Science and technology Making daily life better 科技使得日常生活越来越好
The big projects like exploring the origins of the Universe or probing the workings of the brain capture our imagination, but science and technology are also about making daily life better. Look at the basics – food, clothing and shelter. 探索宇宙起源或解密大脑的工作原理等大问题往往更能激发我们的想象力，而科技也让我们的日常生活越来越好，看看我们最基本的衣食住行就知道了。

The US and EU27 had around 30% each of patents in 2007, Japan 28%, and the rest of the world 12%. Switzerland, Japan, Sweden and Germany are the four most inventive countries in 2007, with the highest values recorded in Switzerland (118 per million habitants) and Japan (115). Conversely, China has less than 0.5 patent families
per million population. 2007年的新专利中来自美国和欧洲27国的各占30%，28%来自日本，世界上其余的国家共占12%，2007年四个最有创造性的国家分别为瑞士、日本、瑞典和德国,而瑞士(每百万居民中就有118项)和日本(每百万居民中有115项)登记在册的数字最高，相对照，中国每百万人口只有不到半个发明。

Malthus would have been right about the Earth not being able to feed a bigger population if extending the area of farmland had remained the main way to increase production. 如果扩大耕地面积依然是增加产量的主要方法，Malthus关于地球将不能养活更多人口的断言应该早就应验了。Thanks to a series of innovations in animal and crop science, as well as fertilisers and pesticides, the world now produces more than enough to feed everybody (to the point where obesity is the main problem in many places) and hunger exists because of economic reasons, not agricultural ones. 得益于一系列动植物科学和化肥、杀虫剂的创新，现在人类的温饱早已不是问题(很多地方肥胖倒成了主要问题)，之所以有饥饿存在，也是因为经济的原因而非农业上的原因。

In the 19th century, Gogol could write a credible story about a man who dreams of a new overcoat, 在19世纪，果戈理可写出一个让人相信的故事，而这个故事是关于一个梦想一件新外套的人。whereas today, in OECD countries at least, people throw away used clothes rather than mend them, and the same is true for far more sophisticated goods too because factories can churn out products at a fraction of the cost they once did, in part because of advances in production technology.
然而，在今天，至少是在经济合作与发展组织国家（OECD）中，人们会扔掉使用过的衣服而不是修补它们。并且，对待更多的复杂的货物的处理方式也与此相同，因为工厂可以大量生产产品，而所用成本只占原先成本的一小部分。在某种程度上说，这是因为有了先进的生产技术。

A favourite article in 1950s magazines was the home of the future, and while the atomic vacuum cleaner and helicopter in every garage have not materialised, many
products and services we take for granted were barely known half a century ago. 在19世纪50年代的杂志中有一篇最受人喜爱的文章，这篇文章是关于未来的家的，文中写到在每个车库中将有原子真空吸尘器和直升飞机，半个世纪前这些还未成为现实，我们还司空见惯的许多产品和服务就很少为人所知了。Some of these seem very low-tech, like stain-proof carpets or non-stick frying pans (which, contrary to a popular myth, were invented in 1954, and were not a spin-off from the space programme), but there is complicated science behind them, and equally complicated technology to turn the discovery into a useful product.它们中的一些显得没有太多科技含量，比如抗污地毯，或是不粘煎锅（与流行的传说相反，实际上它发明于1954年，且不是来源于太空计划的副产品），但在它们背后是很复杂的科学知识，以及同样复杂的将发明变为有用产品的技术。

Information and communication technologies have seen rapid advances too. A year before Apollo 11’s Moon landing captivated the world’s imagination, Douglas Englebart
presented e-mail, hypertext, word processing, video conferencing, and the computer mouse for the first time.
信息与通信技术也迅速发展。在阿波罗11号登月之前的一年，吸引了全世界的想象力。道格拉斯?英格雷巴特首次展示了电子邮件、超文本、字处理、视频会议及计算机鼠标。The computers he used were too expensive for most businesses, even if they could have found the experts needed to run them, but one of the greatest changes of the industrial age was underway.
但他使用的计算机对于大多数企业而言还是过于昂贵，即便这些企业能够找到会操作这些计算机的专家，然而工业时代的一个最大的变革正在发生。In fact, you could argue that the industrial age was coming to an end in the decade that would see the birth not only of space flight, but of the Internet, computer games, video cassettes, the ATM, and a host of other inventions ranging from artificial hearts to the bar code scanner.事实上，你可以认为，工业时代将会在10年内结束，这10年内将见证太空飞行器、因特网、电脑游戏、视频录像、ATM、以及一堆其它发明（从人造心脏到条形码扫描器）的诞生。