The 2024 Consumer Electronics Show is upon us and we’ve chosen four most functional-seeming ones to share with you.

Combining the health benefits of a pedal (脚踏) desk with the energy savings of a body-powered phone charger, Ampera Bike seems ideally suited for office multitaskers. A half-hour of pedaling can charge the average phone about 50 percent. The bike, small and unnoticeable enough for a home office, allows workers to finish the same tasks moving as they did sitting still.

For many, walking is a challenge because of aging, illness or muscle weakness. That’s why WIM, a robotic assist device tied around your waist and legs, was created. It reduces the energy needed to walk by 20 percent, potentially enabling walkers to go farther and feel less tired. The entire device weighs 3 pounds and folds up to the size of a purse. WIM can also be used in an exercise mode, providing resistance similar to walking in water and targeting specific muscles.

How do you feel when looking in the mirror in the morning? BMind Smart Mirror can take one look, use AI and natural language processing to analyze your expressions and gestures, tell your moods and then offer “personalized mental health coaching” to help. This technology that can monitor for heath changes has the potential of improving the quality of millions of lives.

People with hearing loss have difficulty listening to a specific voice in a noisy space. OrCam Hear addresses this issue with a system of earphones and an AI-powered app. The app samples voices and creates speaker profiles, which then allows users to select to select their wanted voice and deaden other ones, making a game-changing, experience for hearing aids in general.

Chaudhary weaves (编织) together lengths of rope and grass collected from the nearby riverbank in her village, skillfully shaping the materials into a gift box while instructing a group of women to follow suit.

The ropes being used were once the lifeline for mountain climbers tackling Nepal’s mountains and were then cast away. Diverse measures to remove such discarded materials have rocketed since 2019, when the government launched Clean Mountain Campaign.Around 140,000 tons of waste were collected on Mt. Everest alone, which were handled accordingly, either securely buried or recycled.

Some waste is now finding fresh life, transformed by skilled hands like Chaudhary’s into items to sell, thanks to an initiative led by Acharya, an owner of a waste processing business and an advocate for sustainable waste management. She has been working with the cleaning campaign, aiming at mountains like Mt. Everest.

“Metal waste goes through the recycling process, but we weren’t capable of recycling these ropes and cooking gas cans,” Acharya says. It didn’t occur to her that the waste which couldn’t be recycled could be reused until she met Rai at an art exhibition and a solution emerged.

Rai, a businessman dealing in craftworks, helped connect Acharya with Chaudhary and her team of craftswomen in hopes of unlocking the economic value of the mountain waste. With flexible hours, the project gives the craftswomen an opportunity to earn money even as they maintain their household responsibilities.

“While this seems insignificant compared to waste in the mountains, it’s a start. We can’t supply sufficient raw material with waste sorting and cleaning processes taking plenty of time and money,” Acharya says, desperate to expand the program to involve more women and treat more waste. But progress has been slow. “We need investment to mechanize the cleaning and processing of waste in the initial phase to provide the crafting team with enough materials to meet their demand,” she adds.

Do you know cultivated meat? Typically, making this sort of meat starts with cells from domestic animals. The cells are grown in bioreactors full of nutrient-rich liquid, and then harvested, and eventually become products such as steak or chicken. In a homely kitchen of Eat Just, a startup, a slice of such meat was fried and then served with peppers. The first mouthful of it was extraordinary because the meat was grown in a lab, rather than on an animal. Meanwhile, it was also dull, because the texture, taste, look and smell of the meat was almost identical to that of chicken.

In June, Eat Just and Upside Foods became the first two companies to win regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat in America. A handful of other firms are trying to bring cultivated meat to market. But the hope is fading owing to continued high costs and troubles with mass production.

The UN reports meat and dairy production already accounts for 12% of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions, Demand for meat is skyrocketing among the growing middle classes of Africa and Asia. Lab-grown meat could help meet that demand without the world breaking its carbon budget. By contrast, two-fifths of Americans claim to restrict their meat consumption either for ethical(伦理的) reasons or environmental ones. Lab-grown meat may seem less ethically worrisome than eating animals. And the early success of plant-based meat alternatives gave investors hope. Beyond Meat, one such firm, went public in 2019, and saw its value shoot to $14 billion.

Though lab-grown meat offers an alternative to farm-grown meat, questions have been raised about how climate-friendly it can be. A study published earlier this year found that in some circumstances cultivated meat could be more polluting than the conventional stuff because the bioreactor is in great need of power to control its temperature. Consequently, only if renewable energy is used in the production process will cultivated meat cut the carbon footprint of the meat industry.

Whether this effort can make lab-grown meat attractive and cheap enough to attract consumers remains to be seen.

You may well remember the last time you made a fool of yourself when asked a question in front of the entire class or when you felt you stood out, either positively, like scoring a perfect goal in a soccer game, or negatively, like wearing a piece of clothing that made you look entirely out of place.

These situations differ greatly, but one thing is for sure: in none of them did people pay attention to you to the extent that you might have thought they did. We estimate our own significance from our perspective, colored by the fact that we are all the center of our own universes, which is the noted “egocentric bias”, represented by the spotlight effect.

A study conducted by Tom Gilovich and other researchers found the participants greatly overestimated the number of people who might have noticed an embarrassing T-shirt they were wearing. But when required to view a recording of a third person wearing an embarrassing T-shirt, they got the estimate of the number of people who noticed it nearly right. What seems to shift the memorability of the T-shirt in our eyes, then, is us.

The spotlight effect doesn’t apply merely to appearance but to actions. In another part of the same study, the student participants similarly overestimated how much importance their classmates in a group discussion attached to their performance. Having an accurate idea of how much our performance matters to other people is vital. Overestimating how impressed our classmates are with our positive performance can cause us to have a ballooning sense of self-importance. Yet understanding fewer people than we realize actually care about our negative performance or errors can be incredibly freeing.

If we continuously fall into the trap of the spotlight effect, it may harm our mental health. We may respond with inaction to opportunities we want to participate in based on a mistaken assumption that others will analyze and judge us for them. The comforting truth is that just reminding ourselves of the fact that others almost never notice us as much as we think they do can be enough to counteract the spotlight effect.