【推荐1】When Jack Andraka was 15 years old, he created a new diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer. Jack's test is 28 times faster, 26,000 times less expensive and over 100 times more sensitive than the current diagnostic tests. His test earned him first prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, which is like the Olympics of science fairs.

It was after a close family friend died of pancreatic cancer that Jack Andraka became interested in finding a better early-detection diagnostic test. Jack said the solution came to him during his high school biology class. He was secretly reading an article about nanotubes while the teacher was talking about antibodies. Jack said the two ideas came together in his head, and he thought he could combine what the teacher was saying with what he knew about nanotubes to create an early detection test for pancreatic cancer.

Jack Andraka used what he found through Google searches and free online science journals to develop a plan and a budget. Jack contacted about 200 people including researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health with a proposal to work in their labs. He got 199 rejections before he finally got an acceptance from Dr. Anirban Maitra, Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Jack worked after school every day, on weekends and over holidays at Maitra's lab until he developed his test.

So, think about Jack Andraka the next time you hear that something can't be done. Or, if you receive numerous rejections (close to 200 in Jack Andraka's case) or you're simply hesitating to give one of your ideas a shot. Also, keep in mind that you don't necessarily need a giant team, billions of dollars in resources or even more than 15 years of life experience to do something amazing.

【推荐2】Aging is often mentioned in relation to smart homes. Technology can help older people stay independent and safe, and avoid the difficult transition to institutional care. Cox Communications display their new smart home in which every device is “smart”. A strong internet connection is central to their product, and the company also provides a network for other service providers.

The smart home is not only controlled far away, this home — called Home Life — also features direct connections to family members and health professionals. For example, a person can perform their physiotherapy (物理疗法) far away from home with online live guidance from a physiotherapist. Or, their relatives who live in another state can pop in and out through their smartphone or tablet, so the loved ones are always there if required.

This super smart home also includes a smart pill container, a smart pot to water your plants, and motion sensors for indoors and outdoors which are useful for fall detection, as well as an automatic barcode scanner (条码扫描仪) linked to the home trash can so that the packaging gets scanned when it is thrown and the consumed items are added to the user’s shopping list.

In a modern smart home, many activities that are important to independent living can be monitored, and assistance is provided on an as-needed basis. If something is out of place — for example, a person has an accidental fall or doesn’t take their medicine — family can be informed immediately. However, the person living in the smart home maintains his or her autonomy and sense of independence.

【推荐3】Wildlife tracking is nothing new, but it's certainly not without limitations. When pursuing animals, particularly birds, in some places like rough mountains and vast oceans, the traditional method, VHF tracking which uses GPS tags (跟踪器), often ends up with the signal of animals lost.

A newly developed set of UAVs (无人机) with radio tags aims to solve this problem. ''The swift parrot was the original inspiration for the development of the system. The swift parrots are migratory (季节迁徙的) birds. Before reaching their destination, they'll fly across vast areas of land. Besides, during their flying, they tend to choose a random place for temporary food and rest. And they use different areas as their destinations each year depending on where their food is available. So their destinations each year can also be random. The randomnness can make it hard for us to judge in advance where they'll exactly go and more difficult to track them,"explains Saunders.

"So it's necessary to use tags to track them. But GPS tags are not congruent with swift parrots since these creatures are too small, which makes it hard to attach the large GPS tags to them. Besides, GPS signals can be poor in remote and rough areas. Therefore we had to find a new way to search large pieces of land more effectively. We had an idea to attach smaller radio tags to them and use particular UAVs to track those radio tags to study their movements."

These UAVs only need to fly beside the parrots to track their whereabouts while other systems need to fly directly overhead for a visual sighting. Saunders says, "Our system listens for tag signals, and works most effectively at a distance so it can identify where the animals are and help us observe them without influencing their flying routes."

As for the improvement of UAVs, now the scientists want to develop a version that has stronger lifting ability and flies farther without being charged in the midway. And then it can track animals in more remote and rough surroundings that were previously inaccessible, and shed light on species that have been unable to be tracked until now.

【推荐1】Cloud computing is set to change how people communicate,work and learn.But do you know it may also affect how you are hired for a job in the future?

It was once more common for people to find jobs advertised in the newspaper and then physically send applications to organizations. Now we primarily look online using job sites and apply for those jobs using cloud recruitment (招聘) services.

However, many new technologies, with the help of artificial intelligence(AI),are changing recruitment and the way we communicate with those holding the key to our dream jobs.

AI recruitment technology, such as ENGAGE Talent, is making it easier for recruiters to find potential employees by analyzing networking sites, like LinkedIn, for appropriate candidates. Primarily based on keywords, circumstance changes or current company performance, it can find candidates that haven’t clearly expressed an interest in changing jobs. Helen Poitevin, research director of IT research firm Gartner, stated, “This method of finding a passive candidate is the subject of a lot of investment and innovation today.”

Another innovation designed to help recruiters is AI assistants, similar to Apple’s Siri. CNN reported that graduates in the future might have to be overseen by a virtual assistant before getting a real interview for highly competitive graduate programs.

Companies such as Hire Vue have already developed software that plays prerecorded questions for candidates and analyzes their responses for different factors, including grammar, facial expressions and tones. It can then produce a result that defines the candidate’s qualities and recommends whether they should be considered.

The US graduate Sarah Ali has been through eight Hire Vue interviews. She told CNN, “Once I understood the AI interview process, I started thinking of it as a game and how I could optimize (优化) myself.”

This interview process has yet become the mainstream outside the US, but with the power of cloud computing, how long will it be before this tech is used worldwide?

【推荐3】Tests have shown robots can diagnose heart problems in as little as four seconds, as a review of artificial intelligence （Al） finds machines are now as good at spotting illness as doctors.

Analyzing a patient's heart function on a cardiac MRI （心脏磁共振成像）scan currently takes doctors around 13 minutes. But a new trial by University College London （UCL） showed an Al program could read the scans in less time with equal accuracy. There are approximately 150,000 such scans performed in the UK each year, and researchers estimate that fully using Al to read them could save 54 clinician-days （临床天数）at each cardiac centre per year. So it can make up for the shortage of doctors.

It is hoped that Al where computer systems are able to learn from data to identify new patterns with minimal human intervention will transform medicine by helping doctors spot dis- eases such as heart disease and cancer faster and earlier. However, most scans are still read by specially trained doctors.

Dr Charlotte Manisty, who led the UCL research, said, "Cardiovascular MRI offers in- comparable image quality for assessing heart structure and function. However, current manual   analysis remains basic and outdated. Automated machine techniques offer the potential to change this and completely improve efficiency and accuracy, and we look forward to further research that could confirm the superiority to human analysis."

She added, “Our dataset of patients with a range of heart disease who received scans enabled us to demonstrate that the greatest sources of measurement errors arise from human factors. This indicates that automated techniques are at least as good as humans, with the potential soon to be   'super-human'—transforming clinical and research measurement precision."

Professor Alastair Denniston said, "Within those handful of high-quality studies, we found that by deep learning Al could indeed detect disease ranging from cancer to eye disease as accurately as health professionals. But it's important to note that it did not absolutely exceed human professional diagnosis. ”

【推荐2】For many famous people, fame is more than being on the big screen or performing on a stage or scoring a game-winning goal, but about using their likeness to bring awareness to different social justice topics or rare medical conditions or assisting undeveloped communities.

Holly Robinson Peete, a black actress, along with her husband, Rodney Peete, started the HollyRod Foundation in 1997. It was inspired by Robinson Peete’s father, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. After it was confirmed that their son was autistic, they expanded their efforts to assist autism community, hoping to bring awareness and resources to this group and help them find jobs.

The Foundation has partnered with Delivering Jobs, an organization creating pathways to one million employment opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental differences by 2025.

“Thanks to our partner, Delivering Jobs, my son has a job with the Los Angeles Dodgers, the World Series Champions,” Peete explains. “We are so happy that the job has given this boy purpose, a paycheck and self-worth and friends. He never had friends growing up and now he has a whole family.”

As Robinson Peete and the HollyRod Foundation continue to help those less fortunate, she shares one principle on how companies can support the autism community: Donate to those supporting programs which provide training to help individuals find a role that best suits their abilities. “Don’t think of a hire from the community as charity. In some cases, these workers will turn out to be your best employees.” says Peete.