Can a small group of drones（无人机）guarantee the safety and reliability of railways and, at the same time, help railway operators save billions of euros each year? That is the very likely future of applying today's "eyes in the sky" technology to making sure that the millions of kilometres of rail tracks and infrastructure（基础设施）worldwide are safe for trains on a 24/7 basis.
Drones are already being used to examine high-tension electrical lines. They could do precisely the same thing to inspect railway lines and other vital aspects of rail infrastructure such as the correct position of railway tracks and switching points. The more regularly they can be inspected, the more railway safety, reliability and on-time performance will be improved. Costs would be cut and operations would be more efficient（高效）across the board.
That includes huge savings in maintenance costs and better protection of railway personnel safety. It is calculated that European railways alone spend approximately 20 billion euros a year on maintenance, including sending maintenance staff, often at night, to inspect and repair the rail infrastructure. That can be dangerous work that could be avoided with drones assisting the crews' efforts.
By using the latest technologies, drones could also start providing higher-value services for railways, detecting faults in the rail or switches, before they can cause any safety problems. To perform these tasks, drones for rail don't need to be flying overhead. Engineers are now working on a new concept: the rail drones of the future. They will be moving on the track ahead of the train, and programmed to run autonomously. Very small drones with advanced sensors and AI and travelling ahead of the train could guide it like a co-pilot. With their ability to see ahead, they could signal any problem, so that fast-moving trains would be able to react in time.
The Tiangong space station, the first space station, is not just for China but for all humanity. The completion of Tiangong, expected by the end of next year, will be yet another milestone for an ambitious space program. The construction of the station is based on the experience gained from its pioneers, Tiangong-l and Tiangong-2. The first module(舱), the Tianhe core module, was launched on 29 April 2021, followed by multiple crewed and uncrewed missions and two more modules to be launched by 2022.
According to China Manned Space Agency (CMSA), which operates the space station, the purpose and missions of Tiangong space station are listed as: breakthrough in key technologies such as permanent human operations in orbit, long- term autonomous spaceflight of the space station, life support technology; development of technology that can aid future deep space exploration.
The Tianhe Core Cabin Module (CCM) provides life support and living quarters for three crew members and provides guidance, navigation (导航) for the station. The module also provides the station's power and life support system. The station is equipped with a small kitchen for food preparation and the first-ever microwave oven in the spaceflight, so that astronauts can always have hot food whenever they need. 120 different types of food, selected based on astronauts' preference, are stored aboard.
China's intention to build its own space station was amplified(增强的) after NASA refused Chines participation in International Space Station in 2011.On 22 February 2017, CMSA and Italian Space Agency (ASD) signed an agreement to cooperate on long-term human spaceflight activities. The agreement holds importance due to Italy's leading position in the field of human spaceflight with regard to the creation and development of the International Space Station and it shows Italy's increased expectation in China's developing space station program. Tiangong is also expected to host experiments from many other countries.
Wherever we go, we are surrounded by history. Across the globe, cultural heritage is passed down through the generations. It is in the buildings and structures around us. It is in the arts and artifacts (手工艺品) we treasure. It lives in the languages we speak and the stories we tell. But today, it is under attack as never before. Not only are the damages of time threatening our cultural heritage, but conflicts, climate change, globalization and tourism are all a heavy price. Technology is now the most essential weapon in the battle. Here's how technology is preserving our cultural heritage.
As you can imagine, creating the replicas (复制品) via crowd sourced 2 D images is extremely time-consuming. Increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms (算法) are being used to do all the required sourcing, allowing millions of images to be stored in a matter of hours. AI will also make restoration and preservation of existing cultural heritage far easier and vastly superior to previous methods.
Virtual reality (VR) technology will play a leading role in preserving our cultural heritage in the coming years.
Many of the most important sites and architecture are extremely fragile. Human interaction with these locations is doing a great deal of harm. Wastes accumulate everywhere, causing enormous problems. As more cultural heritagesites and objects are digitally mapped and recorded, VR technology will increasingly become the way that people experience them. We'll all eventually be able to walk through places, look at (and touch!) artifacts and works of art without ever seeing them with our own eyes.
Finally, our cultural heritage will be preserved via technology. Efforts in research, innovation, data sharing and project work will help promote and preserve the cultural heritage of countries all across the world.
By now，you've likely heard of the metaverse（元宇宙）.
Last month, Mark Zuckerberg sent everyone running to their dictionaries to figure out what he was talking about when he said Facebook was changing its name to Meta and declared the metaverse not only the future for his company, but the future for the Internet.
Actually, the word and concept aren't new. Neal Stephenson made up the term in his 1991 science-fiction book Snow Crash，in which people use avatars（分身）to explore an online world. A number of small metaverses have since developed, where people can do many real life things—like working out, meeting with colleagues, or taking a class—but all online and through a pair of eyeglasses that costs around $ 3, 500 and other more expensive equipment.
"They are virtual worlds where you feel like you're inside a cool video game. But it's so much more than a game because it's like the Internet, where you're socially connected and you can do almost anything in the metaverse, "said Jason Moore who teaches virtual art at Brooklyn College and spends a couple of hours in the metaverse every day. "There are currently a handful of mostly unconnected metaverse platforms, including VRChat, NeosVR, and my studio at the college. "
He hopes that cheaper equipment and faster Internet connections might put it within mainstream applications like tourism and provide us with the most powerful educational tool ever invented within a couple of years.
But Frances Haugen, a former Google's designer, warns that metaverses could harm personal calculation skills and further divide societies as each user stays in their own virtual realities. She is also worried that they are likely to become more addictive than the current social media and rob people of more personal information.
An Australian professor is developing a robot to monitor the health of grazing cattle, a development that could bring big changes to a profession that's relied largely on a low-tech approach for decades but is facing a labor shortage.
Salah Sukkarieh, a professor at the University of Sydney, sees robots as necessary given how cattlemen are aging. He is building a four-wheeled robot that will run on solar and electric power. It will use cameras and sensors to monitor the animals. A computer system will analyze the video to determine whether a cow is sick. Radio tags(标签) on the animals will measure temperature changes. The quality of grassland will be tracked by monitoring the shape, color and texture(质地) of grass. That way, cattlemen will know whether they need to move their cattle to another field for nutrition purposes.
Machines have largely taken over planting, watering and harvesting crops such as com and wheat, but the monitoring of cattle has gone through fewer changes.
For Texas cattleman Pete Bonds, it's increasingly difficult to find workers interested in watching cattle. But Bonds doesn't believe a robot is right for the job. Years of experience in the industry and failed attempts to use technology have convinced him that the best way to check cattle is with a man on a horse. Bonds, who bought his first cattle almost 50 years ago, still has each of his cowboys inspect 300 or 400 cattle daily and look for signs that an animal is getting sick.
Other cattlemen see more promise in robots. Michael Kelsey Paris, vice president of the Oklahoma Cattlemen's Association, said a robot could be extremely useful given rising concerns about cattle theft. Cattle tend to be kept in remote places and their value has risen, making them appealing targets.
Coaches have always taken into account the condition of players when scheduling training sessions. Now with the help of artificial intelligence, they can calculate more precisely the probability that individual athletes will get injured during the next match, the next week or the next month. "We follow a team for an entire season, recording GPS data during training and matches, "Rossi explains. He then uses machine learning to try to detect patterns. "This gives us the probability that a player will get injured in the next days or next weeks."
These data reveal an athlete's workload-how often they train and how intensely. Just enough training can pave the way to medals, but too much puts pressure on the body and can lead to injuries.
Sport is gradually entering a new era, in which artificial intelligence might act as an assistant coach. Algorithms (算法) could enable a teenager to train smarter and avoid a career-ending injury, or help a professional athlete to compete for a few years longer. But the technology's success depends, in part, on the ability of scientists to convince coaches to include data in their decision process.
The teams that McHugh has worked with have seen a reduction in injuries of between 5% and 40%. Yet not every coach is happy to join forces with AI. "Coaches sometimes don't feel good, because it seems like trying to substitute the human element," Rossi says. But in reality, data is only a tool. "The interpretation of the results, the change of the training load, is done by coaches," he says.
McHugh agrees that people have to make the final call. "Once the injury probability for an athlete on a given day is output from an injury model, the athlete or coach must then decide whether the predicted risk is acceptable or not, usually depending on the context, " he says. There might be a big game that day, and the layer might be especially important to the learn. "Even though the predicted injury probability be as high as 70%, the coco may be willing to take that chance," he says.
Scientists say the plant enset, an Ethiopian staple (主食), could be a new superfood and a lifesaver in the face of climate change. "This is a crop that can play a really important role in addressing food security and sustainable development," said a university professor in Awasa, Ethiopia.
Enset, or "false banana", is a close relative of the banana but is consumed only in one part of Ethiopia. The banana-like fruit of the plant is inedible (无法食用的), but the stems and roots can be processed to make porridge and bread.
However, Ethiopia is isolated (隔离) by dry lowlands, which are unsuitable for enset to grow. And the procedures for enset raising and preparing require special knowledge. Therefore, despite its wild relatives distributing across Africa, enset is only used as a crop in Ethiopia and has never been widely adopted elsewhere.
Using agricultural surveys and modelling work, scientists found the crop could potentially feed more than 100 million people and boost food security in Ethiopia and other African countries.
Study researcher Dr James Borrell, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, said planting enset as an alternative crop for tough times could help support food security. "It's got some really unusual characteristics that make it absolutely unique as a crop," he said. Reaching ten meters tall, as few as 15 enset plants can feed a person for a year. Also, it has flexible harvest times, stores well, and is relatively drought and disease tolerant. All these features have earned it the name, "the tree against hunger".
There is growing interest in seeking new plants to feed the world. Nearly half of all the calories we eat come from three species - rice, wheat, and corns. "We need to diversify the plants we use globally as a staple because all our eggs are in a very small basket at the moment," said Dr Borrell.
Transport has a lot to answer for when it comes to harming the planet. While cars and trains are moving towards greener, electric power, emissions (排放) from air travel are expected to increase massively by 2050. If we want big green sky solutions, we need blue sky thinking. Fortunately, there's plenty of that happening right now, particularly the short - haul flights powered by batteries.
Harbour Air is the largest seaplane airline in North America, flying 30,000 commercial flights in 40 seaplanes each year. Significantly, all Harbour Air routes last less than 30 minutes, making it perfectly fit for electric engines. "As an airline, we're currently in the process of turning all our planes into electric airplanes. says CEO Greg McDougall. To make this happen, the airline has partnered up with MagniX to create the world's first commercial flight with an electric engine.
Making the skies electric isn't just good for the environment, it also makes sound financial sense： a small aircraft uses $ 400 on conventional fuel for a 100 - mile flight, while an electric one costs $ 8 12 for the same distance, and that's before you factor in the higher maintenance costs of a traditional engine. There's also the added bonus that electric planes are just much more pleasant to fly in. No loud engine noise, no smell of fuel, just environmentally friendly peace and quiet.
While there has been real progress in the e-plane industry, the technical challenges that remain are keeping everyone's feet firmly on the ground. A battery, even a lithium one, only provides 250 watt-hours per kilogram； compare this to liquid fuel, which has a specific energy of IL 890 watt-hours per kilogram. Carrying adequate batteries, however, would make the plane too heavy to get off the ground. In aircraft, where every bit of weight counts, this can't just be ignored.
The transition (过渡) from gas to electric in the automobile industry has been made easier by hybrids - vehicles powered by both fuel and electricity. Many believe the same pattern could be followed in the air. Fuel consumption could be reduced as the electric component is switched on at key parts of the journey, especially on take-off and landing.
It's certainly an exciting time for electric flying. With companies like Harbour Air taking the lead, battery-powered planes, especially on short-haul journeys, are set to become a reality in the next few years.
Shining just 12 light-years from Earth, the star Tau Ceti so resembles the sun that it has appeared in numerous science- fiction stories and was the first star astronomers ever searched for signs of intelligent life, half a century ago. In 2012 Tau Ceti grew still more interesting when astronomers reported five possible planets somewhat larger than Earth circling closer to the star than Mars orbits (围绕……运动) the sun—one of which is in the star's habitable zone. Newly released images taken by the Herschel Space Observatory provide even more insight about Tau Ceti's solar system: greater detail about its dust belt.
Dust arises when asteroids and comets (小行星和彗星) crash into one another, so its location reveals where these dust- creating objects—which are too small to be seen directly—orbit a star. In Tau Ceti's case, "it's quite a wide dust belt," says Samantha Lawler of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. As her team reported in November, the belt's inner edge is roughly two to three astronomical units (AUs) from the star, which is the position of our own sun's asteroid belt. (An AU is the distance from Earth to the sun.) Tau Ceti's dust belt extends out to 55 AU, which would be just beyond our system's main Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, the zone of small bodies whose largest member is probably Pluto. Presumably full of asteroids and comets, Tau Ceti's dust belt most likely lacks a planet as large as Jupiter, Lawler says. The gravity of such a massive planet would have driven away most small space rocks.
Within a year a new series of radio telescopes in Chile called ALMA should provide a sharper view of the disk, especially of its inner edge. The ALMA images will help astronomers confirm whether the star's five proposed planets are indeed real. If the disk overlaps the planets' hypothesized (假设的) orbits, then they probably do not exist; they would have kept away most asteroids near the star, removing the source of dust.
If those planets do exist, however, Lawler's team suggests that Tau Ceti's planetary system may resemble what our solar system would have looked like had the four giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune- never formed: small planets orbiting close to the star, and nothing but asteroids, comets and dust beyond.
Nowadays technologies benefit us a lot in our daily life, but if not properly used, it can affect our health. The bed should be reserved as a place for sleep, but people tend to read a lot on an iPad in bed before they go to sleep.
Charles Czeisle, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues got a small group of people for an experiment. For five days in a row the people read either in a paper book or on an iPad for four hours before sleep. Their sleep patterns were monitored all night. Before and after each trial period, the people took hourly blood tests to paint a day-long picture of just how much melatonin (褪黑激素) was in their blood at any given time.
When subjects read on the iPad, compared to the paper books, they reported feeling less sleepy at night and less active the following morning. People also took longer to fall asleep on the iPad nights, and the blood tests showed that their melatonin secretion (分泌) was delayed by an hour and a half.
The researchers conclude in today's journal article that given the rise of e-readers and the increasingly widespread use of e-things among children and adolescents, more research into the long- term consequences of these devices on health and safety is urgently needed. Czeisler and colleagues go on, in the research paper, to note, "Reading on an iPad in bed may increase cancer risk."
However, software has been developed that can reduce some of the blue light from the screens of phones and computers according to time of day, and there are also glasses that are made to filter (过滤) short wavelength While they seem like a logical solution for the nighttime high-tech users, it needs more research.
