【推荐1】Even light activity such as housework might help to keep the brain young, researchers say, adding to a growing body of evidence that, when it comes to exercise, every little helps.

Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, the international team of researchers report how they came to their findings by studying at least three days of activity-tracker data from 2,354 middle-aged adults from the US, together with the participants' brain scans.

From the latter, the researchers worked out individuals' brain volume, a measure linked to ageing: about 0.2% of the volume of the brain is lost every year after the age of 60. Loss or shrinkage (萎缩) of brain tissue is linked to dementia (痴呆), Spartano noted.

After taking into account factors including sex, smoking status and age, the team found that every extra hour of light physical activity per day was linked to 0.22% greater brain volume, equal to just over a year's less brain ageing. What's more, those who took at least 10,000 steps a day had a 0.35% greater brain volume than those who took, on average, fewer than 5,000 steps a day—equivalent to 1.75 years' less brain ageing.

However, the study has limitations. It used mainly white participants, and cannot prove cause and effect. The authors add that not all time spent sedentary is necessarily "bad" for the brain—particularly if people are engaged in a task that takes a lot of thinking.

Dr James Pickett, head of research at Alzheimer's Society, said, "Don't worry if you're not hill-running, but find something you enjoy and do it regularly, because we know that what's good for the heart is good for the head."

【推荐1】Researchers at the University of Sussex, Imperial College London and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have for the first time used game theory (博弈论) to allow robots to assist humans safely and variously.

The research team used adaptive control (自适应控制) and Nash equilibrium (纳什均衡) to program a robot that can understand its human users’ behavior in order to better foresee their movements and respond to them. The researchers believe the breakthrough could make robots help humans do things better in many areas, such as sport training, body recovery or shared driving.

Lead author Dr Yanan Li, Lecturer in Control Engineering at the University of Sussex, said, “It is still very early days in the development of robots and at present, those robots for work are not intuitive enough to work closely and safely with human users. By allowing the robot to identify human users’ behavior and make use of game theory to let the robot react to them in the best way, we have developed a system where robots can work along with humans as humans do.”

To successfully apply game theory to the interaction of a robot and its human users, the researchers had to overcome the problem that the robot cannot know the humans’ intentions. The researchers thus had to develop a method allowing the robot to identify the human partner while safely and efficiently interacting with their motion.

The reactive robotic programming system allows a robot to continuously learn the human users’ control and adapt its own control accordingly. The robot is able to understand the human users’ action and then respond to it and help them to perform tasks successfully with minimal effort.

Professor Etienne Burdet, senior author of the paper, added: “Game theory has had important influences on economics during the last century and lead to several Nobel prizes.”

【推荐3】Our lives are made up of human-machine interactions—with smartphones, televisions, computers—that have the power to delight and, often, frustrate. Into this area has stepped a new class of professional: the user-experience, or UX, designer, whose job is to see a product not from an engineer’s, marketer’s, or legal department’s perspective but from the viewpoint of the user alone. And to insist that the customer should not have to learn to speak the company’s internal language. The company should learn to speak the customer’s.

According to a recent survey, the role of UX designers has become a fixture on those year-end “hottest job” lists. If you want to study UX, you now have the option at some three dozen institutions in the United States, including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Washington. But Ford is one of the few major industrial companies in the U.S. to put a UX expert, Jim Hackett, in charge.

At present, the question facing the car industry is basically whether high-tech giants such as Tesla and Google can learn car-making technology trains faster than Ford, GM, and other carmakers can learn software and algorithms. But Hackett reflects Ford’s bet that the winner won’t be the best chassis (底盘) maker or software maker, but the company that nails the interaction between man and machine. “One of the things that drew me to Jim was his commitment to design thinking, which puts the human being at the center of the equation,” explained Bill Ford, the company’s executive chairman.

Hackett retired from Steelcase, a furniture maker, in 2014 and in 2016, Bill Ford hired him to run the automaker’s Smart Mobility subsidiary, which was tasked with rethinking from the ground up how cars would be driven, powered, and owned. “This is what we call the design gap,” said Hackett in an interview, pointing to the space between two lines on a graph he’d drawn on a whiteboard. One line climbs up—this is a company’s skill at making things, which goes up over time. Below it is a downward line, representing a company’s understanding of the customer’s experience. This, he said, can decline over time, as a company loses sight of the problems it’s in the business of solving. The design gap may be noticeable when the job is, say, building a marginally better tailgate for the Ford F-150. But it becomes positively yawning when your industry is so thoroughly turned on its head that you’re forced to ask some basic questions: Do people want to own their cars or share them? Drive them or have them driven? The flood of new technologies makes everything possible.