【推荐1】“The mosquitofish is one of the 100 world’s worst invasive (侵入的) species, and present methods to kill it are too expensive. It will take too much time to successfully control the spread of the mosquitofish,” says Giovanni Polverino. “This global pest is a serious threat to many animals living in water. Instead of killing them one by one, we’re presenting an approach that can inform better strategies to control this global pest. We made their worst nightmare become real: a robot that scares the mosquitofish but not the other animals around it.”

In the presence of the robotic fish, mosquitofish would stay closer to each other and spend more time at the center of the testing area. They were unwilling to swim to unknown waters. They also swam more crazily, with frequent and sharp turns, than those who haven’t met the robot. They swam away from the robot and back to their living area. The influence of fear lasted. The scared fish were less active, ate more, and froze longer, presenting signs of anxiety that continued weeks after their last encounter (相遇) with the robot.

For the tadpoles (蝌蚪) the mosquitofish usually hunt for food, the robot’s presence was a change for the better. Tadpoles have poor eyesight. They don’t see the robot well. Because the robot changed the behavior of the mosquitofish, the tadpoles didn’t have predators (捕食者) at their tails anymore and they were more willing to explore in the testing area. “It turned out to be a positive thing for tadpoles. Once freed from the danger of having mosquitofish around, they were not scared anymore. They’re happy.”

After five weeks of brief encounters between the mosquitofish and the robot, the team found that the fish spent more energy towards escaping than reproducing. Male fish’s bodies became thin.

“While successful at preventing mosquitofish, the lab-grown robotic fish is not ready to be put into the wild,” says Maurizio Porfiri. The team will still have to overcome technical challenges.

【推荐3】Virtual reality is rapidly changing the way education is being imparted in some of the leading schools worldwide. The transfer of knowledge is no longer restricted to pen and paper, blackboard and chalk, and PowerPoint presentations. It has taken a turn towards experience-based learning in its truest form. This is so because, with virtual reality, the observers are transported into a whole new world which has been designed to provide visual and touchable stimuli to them, allowing more knowledge to be kept in mind.

In recent years, the concept of virtual reality-based language learning is starting to come into focus. In order to be fluent in any given language, or have a sound grasp of it, you have to be immersed in an environment where it is the primary medium of communication. Think of it like this. If you are learning Spanish in the Netherlands, you won’t have adequate exposure to the language, but if you choose to learn Spanish in Spain, or any other Spanish – speaking country, you are far more likely to succeed, because you will have countless avenues to practice your language skills in a real world setting.

This leads us to an important point — most people who are learning a foreign language are nor exposed to favorable linguistic conditions like the ones mentioned earlier. Virtual reality is seeking to bridge this gap by exposing the subject to a virtual environment where their chosen language is the main mode of communication.

Since the arrival of user-friendly virtual reality gear, some applications have been designed. House of Languages is one of them. It is already available on the Gear VR. It involves an animated raccoon that is looking for you to find certain objects in a virtual environment, whose names would be in the language that you are learning. Often you will hear the name, or the name will appear as a thought - bubble over the raccoon’s head. Then you will have to look through the environment to find the object in question. There are several environments in this VR experience, each with its own set of animated objects.

Virtual reality is definitely showing increasing promise in the educational sector and the day isn’t far away when it will become one of the major media in education. What about you? Would you learn a new language in virtual reality?

【推荐2】Until now, dressing robots, designed to help an elderly person or a person with a disability get dressed, have been created in the laboratory as a one-armed machine, but research has shown that this can be uncomfortable for the person in care.

To solve this problem, Dr Jihong Zhu, a robotics researcher at the University of York’s Institute, proposed a two-armed assistive dressing plan, which has been inspired by caregivers who have demonstrated that specific actions are required to reduce discomfort to the individual in their care.

Dr Zhu gathered important information on how care workers moved during a dressing exercise, through allowing a robot to observe and learn from human movements and then, through AI, generate a model that mimics (模仿) how human helpers do their task. This allowed the researchers to gather enough data to illustrate that two hands were needed for dressing and not one, as well as information on the angles that the arms make.

Dr Zhu said, “We know that practical tasks, such as getting dressed, can be done by a robot, freeing up a care worker to concentrate more on providing companionship and observing the general well-being of the individual in their care. It has been tested in the laboratory, but for this to work outside of the lab, we really need to understand how care workers do this task in real life.”

“We’ve adopted a method called learning from demonstration, which means that you don’t need an expert to programme a robot; a human just needs to demonstrate the motion that is required of the robot and the robot learns that action. It is clear that for care workers two arms are needed to properly attend to the needs of individuals,” Dr. Zhu said. “With the current one-armed machine scheme a patient is required to do too much work in order for a robot to assist them, moving their arm up in the air or bending it in ways that they might not be able to do.”