use the bathroom. Her father, Steven Levitt, decided to try something new. He told his daughter, “Amanda, every time you go pee pee in the potty, I’m going to give you M&Ms. Okay?” Amanda loved M&Ms. At first, the plan seemed to be working perfectly. Amanda started going to the bathroom to pee. Levitt was very pleased with himself. But just a few days later, things changed. A few minutes after Amanda went to the bathroom, she said she had to go again! Every few minutes, she wanted to try to pee – just so she could get her candy reward. This wasn’t what Levitt had in mind at all.
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污染水—弗林特河与公共健康危机的故事
In November 2014, LeeAnne Walters turned on the tap in her kitchen in the city of Flint, Michigan. Disgusting, brown water streamed out. Over the following weeks, its color ranged from “light yellow to nasty, dark-looking
cooking grease,” she recalls.
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2050年，我们将用什么来替代化石能源？
Welcome to the year 2050. In cities around the world, cars whiz past tall buildings and factories, yet the air is clear, clean, and cool. People have stopped burning coal, oil, and gas to run engines or make heat and electricity. These fossil fuels no longer spew pollution and greenhouse gases into the air. As a result, climate change is slowing. Dangerous wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are becoming less common. Humanity has managed to back the world away from the brink of disaster.
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