【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题:AI researchers receive the Nobel prize for physics The award, to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, stretches the definition of the field 正文：Nobel science prizes are awarded in three areas: physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine. But occasionally some noteworthy discovery comes along that does not really fit into any of them. In 1973, for example, three pioneering students of animal behaviour, who worked on honeybees, geese and sticklebacks, were shoehorned...
Oct 10, 2024•16 min•Ep. 571
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题:Elon Musk Bends the Knee to Donald Trump The alliance between the billionaire and the politician is pure strongman politics. 正文： Have you ever watched a crowd go wild for a PowerPoint slide? After a few introductory hellos yesterday in Butler, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump gestured to a screen showing the same graph on illegal immigration that he had been talking about when he was nearly assassinated in July and delivered his real opening line: “As I was saying …” 知识...
Oct 09, 2024•14 min•Ep. 572
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Is Your Name Your Destiny? 正文：. Long before Reddit users discovered the firefighter Les McBurney, humans were fascinated by the idea that a person’s name influences his destiny. The ancient Romans even left us a rhyme for this concept, nomen est omen, or “the name is an omen.” The relationship between names and destinies has increasingly become the subject of scientific inquiry. 知识点：destiny n. /ˈdestəni/ what happens to sb or what will happen to them in the future...
Oct 08, 2024•12 min•Ep. 573
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The future of the Chinese consumer—in three glasses What China’s biggest distiller, brewer and water-bottler say about its economy 正文：To western palates baijiu is an acquired taste—and most never acquire it. China’s national fire water, at first whiff redolent of cheap potato vodka with a soupçon of fish sauce, is just too pungently unfamiliar. But whatever foreign investors plied with the stuff by their Chinese business partners make of the flavour, they appear t...
Oct 07, 2024•18 min•Ep. 574
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：What to eat and drink in China 正文：In China, food conquers all. Eating is the national obsession, and China’s incredible diversity of terrain and climate, coupled with millennia of culinary history, equals an unmatched abundance of dishes and cooking styles. 知识点：obsession n. /əbˈseʃn/ the state in which a person's mind is completely filled with thoughts of one particular thing or person in a way that is not normal 痴迷；着魔；困扰 • Her fear of flying is bordering on obses...
Oct 06, 2024•11 min•Ep. 575
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Takeaways from the vice presidential debate between Vance and Walz 正文：The vice presidential debate between Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was something that’s become increasingly rare in modern American politics: normal. In an event that is unlikely to change the trajectory of the presidential race, the two running mates were cordial with each other, training their attacks instead on the tops of the opposing tickets and focusing largely on policy d...
Oct 05, 2024•14 min•Ep. 576
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Canneseries: China’s ‘To the Wonder’ Is a Politically Correct Tale of Multicultural Romance and Self-Discovery 正文：. China’s video streamers, much like their counterparts in the west, have passed their peak growth phase and have been forced to refocus their efforts on achieving profitability. In the case of IQiyi, which is a subsidiary of tech giant Baidu but has its own stock market listing on the NASDAQ, that transition has meant reduced content spending and a mo...
Oct 04, 2024•15 min•Ep. 577
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Why paying women to have more babies won’t work Economies must adapt to baby busts instead 正文：As birth rates plunge, many politicians want to pour money into policies that might lead women to have more babies. Donald Trump has vowed to dish out bonuses if he returns to the White House. In France, where the state already spends 3.5-4% of GDP on family policies each year, Emmanuel Macron wants to “demographically rearm” his country. South Korea is contemplating hand...
Oct 03, 2024•20 min•Ep. 578
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The United States used to have cachet in China. Not anymore. “Soft power” is even more important during times of sharp words and military bluster, but the cultural appeal of American culture and ideas has waned in China 正文：There was a time not so long ago in China when anything American was automatically seen as better. In the 1990s, weddings were held at McDonald’s. By the 2000s, Nike sneakers, iPhones and dates at Pizza Hut were the badges of middle-class achiev...
Oct 02, 2024•19 min•Ep. 579
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：China is going crazy for durians Locals love the pungent fruit. The government sees an opportunity 正文：Eric Chan has long sold durians, a pungent fruit, to South-East Asians. Now he is eyeing a bigger prize. The Musang King variety that he cultivates in Malaysia is beloved by Chinese consumers. But at the moment his country only has permission to export frozen durians to China, where many want them fresh. In total, Chinese foodies gobbled up $6.7bn-worth of importe...
Oct 01, 2024•18 min•Ep. 580
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Hasan Nasrallah chose his own fate 正文：Hasan Nasrallah wanted to live and die as a fighter, and he got his wish Friday, when Israeli bombs pulverized his underground lair in Beirut. Hezbollah will surely seek to avenge Nasrallah’s death, but he was the rare leader who was close to irreplaceable. I met Nasrallah in October 2003 in a fortified bunker in the southern suburbs of Beirut, not far from where he died. For a man who ordered the deaths of so many Israelis an...
Sep 30, 2024•21 min•Ep. 581
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：China’s ‘Silver Economy’ Is Thriving as Birthrate Plunges The shrinking population poses threats to growth but has opened opportunities for businesses that serve seniors. 正文：For more than a decade, Li Dongmei operated a series of kindergartens and schools for young children, withstanding the realities of China’s declining birthrate. She finally faced the music in 2020. The shrinking number of children meant ever smaller enrollments of babies and toddlers at her sc...
Sep 29, 2024•20 min•Ep. 582
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：OpenAI Takes Its Mask Off OpenAI Another restructure, and the clearest signal yet of what the company really is 正文：There’s a story about Sam Altman that has been repeated often enough to become Silicon Valley lore. In 2012, Paul Graham, a co-founder of the famed start-up accelerator Y Combinator and one of Altman’s biggest mentors, sat Altman down and asked if he wanted to take over the organization. 知识点：lore n. /lɔːr/ traditional knowledge and stories about a sub...
Sep 29, 2024•14 min•Ep. 583
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Private tutoring is booming across poorer parts of Asia Governments are struggling to keep up with an educational arms race 正文：The moral of the story is clear in “12th Fail”, a recent Bollywood hit about a poor farm boy, Manoj, bent on passing India’s ruthless police exam. Persevere and be richly rewarded, it suggests. Yet for a film about education and meritocracy, the portrayal of Indian schools is dismal: teacher-abetted cheating is rife at Manoj’s local school...
Sep 27, 2024•21 min•Ep. 584
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The Magic Behind Shein’s Rise Comes Under Threat: Duty-Free Shipping Proposed regulations from around the world would squeeze the China-founded bargain site 正文：Shein has used a nimble supply chain and duty-free shipping to send dresses and T-shirts for as little as $2 in squishy bags directly from China to hundreds of millions of shoppers. Now, a business model that has let it capture fleeting fashion trends is confronting a ripple of challenges, not just in the U...
Sep 27, 2024•20 min•Ep. 585
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：China’s AI firms are cleverly innovating around chip bans Tweaks to software blunt the shortage of powerful hardware 正文：Today’s top artificial-intelligence (AI) models rely on large numbers of cutting-edge processors known as graphics processing units (GPUs). Most Western companies have no trouble acquiring them. Llama 3, the newest model from Meta, a social-media giant, was trained on 16,000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia, an American chipmaker. Meta plans to stockpile 60...
Sep 26, 2024•20 min•Ep. 586
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The Tupperware Trap The company’s bankruptcy filing is a reminder that being first isn’t always enough. 正文：In the 1940s, a man named Earl Tupper invented a product that would transform how Americans store their food. Women started selling his airtight plastic containers, dubbed “Tupperware,” to their friends and neighbors. Soon, the product was everywhere—but by the 1980s, once Tupperware’s patents started to expire, so were the copycats. This week, after years of...
Sep 25, 2024•17 min•Ep. 587
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The breakthrough AI needs A race is on to push artificial intelligence beyond today’s limits 正文：Two years after ChatGPT took the world by storm, generative artificial intelligence seems to have hit a roadblock. The energy costs of building and using bigger models are spiralling, and breakthroughs are getting harder. Fortunately, researchers and entrepreneurs are racing for ways around the constraints. Their ingenuity will not just transform AI. It will determine w...
Sep 24, 2024•19 min•Ep. 588
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：I Paid My Child $100 to Read a Book 正文：This summer, I paid my 12-year-old daughter $100 to read a book. As far as mom maneuvers go, it was definitely last-ditch, and the size of the payout was certainly excessive. I can’t say I am proud — but I am extremely satisfied. Because the plan worked. My daughter is a whip-smart kid, definitely smarter than I was at 12. But until I resorted to bribery, she’d never read an entire chapter book for pleasure. She’d read books ...
Sep 23, 2024•16 min•Ep. 589
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The latest threat to China? The rise of the DINKs 正文：Shorthand for gainfully employed U.S. couples whose only responsibilities were to themselves, the acronym DINK — dual income, no kids — was coined to capture the unabashed materialism of the 1980s. Four decades later, the term has made a comeback, with millennials embracing it on social media to flaunt their free time, lavish spending habits and the other perks of choosing to be child-free. 知识点：shorthand n. /ˈʃɔ...
Sep 22, 2024•20 min•Ep. 590
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Don’t Fool Yourself About the Exploding Pagers Your phone is not a bomb 正文：Yesterday, pagers used by Hezbollah operatives exploded simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands. Today brought another mass detonation in Lebanon, this time involving walkie-talkies. The attacks are gruesome and shocking. The pagers received a message that caused them to vibrate in a way that required someone to press buttons to stop it. T...
Sep 20, 2024•16 min•Ep. 591
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Do pager-bombs presage escalation between Israel and Hizbullah? Thousands of devices explode in an apparent Israeli attack 正文：A man is standing at a cash register when the pager at his waist explodes, hurling him to the ground. Less than a metre away, the cashier panics but seems unhurt. Another man, shopping for green almonds in a market, collapses when smoke bursts from his midriff. Some shoppers run away; others stare in confusion. 知识点：hurl v. /hɜːrl/ to throw ...
Sep 19, 2024•13 min•Ep. 592
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：In China, Retiring as Early as 50 Has Been the Norm. That Is About to Change. 正文：Squeezed by an economic downturn and a rapidly aging population, China took a step toward raising its unusually low age benchmarks for when state employees have to retire. China has one of the lowest retirement ages among major economies, letting women retire as early as 50 and men at 60—policies unchanged since the 1950s. Beijing has long said it wants citizens to work longer, but ha...
Sep 18, 2024•16 min•Ep. 593
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：How to write the perfect CV A job applicant walks into a bar 正文：Imagine meeting a stranger at a party. What makes for a successful encounter? Lesson one is to heed the wisdom of a shampoo commercial from the 1980s: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Lesson two is to remember that you do not need to wear a beret or a fur stole in order to stand out. Lesson three is not to forget that what you leave out matters as much as what you say. 知识点：mak...
Sep 18, 2024•14 min•Ep. 594
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The New Dream Job Is Working for … the Government? Job stability is more important to young graduates than it used to be, which may be why more of them are looking at careers in the public sector. 正文：One of the best parts of being a young college graduate, and naïve to the grim realities of the working world, is being deluded about how great your career will be. Maybe you’ll found the next Nvidia, or win the Nobel Prize in your field, or start a charity that will ...
Sep 16, 2024•16 min•Ep. 595
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The Taylor Swift Way to Defuse a Troll She doesn’t need her boyfriend’s brawn 正文：It was highly anticipated and tautly executed. Taylor Swift signed off with a dig at Donald Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance: “With love and hope, Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris on Tuesday night was not a surprise; the pop star has for years backed Democratic candidates and used social media to encourage her followers to vote. Also perhaps uns...
Sep 16, 2024•21 min•Ep. 596
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Polaris Dawn’s First Private Space Walk Was a Stellar Success 正文：It wasn’t a small step—more a clamber, really—but as billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman climbed partway out of a SpaceX Dragon capsule located nearly 740 kilometers above Earth on early Thursday morning, he made a giant leap into spaceflight history. Polaris Dawn had already marked its first historic milestone mere hours after launch when it fired Dragon’s thrusters to raise the spacecraft’s swo...
Sep 15, 2024•19 min•Ep. 597
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Tech billionaire Elon Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. It’s a sign markets aren’t working 正文：Apparently, the world is about to get its first trillionaire. A report from Informa Connect says, at his present rate of wealth accumulation, tech billionaire Elon Musk is on track to be the world’s first trillionaire. If his wealth continues growing at the recent rate of 110% per year, he will hit US$1.195 trillion in 2027. The next trillionaire ...
Sep 13, 2024•17 min•Ep. 598
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The Scariest Spacewalk in 50 Years Spaceflight is entering its cowboy era. 正文：Early this morning, four private astronauts blasted into orbit to carry out SpaceX’s most dangerous mission yet. After a few days of circling Earth, the passengers will suit up and open the hatch of their spaceship. All of the precious, breathable air inside their capsule will escape into the cold void. Two of them will venture out, gripping an exterior ladder with their gloved hands as ...
Sep 13, 2024•22 min•Ep. 599
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Apple Unveils New iPhones With Built-In Artificial Intelligence 正文：The iPhone has grown predictable. Over the past seven years, it has generally looked the same, with incremental improvements to its cameras, processors and battery life. But on Monday, Apple tried to turn the page on that predictability by introducing its first artificially intelligent iPhone. 知识点：predictable adj. /prɪˈdɪktəbl/ if sth is predictable , you know in advance that it will happen or what...
Sep 11, 2024•11 min•Ep. 600
