In the house where I grew up, we had a room we called the library. It wasn't a real library, of course, it was just a small room dominated by a television set. But there were bookshelves built into all four walls, and hundreds of book — hardback books of many colors — surrounded us in that room. The books, collected by my parents and grandparents throughout their lifetimes, were a part of my childhood.

But in the 1970s, I'm noticing a worrying trend: a move away from books. American homes might soon lack dedicated spaces for libraries, and hardcover books, once symbols of enduring thought and wisdom, may become endangered.

A friend who owns a bookstore in a college town tells me he struggles to sell hardback books; paperbacks, though easier to sell, still disappoint him. Students, once seen with books, now carry music records. Reading seems to be giving way to listening. Recent observations support this shift: the University of Illinois reported that a significant portion of freshmen have reading skills no better than an average eighth grader, with many of these students having been top performers in high school.

University professors note that even college graduates struggle with reading and writing. The cultural impact of this change is evident. A successful fiction book might sell a mere 3,000 copies, while a music album by a new band, Boston, has sold millions. This reflects our passive consumption era, where listening to music or watching shows requires little active engagement, unlike reading a book, which demands effort and intent.

In the past, reading was a fundamental part of life, but now, in the era of fast information access, books are losing their significant place. Today's young Americans are more likely to read a disposable paperback than to cherish and reread a hardcover. In a society that values speed and convenience, the book for keeping and rereading is a weighty dinosaur.

An artificial intelligence can decode （解码） words and sentences from brain activity with1 surprising accuracy. Using only a few seconds of brain activity data, the AI guesses what a person has heard. It lists the correct answer in its top 10 possibilities , researchers found in a primary study.

Developed at the parent company of Facebook, Meta, the AI could eventually be used to help thousands of people around the world who are unable to communicate through speech, typing or gestures.

Most existing technologies to help such patients communicate require risky brain surgeries to put in electrodes （电极）. This new approach "could provide a possible path to help patients with communication problems, avoiding the use of surgeries, " says neuroscientist Jean-Rémi King, a Meta AI researcher.

King and his colleagues trained a computational tool, also known as a language model, to detect words and sentences on 56, 000 hours of speech recordings from 53 languages. The team applied an AI with this language model to databases from four institutions that included brain activity from 169 volunteers. In these databases, participants listened to various stories and sentences, while the people's brains were scanned by magnetoencephalography （MEG）（脑磁图）.

Then with the help of a computational method that helps account for physical differences among actual brains, the team tried to decode what participants had heard using just three seconds of brain activity data from each person. The team instructed the AI to match up the speech sounds from the story recordings with patterns of brain activity that the AI computed as corresponding to what people were hearing. It then made predictions about what the person might have been hearing during that short time, given more than 1, 000 possibilities. Using MEG, the correct answer was in the AI's top 10 guesses, the researchers found.

"The new study is decoding of speech recognition, not production, " King agrees, "Though speech production is the final goal, for now, we're quite a long way away. "

Using CRISPR genome (基因组) editing on a few common crops, a team of plant and soil scientists seeks to greatly increase and speed up carbon storage to help fight climate change. 

To prevent dangerous levels of global warming, scientists say it won't be enough to just stop burning fossil fuels that release carbon into the air. Because it's nearly impossible for humanity to do that as fast as is now required, we will also need to pull carbon out of the air and secure it.

Plants are among the best tools we have to do this, since these living solar collectors already capture billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year from the atmosphere through photosynthesis (光合作用). About half of that carbon winds up in roots and eventually the soil, where it can stay for hundreds to thousands of years. 

But what if we could create plants and soils that are better at capturing carbon? With CRISPR genome editing—a new molecular (分子的) biology tool that allows scientists to make edits to the DNA code that underpins all life—that might be possible. 

Last month, the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), a research team founded by CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, began to explore the idea. With an $11-million donation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a team of researchers made a three-year effort using CRISPR to create new crop varieties that photosynthesi ze more efficiently and transport more carbon into the soil. Eventually, the researchers hope to create gene-edited rice and sorghum seeds that could—if planted around the globe--pull more than a billion extra tons of carbon out of the air annually. 

It's an ambitious goal, and the team is likely to face numerous challenges in the lab before its CO2-cleaning plants can be put in the ground. Additional social, policy, and ethical considerations will determine whether those crops are widely accepted by farmers. But the researchers believe their ambitious project is beneficial to cope with climate crisis.