The rain forest contains more than 4000 types of birds and more than 1,000,000 types of insects. In one square mile, there may be more than 100 different types of plants. Some call it the world’s last wilderness area. People are becoming concerned. They want to protect this last wilderness area, the rain forest, and its plant and animal life. For example, in Costa Rica, students have raised money to buy land in the rain forest to protect it. Some businesses prefer to buy products from the rain forest to encourage leaving the forest as it is. Others such as a major ice cream maker have been giving a percentage of their profits for rain forest protection.

In the rain forest of the Amazon, 50 to 150 plant species are being destroyed every day. Some people want to use the land so they cut down some of the rain forest. They want the trees for wood to build houses. They want the land to grow grass for cattle. They want to build roads to areas for mining gold and other minerals. As a result, the forest and its plants are disappearing.

Some scientists and government officials are pointing out the importance of the plants and knowledge of the tribes (部落). They say that it is time to lay stress on the rain forest. It will show the peoples of the rain forests that the world values them, their knowledge of the plants, and the plants themselves. Some years ago, there were hardly any education programs for protecting the rain forest. But today it’s hard to find a public school, university, or law school that does not have such a kind of program. Until we do that, nothing else will change!

The people who live in the rain forest countries are beginning to see that it is profitable and important to save these areas. The Jivaro, a tribe in the rain forest of northern Peru, recently told us, “You are like babies in the rain forest, but we will teach you.”

New technological tools are enabling a global community of biologists and amateur scientists to explore the natural world of sound in richer detail and at greater range than ever before. Just as microscopes helped humans observe things not visible to the naked eye, widely used microphones and machine learning models allow us to listen to sounds we cannot otherwise hear.

Billions of dollars are pouring into so-called generative artificial intelligence, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with scores of new companies being launched to commercialize these foundation models. But in one sense, these models are mostly used to rearrange existing human knowledge in new combinations rather than to generate anything really new. What may have a bigger scientific impact is “additive AI”, using machine learning to explore specific, newly created data sets and extend the frontiers of human knowledge. When it comes to sonic (声音的) data, there is an incredible potential for cross-species communication through the use of machines that can translate and copy animal sounds exactly, effectively creating a “Google Translate for the zoo”.

This sonic revolution has been promoted by advances in both hardware and software. Cheap, durable, long-lasting microphones and sensors can be attached to trees in the Amazon, rocks in the Arctic or to dolphins’ backs, enabling real-time monitoring. That stream of sonic data is then processed by “additive AI”. However, this data only makes sense when combined with human observations about natural behaviors gained from painstaking fieldwork by biologists or crowdsourced analysis from amateurs.

Scientists have discovered fascinating information about the sonic universe, which has already led to practical and commercial outcomes. For example, cryptographers (密码专家) have been studying the buzzes, clicks, creaks and squeaks of whales to understand whether their “bionic Morse code” could be copied to encrypt (加密) communications. However, this is just the beginning of our exploration of sound, and there is no telling what other discoveries await us.

Deepak Chopra is an American author who was born in India in 1946. He is a well-known and respected advocate of alternative approaches to medicine. He has written some 80 books and produced several videos that promote his philosophy on life.

After a career in conventional medicine, he became influenced by Maharishi Maresh Yogi and adopted an approach to medicine based on spirituality and consciousness. Essentially, he views the human body as a whole unit, and by treating the whole, a person can achieve “perfect health”. He describes this state as being free from pain, disease, and the aging process.

For Chopra, the mental state of a person affects every other part of his body, including their spirit. From this, all aspects of a person’s life are influenced, including their social life, work-life, relationships, and even the environment around them.

Part of the treatments that Chopra encourages is meditation(沉思), which aims to calm the mental state of the patient. He also believes that the power of the mind can be used to correct imbalances in the body. He suggests that serious illnesses can be cured or positively affected by the power of the mind.

Chopra’s philosophy on life goes beyond just medical matters. Many of his sayings can be applied to everyday life and the pursuit(追求)of happiness. He believes that to achieve happiness—which for him is the ultimate measure of success-requires positive choices to be made, and that only when we are in the right mental state can we do that.

For him, part of the journey towards ultimate happiness is the ability to reflect, and meditate. In other words, we should all adopt a philosophical approach to life and thus free our imaginations, creativity, and the ability to act with free will.

The promotion of self-awareness is also an aspect of Chopra’s philosophy. Self-awareness comes from theability to make choices, and there are choices to be made throughout one’s life, and those choices often require both dynamic action and meditative relaxation. Through self-awareness, we can know that we can make those choices from an informed position.