The Israeli farmers who pioneered the revolutionary technology known as drip irrigation（滴流灌溉） weren’t trying to solve one of the world’s most urgent problems. They were just trying to survive. They lived in the desert, and they didn’t have enough water to grow their crops.

In its simplest form, it was little more than a pipe with holes in it. But behind each hole was a hi-tech dripper that let out just the right amount of water. Snaked along a row of crops so that the holes were positioned directly above the roots, the pipe could direct each precious drop of water directly to the plants, getting a bigger harvest while using a very small amount of water.

Over time, the farmers improved upon the technology, perfecting the drippers that regulated the flow of water, and connecting the pipelines to computers that could determine exactly how much water each plant needed and when.

If the global population kept growing, the rest of the world would increasingly resemble their little community in the desert. So they began selling their irrigation systems in other parts of the world, eventually expanding to more than 110 countries. Netafirm, the company says it’s lifting people out of poverty and conserving water at a time when the importance of doing so has never been clearer.

The mass adoption of drip irrigation won’t save the world by itself. To avoid the coming catastrophe, nearly everybody will, in some way, have to do more with less, perhaps through accepting and using other new technologies. Otherwise, it’s going to get ugly.

People who grow up left-handed have a different, more flexible brain structure than those born to take life by the right hand, say researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The reason is that right-handers have genes that force their brains into a slightly more one-sided structure, according to the research. Left-handers appear to be missing those genes.

"There really is a difference in brains that results in a more symmetric (对称的) brain in left-handers, where the two sides are more equal," said Daniel Geschwind, who led the research team.

In the effort to understand how the brain shapes the mind, researchers have been trying to document the way genes and environment affect intelligence and mental abilities. They found that right-and left-handedness is determined by genetics. If a person has the gene for right-handedness, that person will be right-handed. People who do not have that gene, however, can be either left- or right-handed. There is no specific gene for left-handedness.

Right-handers typically have a larger left brain, where their language abilities are concentrated. Conversely, left-handers have more balanced brains. The language abilities of left-handers more often, are concentrated on the right side.

The UCLA researchers conducted brain scans on 72 pairs of male identical (同卵双生的) twins between 75 and 85 years old. They noticed that if identical twins carry the gene for hand preference, both must be right-handed. If they lack the gene, one twin can develop right-handed while the other can develop left- handed.

The researchers found that the brains of identical right-handed twins were very similar in size and structure. But when a left-hander was part of the twin set, the brains were different. The conclusion, researchers said, is that the absence of the gene for hand preference allows the brain to develop differently as the individual grows up.

There’s a new AI bot in town: ChatGPT, and you’d better pay attention, even if you aren’t into artificial intelligence. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot system that OpenAI released in November to show off and test what a very large, powerful AI system can accomplish. You can ask it countless questions and often will get an answer that’s useful. For example, you can ask it encyclopedia questions like, “Explain Newton’s laws of motion.” You can tell it, “Write me a poem,” and when it does, say, “Now make it more exciting.” You ask it to write a computer program that’ll show you all the different ways you can arrange the letters of a word.

ChatGPT is a big deal. The tool seems pretty knowledgeable in areas where there’s good training data for it to learn from. It’s not all-knowing or smart enough to replace all humans yet, but it can be creative, and its answers can sound downright authoritative. A few days after its launch, more than a million people were trying out ChatGPT. And it’s becoming big business. In January, Microsoft pledged to invest billions of dollars into OpenAI, saying it’ll build features into cloud services. OpenAI announced a $20 per month ChatGPT Plus service that responds faster and gets new features sooner.

It’s an AI that’s trained to recognize patterns in vast series of text harvested from the internet, then further trained with human assistance to deliver more useful, better dialog. The answers you get may sound reasonable and even authoritative, but they might well be entirely wrong, as OpenAI warns. Sometimes, helpfully, it’ll specifically warn you of its own shortcomings. For example, when I asked it who wrote the phrase “the squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,” ChatGPT replied, “I’m sorry, but I am not able to browse the internet or access any external information beyond what I was trained on.” (The phrase is from Wallace Stevens’ 1942 poem Connoisseur of Chaos.)

The fact that it offers an answer at all, though, is a notable development in computing. Computers are famously literal, refusing to work unless you follow exact syntax and interface requirements. Large language models are revealing a more human-friendly style of interaction, not to mention an ability to generate answers that are somewhere between copying and creativity.