From video games and museums to medical training, virtual reality (VR) has been changing our lives for the better. However, this amazing new technology has a so-far unsolvable shortcoming: motion sickness. “With modern VR systems, the possibility of motion sickness after only 15 minutes is anywhere from 40 to 70 percent.” Thomas Stoffregen, a researcher told ABC News. Indeed, some VR applications have a user-sickness rate of nearly 100 percent!

When caused by VR, this sickness is called cybersickness. It’s probably caused by sensory conflict, explains Stoffregen. When you are wearing a VR device, your body’s motion sensors cannot match the information received by your eyes. For example, when we wear a VR headset and ride a virtual roller-coaster, we think we are going up and down, but our bodies stay still. It leads to confusion of balance and spatial orientation. Sickness is our bodies’ natural response to this confusion. Adding to this problem, Stoffregen says, “Women are more likely to feel sick from the VR experience than men.”

According to a study by Bas Rokers, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, one reason could be the headsets. To work properly, VR headsets must match up with your pupil distance. Since they are designed larger than the average PD, not everyone gets the best experience.

Rokers found that when the headset PD is too large, users experience greater discomfort. Based on his studies, about 90 percent of women have a shorter PD than the headset is designed for. In comparison, only 5 percent of men had this problem. ABC News says that cybersickness presents a “serious barrier” to widespread use of VR technologies. However, people believe it will become comfortable and easy to use and that it can play a great role in our lives.

"We must learn not to take traditional morals（道德）too seriously." So said the biologist J. B. S. Haldane in a 1923 talk on science and the future. Haldane forecasted that scientific progress would destroy every belief and value. The future would be bright only "if mankind can adjust its morality to its powers". Haldane had a point: our powers have led to challenges that have never existed before. Climate change is a threat unlike any we have ever seen. Our machines might become smarter than us. Genetic engineering（基因工程）could change humanity forever.

In the face of such challenges, our evolved moral sense often proves not enough. Part of the problem is scale（规模）.The anthropologist Robin Dunbar says we can keep no more than about 150 meaningful relationships at once. But today, all 7 billion of us are connected—if not in meaningful relationships, not in meaningless ones, either. “Society" is now too big a concept for our brains to analyze.

One result is conflicting demands that are hard to solve. The bad situation of our fellow humans makes us use every possible way to deal with climate change. But that could hurt our own way of life. And then there's the urge to just forget all that pressure and get on a plane to somewhere sunny. Given this cognitive（认知的）overload, our original emotional responses tend to win out. We do what feels right. But such responses don't necessarily produce the best results. So how can we make sure we do what really is right?

It's a hard nut, but never fear: moral philosophers are on the case. Some, such as those based at the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford, UK, aim to maximize the good we can do by quantifying the results of our actions. Many of their suggestions have raised eyebrows: that it may be better to become a generous banker than work for a charity, for example.

Others suggest modifying our moral brains directly, through drugs. The difficulties with this idea are obvious: who decides what makes improvement? Given the practical difficulties of large-scale morality hacking（入侵），we should perhaps stick to education. We are not simply prisoners of our emotions: we can reason our way to workable solutions. Science alone will not get us there. So no, we shouldn't take traditional morality too seriously where it fails to address modern problems.

On a sunny day last August,Daniel Malechuk opened the door to a 77,000-square-foot warehouse just outside Atlanta. Inside, under the soft glow of LED lights, grew five varieties of hydroponic (水培的) lettuce with nine levels high. A handful of employees were busy harvesting the greens. Their pace matched Malechuk’s ambition: to grow 10 million heads of lettuce by next spring.

If they succeed, Kalera, the vertical farming company that began operations here in April 2021, will not only have the largest-yield vertical (垂直的) farm in the Southeast, but will also be Georgia’s largest lettuce producer.

“This facility will produce 12 times as much lettuce in one year as the entire state can produce in the same amount of time,”Malechuk said. These farms, not dependent on specific weather patterns, can grow almost anywhere, cutting down transportation costs and associated emissions. And importantly, they operate more cleanly, without producing runoff from fertilizers or pesticides.

Malechuk, of Kalera farms, has said making his greens affordable is a top priority and that a head of Kalera lettuce sells for less than $3 in most stores. But there’s a catch: indoor farms rely on the artificial light of tens of thousands of LED lights. Add to that the energy needed for climate control, water circulation and other operations, and a farm like Malechuk’s can consume massive amounts of energy.

“The single largest challenge facing the industry is that it uses a huge amount of electricity,” said Julia Kurnik, director of innovation startups at the World Wildlife Fund. She said vertical farming involves a series of economic and environmental trade-offs (权衡). “It may not make sense everywhere, but if you’re in, say, the Middle East and you don’t have much land, but you can use renewable energy to power your farm, this may be a huge boon (益处).” She said the source of the energy is crucial to determining the net environmental impact.

Lowering vertical farms’ energy costs is one of the main goals at Signify, a Dutch LED lighting company, said Udo van Slooten, CEO of the Signify.