The Internet is full of diets. In recent years, a lot has been written about intermittent fasting. This is only eating inside an 8-hour window. Supporters of this say it improves metabolism. However, a new study has cast doubt on its merits. Researchers in China said people who restricted their eating to eight hours a day faced a 91 per cent higher risk of dying from cardiovascular diseases than those who spread their eating over a 12-16 hour period.

The researchers used data from 20,000 adults over a six-year period. The lead researcher said: "We were surprised to find that people who followed…a time-restricted eating schedule were more likely to die from cardiovascular disease." He encouraged people to take "a cautious…approach to dietary recommendations". The Mayo Clinic says fasting has been popular for over 1,500 years, but advised it is safer to consult healthcare specialists.

B1: Lướt qua bài báo và note lại các từ mới, tra nghĩa cẩn thận

B2: Sau khi đã nắm rõ nghĩa, đọc lướt bài báo 1 lần để nắm nội dung

B3: Đọc và ghi âm bản dịch bài báo, up vào comment bản dịch và list từ

Lưu ý: tuyệt đối không up bài lên chat GPT hoặc gg dịch nhờ dịch vì sẽ không có tác dụng trong việc cải thiện kỹ năng đọc của các bạn và AI dịch không thể mượt giống người!

The climate crisis may be a threat to the existence of sharks. The acidification of oceans is decaying sharks' teeth. Scientists already know that increasing ocean acidity is damaging corals and sea creatures with shells. Biologists looked at whether shark teeth are at similar risk. Many sharks swim with their mouths open and are constantly exposed to seawater. The researcher concluded that even the teeth of sharks are now vulnerable to damage.

The researcher analyzed teeth from blacktip reef sharks. He put the teeth in separate water tanks for eight weeks. The salt water in one had an acidity level similar to current ocean averages. The water in the other tank was more acidic. The teeth in the more acidic water had visible damage, including cavities, root decay, and structural deterioration. Ongoing damage could impact how sharks feed. This could trigger "domino effects" across marine ecosystems.

El Salvador is cracking down on school discipline. The new education minister is a former soldier. She has started inspecting schools in army uniform. She is also a doctor. She asked all school principals to be role models. They must greet students every morning. They will also check pupils' haircuts and uniforms. She warned: "Failure to comply with these provisions…will be considered a serious breach of...responsibility."

The focus of the new initiative is on appearance and conduct. Boys must have military-style haircuts. All students must wear neat uniforms and greet all teachers. There has been a mixed reaction. A teachers' union called it a "regrettable militarization" of schools. It worried the country could become a military dictatorship. It worried abuses of power against students might increase. However, many parents support the new rules.

The UK's National Drought Group has said data centres are causing water shortages. The group did not say to what degree these facilities are causing drought conditions. Data centres in the UK use up to 10 billion litres of water per year to cool their facilities. A large centre can use as much water as 50,000 houses. Despite environmental concerns, the UK is building more centres. The UK said the centres would drive economic growth.

The NDG asked people to cut back on water usage. People should delete unwanted emails. This could cut the demand for the huge amounts of water data centres need to cool their systems. The NDG said deleting email could "really help the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife". However, experts say the water saved from deleting emails is a drop in the ocean and may not help with water shortages.

A Danish zoo made an unusual request. It asked pet owners to donate unwanted pets, like guinea pigs, rabbits, and even horses. They will be food for the zoo's big cats and other predators. The zoo wants "to imitate the natural food chain of the animals". Using unwanted small creatures means "nothing goes to waste. The zoo added: "We ensure the natural behaviour, nutrition and well-being of our predators." It said all pets would be "gently euthanized".

The zoo said putting down animals for use as feed was common. It said: "Our…guests appreciate the opportunity to contribute." Regardless, there has been mixed reaction online. Some people felt sad. However, a man who donated his horse was satisfied with its treatment. He said his pet was put down peacefully. There is so much interest in donating that there are waiting lists for horses. Donors can get a tax deduction based on their animal's value.

Japan is often reported as having the longest life expectancy. Japanese people live to be an average of above 84 years old. Many people say this is because of the country's healthy diet. Another reason could be how people walk. Japanese people walk a lot. This has started a new fitness trend on TikTok, called "Japanese Walking". It involves walking quickly for three minutes and then slowing down for three minutes. Walkers repeat this pattern five times. Health experts say Japanese walking is good for posture, blood circulation, lowering blood pressure, and reducing stress. It has also been linked to a lower risk of dementia. Doctors also say it can help people live longer.

Japanese people might not know about the term "Japanese Walking". To them, it is just walking. Researchers at Shinshu University in Matsumoto, Japan came up with the name in 2007. They conducted a study on high- and low-intensity walking. The recent worldwide popularity of the walking method is due to videos made by Eugene Teo, an Australian fitness coach and social media content creator. He wanted people to follow a simple exercise routine that had an easy-to-remember name. His videos have had 10 million views on TikTok and 17 million views on YouTube. He said he wanted "to make fitness advice and scientific jargon a lot more accessible".

The popularity of matcha is skyrocketing. Supplies of the green tea powder are low. Most of the world's matcha is produced in Japan. Record high temperatures there have lowered harvests of the tea leaves. Increased demand and lower crop yields have resulted in record prices. A farmer from Kyoto told the Reuters news agency about his lower harvest. He was only able to harvest 1.5 tons of leaves this year, instead of his usual two tons. He added: "Last year's summer was so scorching that it damaged the bushes, so we couldn't pluck as many leaves."

Matcha has exploded in popularity. It was once a niche product. Now it is a trendy flavouring for drinks, desserts, and even skincare products. A tea association said Japan's tourism boom is making the green tea shortages worse. It said: "Many foreigners buy lots of matcha…as souvenirs, sometimes even in bulk." It added that the increased demand was in part fuelled by social media. The founder of the store Tealife said demand had grown ten-fold. He is always out of stock. "Matcha mania" has resulted in a scarcity that is also affecting Japan's traditional tea ceremonies.

The U.K. will lower the voting age to 16. This is two years lower than the current age. This "seismic" change is part of a set of reforms that will give the electoral system more integrity. The first chance 16- and 17-year-olds will have to cast their vote will be in the UK's next general election. The government said: "We are modernizing our democracy, so that it is fit for the 21st century. By [extending] the vote to younger people, we are taking a generational step forward in restoring public trust and boosting engagement in UK democracy."

There has been mixed reaction to the change. Supporters say 16-year-olds work and pay taxes, so they should be allowed to vote. The UK prime minister agreed. He said: "If you pay in, you should have the opportunity to say what you want your money spent on." The UK's deputy prime minister said: "Young people already contribute to society by…paying taxes and serving in the military. It's only right they can have a say on the issues that affect them." Critics say 16-year-olds cannot drink alcohol or get married without their parents' consent, yet they will be able to vote.

New research suggests that cheese could give people nightmares. A study in a journal found that people with a severe lactose intolerance were more likely to have bad dreams and insomnia. The director of the Dream and Nightmare Lab in Canada analyzed the diet, health and sleep patterns of 1,000 people. She wanted to investigate how food affected dreams. The director based her research on a 2015 study that looked into "food-dependent dreaming". Participants in that study blamed cheese and other dairy products for disrupting their sleep.

The director found that people with stomach problems and lactose intolerance had scarier and more frequent nightmares. She said: "Gastrointestinal issues…could account for a lot of what's happening in terms of sleep disturbances [and] different dreams." Her colleague said: "Sleep disturbances affect a huge proportion of the general population." Around 35 per cent of people could have a clinically significant sleep disorder. Research suggests that about 85 per cent of adults have a nightmare at least once a year. About 5 per cent of people have one frequently.

The kākāpō, also known as the owl parrot, is a large, forest-dwelling bird, with a pale owl-like face. Up to 64 cm in length, it has predominantly yellow-green feathers, forward-facing eyes, a large grey beak, large blue feet, and relatively short wings and tail. It is the world's only flightless parrot, and is also possibly one of the world's longest-living birds, with a reported lifespan of up to 100 years.

Kākāpō are solitary birds and tend to occupy the same home range for many years. They forage on the ground and climb high into trees. They often leap from trees and flap their wings, but at best manage a controlled descent to the ground. They are entirely vegetarian, with their diet including the leaves, roots and bark of trees as well as bulbs, and fern fronds.

Kākāpő breed in summer and autumn, but only in years when food is plentiful. Males play no part in incubation or chick-rearing - females alone incubate eggs and feed the chicks. The 1-4 eggs are laid in soil, which is repeatedly turned over before and during incubation. The female kākāpō has to spend long periods away from the nest searching for food, which leaves the unattended eggs and chicks particularly vulnerable to predators.

Before humans arrived,kākāpō were common throughout New Zealand's forests. However, this all changed with the arrival of the first Polynesian settlers about 700 years ago. For the early settlers, the flightless kākāpō was easy prey. They ate its meat and used its feathers to make soft cloaks. With them came the Polynesian dog and rat, which also preyed on kākāpō. By the time European colonisers arrived in the early 1800s, kākāpō had become confined to the central North Island and forested parts of the South Island. The fall in kākāpō number was accelerated by European colonisation. A great deal of habitat was lost through forest clearance, and introduced species such as deer depleted the remaining forests of food. Other predators such as cats, stoats and two more species of rat were also introduced. The kākāpō were in serious trouble.

Manatees, also known as sea cows, are aquatic mammals that belong to a group of animals called Sirenia. This group also contains dugongs. Dugongs and manatees look quite alike - they are similar in size, colour and shape, and both have flexible flippers for forelimbs. However, the manatee has a broad, rounded tail, whereas the dugong's is fluked, like that of a whale. There are three species of manatees: the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus), the African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis) and the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis).

Unlike most mammals, manatees have only six bones in their neck - most others, including humans and giraffes, have seven. This short neck allows a manatee to move its head up and down, but not side to side. To see something on its left or its right, a manatee must turn its entire body, steering with its flippers. Manatees have pectoral flippers but no back limbs, only a tail for propulsion. They do have pelvic bones, however - a leftover from their evolution from a four-legged to a fully aquatic animal. Manatees share some visual similarities to elephants. Like elephants, manatees have thick, wrinkled skin. They also have some hairs covering their bodies which help them sense vibrations in the water around them.

Seagrasses and other marine plants make up most of a manatee's diet. Manatees spend about eight hours each day grazing and uprooting plants. They eat up to 15% of their weight in food each day. African manatees are omnivorous - studies have shown that molluscs and fish make up a small part of their diets. West Indian and Amazonian manatees are both herbivores.

Manatees' teeth are all molars - flat, rounded teeth for grinding food. Due to manatees' abrasive aquatic plant diet, these teeth get worn down and they eventually fall out, so they continually grow new teeth that get pushed forward to replace the ones they lose. Instead of having incisors to grasp their food, manatees have lips which function like a pair of hands to help tear food away from the seafloor.

At some point in history, humans discovered that ice preserved food. There is evidence that winter ice was stored to preserve food in the summer as far back as 10,000 years ago. Two thousand years ago, the inhabitants of South America's Andean mountains had a unique means of conserving potatoes for later consumption. They froze them overnight, then trampled them to squeeze out the moisture, then dried them in the sun. This preserved their nutritional value - if not their aesthetic appeal.

Natural ice remained the main form of refrigeration until late in the 19th century. In the early 1800s, ship owners from Boston, USA, had enormous blocks of Arctic ice towed all over the Atlantic for the purpose of food preservation. In 1851, railroads first began putting blocks of ice in insulated rail cars to send butter from Ogdensburg, New York, to Boston.

Finally, in 1870, Australian inventors found a way to make 'mechanical ice'. They used a compressor to force a gas - ammonia at first and later Freon - through a condenser. The compressed gas gave up some of its heat as it moved through the condenser. Then the gas was released quickly into a low-pressure evaporator coil where it became liquid and cold. Air was blown over the evaporator coil and then this cooled air passed into an insulated compartment, lowering its temperature to freezing point.

Initially, this process was invented to keep Australian beer cool even in hot weather. But Australian cattlemen were quick to realize that, if they could put this new invention on a ship, they could export meat across the oceans. In 1880, a shipment of Australian beef and mutton was sent, frozen, to England. While the food frozen this way was still palatable, there was some deterioration. During the freezing process, crystals formed within the cells of the food, and when the ice expanded and the cells burst, this spoilt the flavor and texture of the food. 

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) was one of the most influential figures in American art, celebrated for her ability to capture the essential, abstract forms of nature. She maintained a distinctive style for seven decades, focusing on subtle variations of color, light, and shape that fascinated audiences worldwide.

Raised on a Wisconsin farm, O'Keeffe decided early to become an artist. After formal training at top art schools, she worked as a teacher until her experimental charcoal drawings caught the attention of photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. With his support, she moved to New York in 1918, where he organized more than twenty solo exhibitions of her work. The two married in 1924, and Stieglitz famously documented their life together in hundreds of portraits.

By the mid-1920s, O'Keeffe was acclaimed for her bold depictions of New York skyscrapers and magnified flower paintings, which transformed everyday objects into striking abstract compositions.

From 1929 onwards, she spent much time in New Mexico, whose dramatic landscapes and sun-bleached animal bones became central to her art. In 1949, she made the state her permanent home.

In her later years, O'Keeffe expanded her horizons through international travel and produced large-scale sky and river series inspired by aerial views. Despite declining health and near-blindness in her final decades, she left behind a legacy of nearly 900 paintings, securing her place as a pioneer of American modernism.

In 2016, the British professional tennis player Andy Murray was ranked as the world’s number one. It was an incredible achievement by any standard - made even more remarkable by the fact that he did this during a period considered to be one of the strongest in the sport’s history, competing against the likes of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, to name just a few. Yet five years previously, he had been regarded as a talented outsider who entered but never won the major tournaments.

Of the changes that account for this transformation, one was visible and widely publicised: in 2011, Murray invited former number one player Ivan Lendl onto his coaching team - a valuable addition that had a visible impact on the player’s playing style. Another change was so subtle as to pass more or less unnoticed. Like many players, Murray has long preferred a racket that consists of two types of string: one for the mains (verticals) and another for the crosses (horizontals). While he continued to use natural string in the crosses, in 2012 he switched to a synthetic string for the mains. A small change, perhaps, but its importance should not be underestimated.

The modification that Murray made is just one of a number of options available to players looking to tweak their rackets in order to improve their games. ‘Touring professionals have their rackets customised to their specific needs,’ says Colin Triplow, a UK-based professional racket stringer. ‘It’s a highly important part of performance maximisation.’

Consequently, the specific rackets used by the world’s elite are not actually readily available to the public; rather, each racket is individually made to suit the player who uses it. Take the US professional tennis players Mike and Bob Bryan, for example: ‘We’re very particular with our racket specifications,’ they say. ‘All our rackets are sent from our manufacturer to Tampa, Florida, where our frames go through a . . . thorough customisation process.’ They explain how they have adjusted not only racket length, but even experimented with different kinds of paint. The rackets they use now weigh more than the average model and also have a denser string pattern (i.e. more crosses and mains).

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s and by the 1830s and 1840s had spread to many other parts of the world, including the United States. In Britain, it was a period when a largely rural, agrarian* society was transformed into an industrialised, urban one. Goods that had once been crafted by hand started to be produced in mass quantities by machines in factories, thanks to the invention of steam power and the introduction of new machines and manufacturing techniques in textiles, iron-making and other industries.

The foundations of the Industrial Revolution date back to the early 1700s, when the English inventor Thomas Newcomen designed the first modern steam engine. Called the 'atmospheric steam engine', Newcomen’s invention was originally used to power machines that pumped water out of mines. In the 1760s, the Scottish engineer James Watt started to adapt one of Newcomen’s models, and succeeded in making it far more efficient.

Watt later worked with the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton to invent a new steam engine driven by both the forward and backward strokes of the piston, while the gear mechanism it was connected to produced rotary motion. It was a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries.

The demand for coal, which was a relatively cheap energy source, grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, as it was needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also steam-powered transportation. In the early 1800s, the English engineer Richard Trevithick built a steam-powered locomotive, and by 1830 goods and passengers were being transported between the industrial centres of Manchester and Liverpool. In addition, steam-powered boats and ships were widely used to carry goods along Britain’s canals as well as across the Atlantic.

Britain had produced textiles like wool, linen and cotton, for hundreds of years, but prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile business was a true ‘cottage industry’, with the work performed in small workshops or even homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers. Starting in the mid-1700s, innovations like the spinning jenny and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. With these machines, relatively little labour was required to produce cloth, and the new, mechanised textile factories that opened around the country were quickly able to meet customer demand for cloth both at home and abroad.

In 2016, the British professional tennis player Andy Murray was ranked as the world’s number one. It was an incredible achievement by any standard - made even more remarkable by the fact that he did this during a period considered to be one of the strongest in the sport’s history, competing against the likes of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, to name just a few. Yet five years previously, he had been regarded as a talented outsider who entered but never won the major tournaments.

Of the changes that account for this transformation, one was visible and widely publicised: in 2011, Murray invited former number one player Ivan Lendl onto his coaching team - a valuable addition that had a visible impact on the player’s playing style. Another change was so subtle as to pass more or less unnoticed. Like many players, Murray has long preferred a racket that consists of two types of string: one for the mains (verticals) and another for the crosses (horizontals). While he continued to use natural string in the crosses, in 2012 he switched to a synthetic string for the mains. A small change, perhaps, but its importance should not be underestimated.

The modification that Murray made is just one of a number of options available to players looking to tweak their rackets in order to improve their games. ‘Touring professionals have their rackets customised to their specific needs,’ says Colin Triplow, a UK-based professional racket stringer. ‘It’s a highly important part of performance maximisation.’

Consequently, the specific rackets used by the world’s elite are not actually readily available to the public; rather, each racket is individually made to suit the player who uses it. Take the US professional tennis players Mike and Bob Bryan, for example: ‘We’re very particular with our racket specifications,’ they say. ‘All our rackets are sent from our manufacturer to Tampa, Florida, where our frames go through a . . . thorough customisation process.’ They explain how they have adjusted not only racket length, but even experimented with different kinds of paint. The rackets they use now weigh more than the average model and also have a denser string pattern (i.e. more crosses and mains).

The primary reason for these modifications is simple: as the line between winning and losing becomes thinner and thinner, even these slight changes become more and more important. As a result, players and their teams are becoming increasingly creative with the modifications to their rackets as they look to maximise their competitive advantage.

Racket modifications mainly date back to the 1970s, when the amateur German tennis player Werner Fischer started playing with the so-called spaghetti-strung racket. It created a string bed that generated so much topspin that it was quickly banned by the International Tennis Federation. However, within a decade or two, racket modification became a regularity. Today it is, in many ways, an aspect of the game that is equal in significance to nutrition or training.

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s and by the 1830s and 1840s had spread to many other parts of the world, including the United States. In Britain, it was a period when a largely rural, agrarian* society was transformed into an industrialised, urban one. Goods that had once been crafted by hand started to be produced in mass quantities by machines in factories, thanks to the invention of steam power and the introduction of new machines and manufacturing techniques in textiles, iron-making and other industries.

The foundations of the Industrial Revolution date back to the early 1700s, when the English inventor Thomas Newcomen designed the first modern steam engine. Called the 'atmospheric steam engine', Newcomen’s invention was originally used to power machines that pumped water out of mines. In the 1760s, the Scottish engineer James Watt started to adapt one of Newcomen’s models, and succeeded in making it far more efficient. Watt later worked with the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton to invent a new steam engine driven by both the forward and backward strokes of the piston, while the gear mechanism it was connected to produced rotary motion. It was a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries.

The demand for coal, which was a relatively cheap energy source, grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, as it was needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also steam-powered transportation. In the early 1800s, the English engineer Richard Trevithick built a steam-powered locomotive, and by 1830 goods and passengers were being transported between the industrial centres of Manchester and Liverpool. In addition, steam-powered boats and ships were widely used to carry goods along Britain’s canals as well as across the Atlantic.

Britain had produced textiles like wool, linen and cotton, for hundreds of years, but prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile business was a true ‘cottage industry’, with the work performed in small workshops or even homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers. Starting in the mid-1700s, innovations like the spinning jenny and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. With these machines, relatively little labour was required to produce cloth, and the new, mechanised textile factories that opened around the country were quickly able to meet customer demand for cloth both at home and abroad.

The British iron industry also underwent major change as it adopted new innovations. Chief among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke (a material made by heating coal) instead of the traditional charcoal. This method was cheaper and produced metals that were of a higher quality, enabling Britain’s iron and steel production to expand in response to demand created by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) and the expansion of the railways from the 1830s.

In early April 2019, Dr Ceri Shipton and his colleagues from Australian National University became the first archaeologists to explore Obi, one of many tropical islands in Indonesia’s Maluku Utara province. The research team’s discoveries suggest that the prehistoric people who lived on Obi were adept on both land and sea, hunting in the dense rainforest, foraging on the seashore, and possibly even voyaging between islands.

The excavations were part of a project to learn more about how people first dispersed from mainland Asia, through the Indonesian archipelago and into the prehistoric continent that once connected Australia and New Guinea. The team’s earlier research suggested that the northernmost islands in the group, known as the Wallacean islands, including Obi, would have offered the easiest migration route. It also seemed likely that these islands were crucial ‘stepping stones’ on humans’ island-hopping voyages through this region millennia ago. But to support this idea, they needed archaeological evidence for humans living in this remote area in the ancient past. So, they travelled to Obi to look for sites that might reveal evidence of early occupation.

Just inland from the village of Kelo on Obi’s northern coast, Shipton and his colleagues found two caves containing prehistoric rock shelters that were suitable for excavation. With the permission and help of the local people of Kelo, they dug a small test excavation in each shelter. There they found numerous artefacts, including fragments of axes, some dating to about 14,000 years ago. The earliest axes at Kelo were made using clam shells. Axes made from clam shells from roughly the same time had also previously been found elsewhere in this region, including on the nearby island of Gebe to the northeast. As on Gebe, it is highly likely that Obi’s axes were used in the construction of canoes, thus allowing these early peoples to maintain connections between communities on neighbouring islands.

The oldest cultural layers from the Kelo site provided the team with the earliest record for human occupation on Obi, dating back around 18,000 years. At this time the climate was drier and colder than today, and the island’s dense rainforests would likely have been much less impenetrable than they are now. Sea levels were about 120 metres lower, meaning Obi was a much larger island, encompassing what is today the separate island of Bisa, as well as several other small islands nearby.

Roughly 11,700 years ago, as the most recent ice age ended, the climate became significantly warmer and wetter, no doubt making Obi’s jungle much thicker. According to the researchers, it is no coincidence that around this time the first axes crafted from stone rather than sea shells appear, likely in response to their heavy-duty use for clearing and modification of the increasingly dense rainforest. While stone takes about twice as long to grind into an axe compared to shell, the harder material keeps its sharp edge for longer.

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s and by the 1830s and 1840s had spread to many other parts of the world, including the United States. In Britain, it was a period when a largely rural, agrarian* society was transformed into an industrialised, urban one. Goods that had once been crafted by hand started to be produced in mass quantities by machines in factories, thanks to the invention of steam power and the introduction of new machines and manufacturing techniques in textiles, iron-making and other industries.

The foundations of the Industrial Revolution date back to the early 1700s, when the English inventor Thomas Newcomen designed the first modern steam engine. Called the 'atmospheric steam engine', Newcomen’s invention was originally used to power machines that pumped water out of mines. In the 1760s, the Scottish engineer James Watt started to adapt one of Newcomen’s models, and succeeded in making it far more efficient. Watt later worked with the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton to invent a new steam engine driven by both the forward and backward strokes of the piston, while the gear mechanism it was connected to produced rotary motion. It was a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries.

The demand for coal, which was a relatively cheap energy source, grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, as it was needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also steam-powered transportation. In the early 1800s, the English engineer Richard Trevithick built a steam-powered locomotive, and by 1830 goods and passengers were being transported between the industrial centres of Manchester and Liverpool. In addition, steam-powered boats and ships were widely used to carry goods along Britain’s canals as well as across the Atlantic.

Britain had produced textiles like wool, linen and cotton, for hundreds of years, but prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile business was a true ‘cottage industry’, with the work performed in small workshops or even homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers. Starting in the mid-1700s, innovations like the spinning jenny and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. With these machines, relatively little labour was required to produce cloth, and the new, mechanised textile factories that opened around the country were quickly able to meet customer demand for cloth both at home and abroad.

The British iron industry also underwent major change as it adopted new innovations. Chief among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke (a material made by heating coal) instead of the traditional charcoal. This method was cheaper and produced metals that were of a higher quality, enabling Britain’s iron and steel production to expand in response to demand created by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) and the expansion of the railways from the 1830s.

The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system. In the 1830s and 1840s, Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone’s system was soon used for railway signalling in the UK. As the speed of the new locomotives increased, it was essential to have a fast and effective means of avoiding collisions.

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s and by the 1830s and 1840s had spread to many other parts of the world, including the United States. In Britain, it was a period when a largely rural, agrarian* society was transformed into an industrialised, urban one. Goods that had once been crafted by hand started to be produced in mass quantities by machines in factories, thanks to the invention of steam power and the introduction of new machines and manufacturing techniques in textiles, iron-making and other industries.

The foundations of the Industrial Revolution date back to the early 1700s, when the English inventor Thomas Newcomen designed the first modern steam engine. Called the 'atmospheric steam engine', Newcomen’s invention was originally used to power machines that pumped water out of mines. In the 1760s, the Scottish engineer James Watt started to adapt one of Newcomen’s models, and succeeded in making it far more efficient. Watt later worked with the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton to invent a new steam engine driven by both the forward and backward strokes of the piston, while the gear mechanism it was connected to produced rotary motion. It was a key innovation that would allow steam power to spread across British industries.

The demand for coal, which was a relatively cheap energy source, grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution, as it was needed to run not only the factories used to produce manufactured goods, but also steam-powered transportation. In the early 1800s, the English engineer Richard Trevithick built a steam-powered locomotive, and by 1830 goods and passengers were being transported between the industrial centres of Manchester and Liverpool. In addition, steam-powered boats and ships were widely used to carry goods along Britain’s canals as well as across the Atlantic.

Britain had produced textiles like wool, linen and cotton, for hundreds of years, but prior to the Industrial Revolution, the British textile business was a true ‘cottage industry’, with the work performed in small workshops or even homes by individual spinners, weavers and dyers. Starting in the mid-1700s, innovations like the spinning jenny and the power loom made weaving cloth and spinning yarn and thread much easier. With these machines, relatively little labour was required to produce cloth, and the new, mechanised textile factories that opened around the country were quickly able to meet customer demand for cloth both at home and abroad.

The British iron industry also underwent major change as it adopted new innovations. Chief among the new techniques was the smelting of iron ore with coke (a material made by heating coal) instead of the traditional charcoal. This method was cheaper and produced metals that were of a higher quality, enabling Britain’s iron and steel production to expand in response to demand created by the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) and the expansion of the railways from the 1830s.

The latter part of the Industrial Revolution also saw key advances in communication methods, as people increasingly saw the need to communicate efficiently over long distances. In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the first commercial telegraphy system. In the 1830s and 1840s, Samuel Morse and other inventors worked on their own versions in the United States. Cooke and Wheatstone’s system was soon used for railway signalling in the UK. As the speed of the new locomotives increased, it was essential to have a fast and effective means of avoiding collisions.

Let us start by looking at a modem ‘genius’, Maryam Mirzakhani, who died at the early age of 40. She was the only woman to win the Fields Medal - the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize. It would be easy to assume that someone as special as Mirzakhani must have been one of those ‘gifted’ children, those who have an extraordinary ability in a specific sphere of activity or knowledge. But look closer and a different story emerges. Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran. She went to a highly selective girls’ school but maths wasn’t her interest - reading was. She loved novels and would read anything she could lay her hands on. As for maths, she did rather poorly at it for the first couple of years in her middle school, but became interested when her elder brother told her about what he’d learned. He shared a famous maths problem from a magazine that fascinated her - and she was hooked.

In adult life it is clear that she was curious, excited by what she did and also resolute in the face of setbacks. One of her comments sums it up. ‘Of course, the most rewarding part is the “Aha” moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new . . . But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight.’ That trail took her to the heights of original research into mathematics.

Is her background unusual? Apparently not. Most Nobel prize winners were unexceptional in childhood. Einstein was slow to talk as a baby. He failed the general part of the entry test to Zurich Polytechnic - though they let him in because of high physics and maths scores. He struggled at work initially, but he kept plugging away and eventually rewrote the laws of Newtonian mechanics with his theory of relativity.

There has been a considerable amount of research on high performance over the last century that suggests it goes way beyond tested intelligence. On top of that, research is clear that brains are flexible, new neural pathways can be created, and IQ isn't fixed. For example, just because you can read stories with hundreds of pages at the age of five doesn’t mean you will still be ahead of your contemporaries in your teens.

While the jury is out on giftedness being innate and other factors potentially making the difference, what is certain is that the behaviours associated with high levels of performance arc replicable and most can be taught - even traits such as curiosity.

In early April 2019, Dr Ceri Shipton and his colleagues from Australian National University became the first archaeologists to explore Obi, one of many tropical islands in Indonesia’s Maluku Utara province. The research team’s discoveries suggest that the prehistoric people who lived on Obi were adept on both land and sea, hunting in the dense rainforest, foraging on the seashore, and possibly even voyaging between islands.

The excavations were part of a project to learn more about how people first dispersed from mainland Asia, through the Indonesian archipelago and into the prehistoric continent that once connected Australia and New Guinea. The team’s earlier research suggested that the northernmost islands in the group, known as the Wallacean islands, including Obi, would have offered the easiest migration route. It also seemed likely that these islands were crucial ‘stepping stones’ on humans’ island-hopping voyages through this region millennia ago. But to support this idea, they needed archaeological evidence for humans living in this remote area in the ancient past. So, they travelled to Obi to look for sites that might reveal evidence of early occupation.

Just inland from the village of Kelo on Obi’s northern coast, Shipton and his colleagues found two caves containing prehistoric rock shelters that were suitable for excavation. With the permission and help of the local people of Kelo, they dug a small test excavation in each shelter. There they found numerous artefacts, including fragments of axes, some dating to about 14,000 years ago. The earliest axes at Kelo were made using clam shells. Axes made from clam shells from roughly the same time had also previously been found elsewhere in this region, including on the nearby island of Gebe to the northeast. As on Gebe, it is highly likely that Obi’s axes were used in the construction of canoes, thus allowing these early peoples to maintain connections between communities on neighbouring islands.

The oldest cultural layers from the Kelo site provided the team with the earliest record for human occupation on Obi, dating back around 18,000 years. At this time the climate was drier and colder than today, and the island’s dense rainforests would likely have been much less impenetrable than they are now. Sea levels were about 120 metres lower, meaning Obi was a much larger island, encompassing what is today the separate island of Bisa, as well as several other small islands nearby.

Roughly 11,700 years ago, as the most recent ice age ended, the climate became significantly warmer and wetter, no doubt making Obi’s jungle much thicker. According to the researchers, it is no coincidence that around this time the first axes crafted from stone rather than sea shells appear, likely in response to their heavy-duty use for clearing and modification of the increasingly dense rainforest. While stone takes about twice as long to grind into an axe compared to shell, the harder material keeps its sharp edge for longer.

Wetlands are areas where water covers the soil, or is present either at or near the surface of the soil, for all or part of the year. These are complex ecosystems, rich in unique plant and animal life. But according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWFN), half of the world’s wetlands have disappeared since 1990 - converted or destroyed for commercial development, drainage schemes and the extraction of minerals and peat*. Many of those that remain have been damaged by agricultural pesticides and fertilisers, industrial pollutants, and construction works.

Throughout history, humans have gathered around wetlands, and their fertile ecosystems have played an important part in human development. Consequently, they are of considerable religious, historical and archaeological value to many communities around the world. ‘Wetlands directly support the livelihoods and well-being of millions of people,’ says Dr Matthew McCartney, principal researcher and hydrologist at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). ‘In many developing countries, large numbers of people are dependent on wetland agriculture for their livelihoods.’

They also serve a crucial environmental purpose. ‘Wetlands are one of the key tools in mitigating climate change across the planet,’ says Pieter van Eijk, head of Climate Adaptation at Wetlands International (WI), pointing to their use as buffers that protect coastal areas from sea-level rise and extreme weather events such as hurricanes and flooding. Wetland coastal forests provide food and water, as well as shelter from storms, and WI and other agencies are working to restore those forests which have been lost. ‘It can be as simple as planting a few trees per hectare to create shade and substantially change a microclimate,’ he says. ‘Implementing climate change projects isn’t so much about money.’

The world’s wetlands are, unfortunately, rich sources for in-demand commodities, such as palm oil and pulpwood. Peatlands - wetlands with a waterlogged organic soil layer - are particularly targeted. When peatlands are drained for cultivation, they become net carbon emitters instead of active carbon stores, and, according to Marcel Silvius, head of Climate-smart Land-use at WI, this practice causes six per cent of all global carbon emissions. The clearance of peatlands for planting also increases the risk of forest fires, which release huge amounts of CO2 ‘We’re seeing huge peatland forests with extremely high biodiversity value being lost for a few decades of oil palm revenues,’ says Silvius.

The damage starts when logging companies arrive to clear the trees. They dig ditches to enter the peat swamps by boat and then float the logs out the same way. These are then used to drain water out of the peatlands to allow for the planting of corn, oil palms or pulpwood trees. Once the water has drained away, bacteria and fungi then break down the carbon in the peat and turn it into CO2 and methane. Meanwhile, the remainder of the solid matter in the peat starts to move downwards, in a process known as subsidence**. Peat comprises 90 per cent water, so this is one of the most alarming consequences of peatland clearances. ‘In the tropics, peat subsides at about four centimetres a year, so within half a century, very large landscapes on Sumatra and Borneo will become flooded as the peat drops below water level,’ says Silvius. ‘It’s a huge catastrophe that’s in preparation. Some provinces will lose 40 per cent of their landmass.’

Noise, Alex Waibel tells me, is one of the major challenges that artificial speech translation has to meet. A device may be able to recognise speech in a laboratory, or a meeting room, but will struggle to cope with the kind of background noise I can hear in my office surrounding Professor Waibel as he speaks to me from Kyoto station in Japan. I’m struggling to follow him in English, on a scratchy line that reminds me we are nearly 10,000 kilometres apart - and that distance is still an obstacle to communication even if you’re speaking the same language, as we are. We haven’t reached the future yet. If we had, Waibel would have been able to speak more comfortably in his native German and I would have been able to hear his words in English.

At Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where he is a professor of computer science, Waibel and his colleagues already give lectures in German that their students can follow in English via an electronic translator. The system generates text that students can read on their laptops or phones, so the process is somewhat similar to subtitling. It helps that lecturers speak clearly, don’t have to compete with background chatter, and say much the same thing each year.

The idea of artificial speech translation has been around for a long time. Douglas Adams’ science fiction novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, published in 1979, featured a life form called the 'Babel fish’ which, when placed in the ear, enabled a listener to understand any language in the universe. It came to represent one of those devices that technology enthusiasts dream of long before they become practically realisable, like TVs flat enough to hang on walls: objects that we once could only dream of having but that are now commonplace. Now devices that look like prototype Babel fish have started to appear, riding a wave of advances in artificial translation and voice recognition.

At this stage, however, they seem to be regarded as eye-catching novelties rather than steps towards what Waibel calls ‘making a language-transparent society’. They tend to be domestic devices or applications suitable for hotel check-ins, for example, providing a practical alternative to speaking traveller’s English. The efficiency of the translator is less important than the social function. However, ‘Professionals are less inclined to be patient in a conversation,’ founder and CEO at Waverly Labs, Andrew Ochoa, observes. To redress this, Waverly is now preparing a new model for professional applications, which entails performance improvements in speech recognition, translation accuracy and the time it takes to deliver the translated speech.

For a conversation, both speakers need to have devices called Pilots (translator earpieces) in their ears. ‘We find that there’s a barrier with sharing one of the earphones with a stranger,’ says Ochoa. That can’t have been totally unexpected. The problem would be solved if earpiece translators became sufficiently prevalent that strangers would be likely to already have their own in their ears. Whether that happens, and how quickly, will probably depend not so much on the earpieces themselves, but on the prevalence of voice-controlled devices and artificial translation in general.