Kids today may be more  with the sound of a rushing highway than a rushing river. But imagine that the internal combustion engine could be set aside and we could  the soundscape of our future.What aural environment would you choose for traffic? For the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the answer is that new cars should sound like old cars. Hybrid and electric vehicles can be so quiet that people outside the vehicle can’t hear them.So these too-quiet cars will be  to sound something like this. The Obama administration wants a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. Slow sales of cars like the Chevy Volt and Tesla Model S may keep that  from being reached. But there are still hundreds of thousands of EVs and hybrids on the road today. It’s hoped that the new rule will help prevent thousands of  and cyclist deaths. But the rule also hews to a possibly outdated  , like people who set their cellphone ringtone to sound like an old rotary phone. And it’s wasting a chance to reimagine what our cars, roads and even cities could sound like.

Medicinal tablets are nothing new. Doctors have been dispensing pills for thousands of years. And now archaeologists have turned up some of those  medicines, which were preserved in a shipwreck for close to two millennia. The 2nd-century Pozzino wreck was  in 1974 off the coast of Italy. It’s cargo included medical equipment like a cupping vessel, iron probe, and tin boxes of  . And in one of those boxes, researchers recovered five gray tablets. Now, they’ve analyzed the antique  . The work is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.The pills primarily  zinc compounds, probably the active medicinal ingredients. But researchers also detected starch, pollen, charcoal, fats and linen fibers. Those fibers helped the tablets hold their round, loaf-like shape, which may be the key to the medication’s use: the Greek word meaning “small round loaves” also  the word collyrium, or eye-wash. The pills were probably either dissolved in liquid or ground into a powder and used to treat eye conditions. Who knows, maybe Hippocrates used them on his pupils

You will hear a recording. Type the missing words in each blank.

Millions of roses get handed out on Valentine’s Day. But growing roses has an   impact worse than many other crops. Start with climate change: most roses in the U.S. and Europe are  from warmer climes. All that flying and trucking adds thousands of metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Then there’s all the water needed to, well, water the flowers. And the runoff fouled by copious   of pesticides needed to make the roses look perfect. There’s also the wildlife and workers poisoned by all that fumigation. Add to that habitat   where floral plantations displace native forest and wetlands. Finally, there’s the refrigeration needed to keep those blooms fresh. The    is often produced by burning fossil fuels, and the refrigerant gases also exacerbate climate change. A more sustainable and, possibly, more romantic    is to go with flowers certified by outfits like VeriFlora, or even better, whatever flowers are in season locally. Of course, that’s not much help for those of us in wintry climes. Maybe try writing a poem. Let’s see: Roses are red, violets are blue…