The Internal Business Machines Corporation, known as IBM, says it is making technology for precision weather predictions available to everyone. The company said the new weather forecasts offer more details and bring a level of accuracy once available only in major industrial countries. The forecasting tool is expected to help emergency officials better predict where severe storms will hit. It may also aid airline companies to plan flight paths, as well as farmers to care for crops.

The new system creates weather forecasts more often and with finer details than what is available outside the United States, Europe and Japan. Most forecasts have a resolution (分辨率) of 10 to 15 square kilometers and provide new information every six to twelve hours. IBM’s Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System goes down to three square kilometers and provides information every hour.

Fred Carr is a famous climatology (气候学) professor at the University of Oklahoma and was not involved in the project. Carr said the United States has a similar high-resolution forecasting system, “but it’s just for the U.S. because it takes so much computer time. To do it for the whole globe is a pretty important achievement.” Carr added that it is possible to quickly collect observations from radar, airplanes and surface measurements in the United States. But he said it is not clear how IBM gets information from the other 98% of the world. Carr said he believes there will be problems in getting information, so “sometimes those forecasts aren’t going to be very accurate”. Users will be able to decide for themselves. The system now operates on the Weathers.com website and The Weather Channel’s application program for smartphones.

In the future, IBM hopes to improve its forecasts by collecting information from atmospheric pressure sensors used in such phones. The sensors improve the precision of global positioning system, or GPS, technology. For example, they can help fitness tracking instruments measure how many steps a user has taken. IBM said it is not currently using this information but plans to offer users the chance to choose it. Some privacy activists and governments have criticized technology companies for gathering this kind of information. The city of Los Angeles, California has brought a case against IBM for improperly using location information from Weather Channel app users.

Having a microchip implanted in a man’s brain may be common in sci-fi movie plots, but it may soon become an actual possibility.

Elon Musk -- a US tech tycoon, founder of Space X -- has been working on this technology. On Aug 28, Musk gave a display of the chip, which was implanted into the head of a pig named Gertrude. The chip, developed by Musk’s company Neuralink, is just as small as the size of a coin. But don’t let its size fool you. The tiny chip has over 3,000 electrodes(电极) attached to flexible threads(线), which can monitor about 1,000 neurons(神经元). It collects neural signals from an area of the brain, and then wirelessly transmits those signals to nearby computers, according to MSN. That enabled researchers to monitor Gertrude’s brain activity while she was walking around in the display.

Though the technology is still in its early stage, it is encouraging for humans. This technology would solve a lot of brain injuries and is essential for AI symbiosis(共存关系), which will allow the human brain to combine with an artificial intelligence. When the device can be applied to humans, its main goal will be to help those who have mobility difficulties. Musk hopes this technology can also be used to help those with hearing and eyesight issues.

Although such a device could repair those problems, putting it into practice is by no means a piece of cake. Currently, the device can transmit signals from about 500 neurons in the pig’s brain. Compared to 80 billion neurons in a human brain, this number is extremely tiny. And to cover the whole human brain also means the electrodes have to be much smaller.

Also, implanting the chip into the brain poses a potential danger. There is a risk of the immune system attacking this foreign body. Right now, the hope of controlling the brain by controlling just a few neurons seems overly optimistic. “There are still so many technological challenges, especially the possible risks it may cause, to overcome before Neuralink can put its devices to the purposes,” Yuan Lanfeng, an associate professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, told China Daily.

Paperless office was first coined in 1975.Four decades later, we're still chasing(追逐) the paperless office dream. Take the financial(金融的) industry for example—it is one of the slower industries to hug digital transformation. Many financial institutions today still send out trade confirmations by mail. I can tell you from first－hand experience that going paperless is by no means impossible. The Centric Digital office is a paperless work environment where all the office operations go digital, which has amazed our business partners.

Actually, companies need to stress the benefits of a digital culture for communications. Going paperless can save time and money. You could say goodbye to costly repairs, office supply orders, wasted employee time and so on. Besides, forbidding paper in the office forces information to be 100% digital, where you can make endless amounts of backups(备份), which easily increase transparency(透明). Not to mention, top talents want to work for digital companies.

You might think the secret to a paperless company is purely technology. Well, not really. Thanks to products like iPads, smartphones and cloud services, the ability to go paperless is highly accessible. Yet, even with all this technology, companies continue to rely on paper. It's not because they don't have access to the technology, but because they're lacking the policies, organizational structure and a strong desire to change. In order to go paperless, companies need to change the way they think and operate. The decision needs to be made and carried out and everyone needs to work together to make it.

Yes, the paperless office has been a very long time in the making—but it no longer has to be. With numerous amounts of software, services, apps, and technology available today, the only thing we need to do is make the decision to go paperless and see it through.