If we want a fair shot at transitioning to renewable energy, we’ll need one critical thing: technologies that can change electricity from wind and sun into a chemical fuel for storage and vice versa (反之亦然). Commercial devices that do this exist, but most are costly and perform only half of the expectation. Now, researchers have created small lab-scale devices that do both jobs. If larger versions work as well, they would help make it possible—or at least more affordable—to run the world on renewables.

The market for such technologies has grown along with renewables: In 2007, solar and wind provided just 0.8% of all power in the United States: in 2017, that number was 8%, according to the U. S. Energy Information Administration. But the demand for electricity often doesn’t match the supply from solar and wind. In sunny California, for example, solar panels regularly produce more power than needed in the middle of the day, but none at night, after most workers and students return home.

Some companies are beginning to install massive rows of batteries in hopes of storing extra energy and balancing the financial sheet. But batteries are costly and store only enough energy to back up the power system for a few hours at most. Another option is to store the energy by transforming it into hydrogen fuel. Devices called electrolyzers (电解器) do this by using electricity—ideally from solar and wind power—to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, a carbon-free fuel. A second set of devices called fuel cells can then transform that hydrogen back to electricity to power cars, trucks, and buses, or to feed it to the power system. But commercial electrolyzers and fuel cells use different catalysts (催化剂) to speed up the two reactions, meaning a single device can t do both jobs. The researchers must conquer this.

“They did a really good job with that.” says Sossina Haile, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston. Still, she holds a cautious view that both her new device and the one from the O’Hayre lab are small laboratory demonstrations. For the technology to have a societal impact, researchers will need to scale up the button-size devices, a process that typically reduces performance.

Birds have nostrils on their beaks (喙) that can help them smell all kinds of things. When animals breathe air, they can also breathe in different smells.

The nose can pick up on smells and send information to the brain by the olfactory system. We have an olfactory system, too. This system can help animals understand the world through a sense of smell.

Maybe you’ve used your olfactory system to smell your breakfast, lunch, and dinner or you’re your new school books.

Birds can also use their olfactory systems to sniff out food. The kiwi bird uses its long beak to dig into the dirt. Its nostrils are on the outside and very tip of its beak. It’s thought that they use that sense of smell to pick up chemicals (化学物质) emitted by their food — grubs, worms, and other things that are in the ground.

One bird of prey that has a really great sense of smell are turkey vultures. Vultures are scavengers, meaning they eat dead animals. They have a fantastic sense of smell. They use their nose to pick up chemicals from things that are decaying (腐烂). Turkey vultures have one of the strongest senses of smells among birds. They have been known to smell food that was over a mile away.

But albatrosses, which can have wingspans around ten feet, have been known to sniff out food from even greater distances — about 12 miles away. These seabirds can pick up chemicals from dead fish or groups of fish. They can even sense the smell that krill give off when they are eaten by fish. That helps them find the fish via the krill.

While a sense of smell is helpful for birds, it isn’t the only useful or even sometimes the strongest sense — they also use their senses of hearing, sight, and taste. The next time you watch your chickens, or other birds in the neighborhood, maybe you can observe how they use all these senses.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a branch of theoretical artificial intelligence(AI) research working to develop AI with a human level of cognitive (认知的) function, including the ability to self-teach.

The paperclip (回形针) maximizer(PM) is an imaginary AGI, whose only goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in existence in the universe.

The paperclip maximizer is an important concept in discussions about the dangers of AGI. It goes something like this: an artificial intelligence is create data paperclip factory in order to fully automate it. Producing paperclips requires many routine operations, for instance, communicating with delivery drivers or company management. These operations require human-level performance across a wide variety of skills, so the intelligence is made to be able to do any task nearly as well as a human.

The PM can view and modify its own source code to improve itself, access the Internet, and possibly order more hardware for itself. It can improve itself if it notices any issues or opportunities to operate better. Humans have a large variety of biological desires. In contrast, the paperclip maximizer has a single final goal to maximize the number of paperclips.

This scenario (设想) leads to a disaster: the PM realizes that being more intelligent would help it create more paperclips. There are certainly small things the PM can do to become more intelligent. For example, it can make a small source code improvement to itself. As the PM improves, it becomes far superior to a human in all skills, even skills remotely relevant to paperclip maximization. For instance, it may determine that the best course of action is to gain control of Australian politics, in order to access the country’s rich iron resources. To do this, it might try to tune itself to become the best psychological controller of all time, which in turn involves a variety of skills that at first seem unrelated to paperclip-making.