【推荐2】Robotic scientists say that one-year-old human babies have better movement skills than robots do. Let's take a look at some tasks that are easy for you but tough for robots.

Pick things up

Picking things up is not easy. If we drop our pencil on the floor, our brains work hard. First, we must find the pencil and look at its distance. Then we move our hands to it. A robot cannot always move its "hand" to the right place. Calculating the distance is not easy. Then, when we touch the pencil, it might roll a little bit. Robots cannot easily understand this either. So, if you drop a pencil on the floor, a robot will probably roll it around the room.

Get around spaces

If someone drops you in a building you've never been to, you might feel a bit lost. But you can look around, find a door and get out quickly. You will not get stuck in a corner. But a robot will look everywhere for a door, even on ceilings and floors. This is because it's hard for them to understand spaces.

Understand the world made by people

"Common sense" is what we don't need to think or talk about. Because of common sense, we pick up a coffee cup by its handle. We feel whether it has coffee inside, and whether it is hot.

But robots may turn the cup upside down or hold the hot part of the cup, damaging itself. Scientists have tried teaching robots common-sense rules. But even huge databases don't help much. There are just too many rules—and too many exceptions. Maybe they just need more time to learn.

【推荐3】Shanya Gill, 12, a seventh-grader at Miller Middle School in San Jose, spent more than a year developing a fire detection (探测) device.

Last summer Shanya was sad after a fire happened in a restaurant in her California neighborhood. So the middle-schooler got straight to work.

“I had never really experienced something like that before,” she said of the early morning fire at Holder’s Country Inn, which was reported, to have started in the kitchen. No one was hurt, but the restaurant was demolished. “It hit close to my heart because it was part of my community.”

Shanya created a tool that uses thermal imaging (热成像) to detect when a heat source (来源) — such as a gas burner — is left unattended for10 minutes. Her goal, she said, was to design an early warning system that is better than a standard smoke detector.

Shanya recently won the top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in D.C., in part for her fire-detection device. Judges were impressed by her fire detection system, featuring a thermal camera and a Raspberry Pi, a small computer board.

Creating the prototype (原型) was not easy, Shanya said. “I had really big difficulties with my project, and almost all of them were related to code (编码),” she said. “I had two designs, and my first design completely failed.”

While Shanya is pleased with her final prototype, she is now working to improve it. She is in the process of trying to find something more affordable than the Raspberry Pi, which starts at around $35, and she is also working to improve the code. Her plan is to bring the product to market and give out the money to organizations that support people who suffer from fires.

Shanya’s success at a young age has made her excited about her future career in science. She hopes to continue creating products that help people.

“I want to follow what I love and try to create a positive impact,” she said.

【推荐2】There are few spectacles more unpleasant than a television presenter trying to hang on to a job. When one of the presenters of the BBC program Crimewatch resigned recently, rather than suffer the inevitable indignity of being unfinished and replaced by a younger version, he made the usual hurt noises about his masters' overemphasis on youth. People in the media listened sympathetically before he slid from view to join the ranks of television's has-beens.

The presenter's argument, that the views don't care how old you are so long as you can “do the job,” unfortunately is not backed up by the evidence. When you're on TV, viewers are always thinking about whether you're losing your hair or your figure and, lately, whether you've had cosmetic work done. This is what they're actually doing when you think they're listening to the wise things you say. Viewers actually don't understand much of what the job involves, they just see you sitting there looking the part. Like the ability to pet one's head while rubbing one's stomach, TV presenting is just one of those sills. Some of those who possess this skill can hit the big name, inevitably as they become more attached to the lifestyle this brings, however, the more likely they are to overstate the skill.

In reality, if somebody is paying you a lot of money to do a job, it's often on the tacit （心照不宣的） understanding that you may be fired suddenly-it's part of the deal. Unlike football managers, TV presenters pretend not to understand this. If they've had many years being paid silly sums to read a script from an autocue （ 自动题词机），it's difficult for them to accept that they've been the beneficiary of good fortune rather than anything else; even harder to face the fact that an editor could all too easily send them to the shopping channels.

Something similar eventually awaits all the people who are currently making fortunes that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations of presenters. One day we'll decide that their face no longer fits and they'll be dragged away complaining about the same ageist policy from which they no doubt previously profited. Show business is a brutal （残忍的） business. The one thing it reliably punishes is age, particularly among women. That's why, at the age of fifty, female TV presenters become female radio presenters and why girl bands planning to re-form need to get it done before they're forty, after which it will get too hard for everyone to suspend their collective disbelief.