Episode Details

Hi everyone, welcome to a new episode of News Bites! I'm Kelly Kimura… And I'm Paz Bueno. Coming up next in today's news: the most valuable public company in the world and how scientists are studying whale songs! And in today's Tasty Tidbit… do you know how your tongue tastes food? Stay tuned for more on those stories! ___________________________________________________________ 全球最有價值的上市公司 The World's Most Valuable Public Company Thirty-one years ago, a Taiwanese American electrical engineer (電機工程師) started a company with two other people. He was 30 years old and younger than the other two. But they wanted him to be the president and CEO (總裁和執行長). The early days of the company were not easy. Once, it only had enough money to pay its workers for one more month. After that, the CEO often started meetings by saying, "Our company is thirty days from going out of business." The company started doing better. The CEO liked video games. So his company made powerful (強大的) graphics cards (顯示卡). They made the images (圖像) in games look more real. To work very quickly, these cards do many calculations (計算) at the same time. Other cards do one calculation at a time. They are much slower. A graduate student (研究生) made a supercomputer (超級電腦) by connecting (連接) many of the company's graphics cards together! The company began to make software (軟體) and chips (晶片) for supercomputing (超級計算). But did many companies need supercomputing? Maybe they did, but they didn't know this. The company's business was slow. A few years later, a researcher used the company's supercomputing software to train (訓練) software to recognize (認出) people's voices. Then the researcher's student used the supercomputing software to train software to recognize images. These were the beginning of AI systems (人工智慧系統). These systems need to do many calculations at the same time. The CEO changed the company's products to help other companies make AI systems. Then the company's supercomputer trained an AI chatbot (聊天機器人). This chatbot is very, very popular. Anyone can use it. And the AI boom started! The company soon became the second most valuable public company (第二大最有價值上市公司) in the world. Then last week, the company became the world's MOST valuable public company. It's the third company with a value (價值) of $3 trillion (兆) US dollars or more. Last week, it had a value of $3.3 trillion US dollars. That's over 106 trillion Taiwan dollars! The company does not make its products. It has strong ties to Taiwan, with about 100 suppliers (供應商) here. 這位執行長表示，台灣「處於世界技術供應鏈的中心」。 Do you know the name of the company and its CEO? ___________________________________________________________ 科學家如何研究鯨魚唱歌 How Scientists Are Studying Whale Songs Marine biologists (海洋生物學家) and computer scientists (電腦科學家) are working together on whale songs. They want to find out what sperm whale (抹香鯨) songs mean. These whales have the biggest brain (腦) of all living animals. They're also the loudest animal! One of the marine biologists recorded sperm whale songs with underwater microphones (麥克風) for many years. The group has thousands of hours of songs to study! Sperm whale songs are clicks (點擊聲). The whales make clicks when they're swimming together. Sometimes the whales click more quickly. Then other whales also click more quickly. The clicks sound like a code (碼). One pattern sounds like this: Click…, click…, click, click, click. For a long time, the marine biologists thought there were about 30 patterns (模式). They thought of the clicks as points on a line (一條線上的點). But a computer science graduate student didn't like looking at the clicks this way. She arranged (整理) the clicks differently. The new arrangement let her see that there were many, many more click patterns. The scien