Most people love to lose themselves in a great book, maybe a classic novel, a modern storybook or a great work of history. But many people also live busy lives, and for them finding time to sit quietly and read is difficult, if not impossible. Fortunately, with the coming of the Internet and high-tech tools like the iPod, more and more people are making literature a part of their lives again.

A very special website now makes it possible for people to listen to books that they simply would not have time to read. The site is called Audible Inc., and it’s the best place to download audio (音频的) books. Over the past few years, hundreds of thousands of these books have been recorded. They include nearly every classic, as well as most newly-published ones. Most of these are read by voice actors who really bring the text to life.

Audible Inc. lets you easily and quickly download a book and load it onto your iPod or other MP3 players, or onto CDs so that you can listen in your car. The site is like Amazon, com, but for audio books. It includes thousands of recommendations (推荐) and customer reviews that are extremely helpful. The site lets you listen to a free piece of each book so you can tell ahead what the narrator (讲述者) sounds like. No wonder that most people who listen to an audio book for the first time are immediately attracted.

This is the perfect opportunity to find out what so many people know about audio books. But be careful — you may become attracted to audio books for life.

   In the early times, the music industry was terrified of taping (用磁带录音), thinking that customers would just copy music, or record from the radio. But that never really happened, at least not enough to cause any real hardship to anyone in the music business.

The same argument arose over technologies like MiniDiscs and recordable CDs. But the thing that terrified the music industry more than anything else was the arrival of services like Napster, which allowed people to share music over the Internet without costing them anything. The music industry was shocked; it saw people exchanging (交换) digital copies that didn’t degrade (削弱) the quality with each transfer, something that stopped tapes being a huge threat.

But it wasn’t the Internet that killed the music industry. In fact, everything is still looking optimistic for many musicians. Taylor Swift has had a good year, and her latest album is likely to make her very wealthy indeed. There is always going to be public demand for music.

However, the technology will simply destroy the record company. The reason is simple. Record companies are a man in the middle that simply doesn’t need to exist anymore. The same way we buy our flights direct, and do our shopping online and have things delivered from Amazon instead of going to a local shop. We have always been willing to enjoy cost reductions at the expense of the middleman, and the record companies are that kind of middleman.

What does the record industry offer? Well, surprisingly little these days. It used to be the case that record companies would go and find new talents. Of course this still happens, but more likely is that an artist will be discovered by the public through YouTube, or even from friends on Facebook or Twitter. Record companies also used to have an important role in producing the music. But countless artists are making their own way through software or any of the other amazing music apps, without any help from the record companies.

   Government intelligence agencies have a plan to build computers that store information inside DNA and other organic molecules（分子）.

Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity（IARPA）announced plans to develop tabletop-sized machines that can store and retrieve（取回）data from large batches of polymers — a term that refers to a wide variety of long，string-like molecules. Polymers can store data in individual atoms or groups of atoms.

The project is an attempt to solve a basic problem of the modern era:the vast and growing costs of data storage. Datacenters around the world sucked up 416. 2 terawatt hours of electricity in 2016. That's about 3 percent of the global supply，and it accounts for 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

A 2016 paper found that DNA，in particular，could store computer information more densely，require less energy，and survive higher and lower temperatures than conventional hard drives. The authors of that paper reported on the successes of prototype（雏形）DNA computers that used the genetic molecules for both long-term storage and random access memory（RAM）.

But no one has yet figured out how to handle DNA data storage on large scales.

IARPA officials said the new effort, called Molecular Information Storage, will be broken up into three periods:a two-year program to figure out how to store data in DNA or other molecules at high speed,a two-year program to figure out how to retrieve that data at high speed, and a two-year effort to develop an operating system that can run on that DNA.

Many of the technologies IARPA wants to develop are untested at these scales, so it's unclear how far away that proposed tabletop device really is.

Bad Things About Cell Phones in School

Giving your schoolchild a cell phone has a very positive effect. 【小题1】 However, at school especially in the classroom, cell phones cause a lot of problems.

The Internet capabilities (联网功能) of phones will make students absent from their tasks. 【小题2】 In addition to sending text messages, smartphones have email and Internet capabilities. All of these features will distract (使分心) children from their tasks at hand.

【小题3】 The most common means by which the whole class distraction happens is when a cell phone rings during the middle of a class, attracting students’ attention towards the noise. A student with a cell phone may also encourage others to play the game on his cell phone or share information that comes up on the Internet.

The use of phones may contribute to the students’cheating in the exams. Students can take advantage of cell phones’ Internet capabilities to look for answers to questions for tests for which they haven’t studied. Having a palm-sized computer may give students the chance to cheat in exams. 【小题4】

Using a phone may reduce children’s social behavior. If a student has a cell phone, particularly one with an Internet connection, it must reduce his necessity to socially communicate with others. 【小题5】