【推荐1】When Liam Pope-Lau fell into the ocean during a sailing lesson, he had no idea what he was in for. “I just remember how cold it was,” Liam recalls. “It really scared me and shook me up.” Thankfully, he was wearing a life jacket, but the water was freezing.

Liam’s scary experience inspired him to team up with his friend, Fraser Tuck, in his Grade 6 science class at the time. Together they came up with the idea of “LifeHeat” — a self-heating life jacket that could one day help someone in a similar situation. During the first phase, they concentrated on finding a chemical that creates heat upon contact with water. After a series of investigations, Liam and Fraser came across calcium chloride (氯化钙). It soon became LifeHeat’s primary chemical component, which allowed the life jacket to remain warm underwater.

Over the next two years, Fraser and Liam built 13 prototypes (模型) of LifeHeat. But instead of building multiple life jackets from scratch (从零开始), the two focused on creating an attachable pouch (荷包). When the pouch came in contact with water, it could heat the body’s core. For each prototype, Liam and Fraser experimented with different materials that could contain calcium chloride while still allowing its heat to escape. In the process, they experienced countless failures which, however, led them to be more creative.

The two have entered their many prototypes into several science competitions over the last two years. In November last year, Liam and Fraser won two awards at a big science fair. They are now taking the feedback they received from experts and applying it to their next prototype. Liam and Fraser anticipate turning their invention into a business.

As for future inventors, Fraser and Liam have advice for kids who want to create their own new technology. “Don’t be afraid to try it out because you never know where it could end up,” said Liam. “Go for it before someone else can steal your idea,” added Fraser with a laugh.

【推荐2】Twenty years ago, the word “smartphone” didn’t exist. By necessity, neither did the word “dumbphone.” In two decades, we might talk about all of our appliances in similar ways. From ovens to garage doors to insulin pumps to vehicles, many of our devices are going to be connected to the Internet in the same sense that our phones are now. One company, SmartThings   sells devices that help consumers control their lights and locks while they’re not at home, for example. Eventually, these items will be able to respond to signals from one another independent of human input.     1    .

That could be great, but it also vastly expands the universe of things that could go wrong, particularly when it comes to privacy. Take dishwashers. At heart, they're very simple machines. But a hacked dishwasher might start running on overdrive, going through multiple cycles, wasting gallons of water and costing you extra and possibly flooding your house. Although the folks who make dishwashers may be fantastic engineers, or even great computer programmers, it doesn’t necessarily imply they’re equipped to protect Internet users from the beginning,

    2     Hacking is just an extreme case. Short of that, there are all kinds of security problems that could crop up in an Internet of Things situation. Many of these devices are pumping out vast amounts of data. According to Hagins, a modest 10,000 households have SmartThings installed. Together, those homes produce 150 million data points a day.

    3    As early as 2010, Siemens said it was capable of using its smart meters to learn some pretty incredible things about our energy usage: “We, Siemens, have the technology to record it every minute, second, microsecond”. From that we can infer how many people are in the house, what they do, whether they're upstairs, downstairs, do you have a dog, when do you habitually get up, when do you have a shower: masses of private data.     4    

One difference between data-hungry businesses like Google and your future home network of Internet-enabled objects is that some of those devices may not need to talk to each other over the public Internet. If they’re connected to the same Wi-Fi network, maybe those devices won’t need to transmit data across the Web. “Utilize but keep the data within the home boundary, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Lee Tien suggested ‘‘Keep the interesting variations within the home boundary.”

【推荐1】We live and die by our cell phone, rarely giving it the chance to reboot and refresh. But are you harming the device without knowing it? We asked the experts. For many of us, our smartphones have become a touchstone of life. It affects how we do our jobs, interact with our friends and family, and even how we access important information like our banking, and healthcare. But are you taking proper care of it? Experts say that knowing simple care tips, such as how often to shut it down, can drastically affect how well your phone will continue to perform the older it gets. That means the simple knowledge of when to turn it on and off, can cost you hundreds of dollars in prematurely replacing your phone. But just how often do we need to shut off our smartphones? As opposed to how often you need to shut down your computer, your smartphone has a more hard and fast rule you should live by: once a week, shut it off, let it rest at least one minute, and then you can fire it back up.

There are multiple reasons why you’re supposed to restart your phone at least once a week, and it’s for a good cause: retaining memory, preventing crashes, running more smoothly, and prolonging battery life. Let’s talk first about all the apps you use on a daily basis. “In most cases, the app isn’t really closed but rather, it’s put into a state where it can be restarted faster,” says Bob Motamedi, a Los Angeles-based tech consultant. “Now think about how many apps are open, slowly eating memory and battery power on the phone, and think about all those times you’ve thought that your phone drained entirely too fast that day.” Restarting the phone clears open apps and memory leaks, and gets rid of anything draining your battery.

Here are other things you can do to help prolong your smartphone battery. Crashing happens for various reasons, but not restarting your phone can definitely have an effect here as well, as every update, page loaded, and app installed or deleted will add and remove code in the operating system of the phone. “Sometimes these remnants are incompatible or improperly removed after installation or un-installation,” says Motamedi. “Restarting your phone will eliminate most of these issues and will get your phone working better.”

The good news is that even though failing to restart your phone periodically could zap memory and cause crashes, it won’t directly kill your battery. What could kill your battery is always rushing to recharge. “If you never let your battery drain fully, it will never learn to recharge fully and will shorten the battery’s life,” says Motamedi. “It’s recommended that you let the battery drain down to 0 percent, and then refill it back up to 100 percent.” The same is true for laptops, according to Josh Davis of Abt Electronics in Glenview, Illinois. “After a couple of years of leaving your laptop plugged in all the time, you can expect it not to hold much of a charge at all when you go portable.” In a crunch and need to charge up fast? Check out this trick to charge your phone in just 5 minutes.

To help preserve memory and prevent crashes, consider restarting your smartphone at least once a week. We promise you won’t miss too much in the two minutes it might take to reboot. Meanwhile, you’ll want to stop believing these phone battery and charger myths.

【推荐3】Certain areas near the moon’s poles stay everlastingly in shadow, never receiving direct sunlight. Recent studies suggest these so-called permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) contain rich ice resource that could show details about the early solar system; they could also help future visitors make fuel and other resources. But these areas are hard to photograph from satellites moving around the moon and thus are a challenge to study. The few photos PSRs reflect are often flooded by camera noise and quantum effects (量子效应).

Now researchers have produced a deep-learning algorithm (算法) to cut through the interruption and to see these dark zones. “Our images enable scientists to identify the features of craters and boulders (陨石坑和巨石),” says Valentin Bickel, a planetary scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Solar System Research in Germany and lead author of a Nature Communications study testing the new algorithm.

The researchers used more than 70,000 images of completely dark lunar areas — with no light signal — together with details about the camera’s temperature and position in orbit to train their algorithm to recognize and remove camera noise. Next they dealt with the rest noise through information learned from millions of sunlit lunar photos, together with copied versions of the same images in shadow. Ignacio Lopez-Francos, a study co-author and engineer at the NASA Ames Research Center, says using such man-made shadow was necessary because sunlit PSR images do not exist. A similar technique is also used in low-light digital camera photography.

The researchers used their algorithm to analyze the size and number of craters and boulders in several PSRs that might be explored by NASA’s Artemis moon program. They also found the likely origins of some boulders and established a potential route for an astronaut through a PSR on the moon, avoiding obstacles and slopes steeper than 10 degrees.

“It’s an interesting application of machine-learning technology, and the noise model seems realistic and useful for this real case,” says computer scientist Chongyi Li, who uses similar strategies to enhance underwater images at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and was not involved in the study.

【推荐3】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.