【推荐1】Baidu has uncovered plans for an electric self-driving car with a removable steering wheel (方向盘), marking another step forward in the fast-moving robotaxi race in China.

The Chinese tech giant, the country’s answer to Google, showed the Apollo RT6, its sixth-generation self-driving car, at its yearly flagship meeting on Thursday. Baidu’s ride-hailing (叫车) service, Apollo Go, currently operates in 10 Chinese cities. The new vehicle will be introduced through that program sometime next year. Once regulators give the green light, the Apollo RT6’s removable steering wheel will legally be able to come off, a company executive said Thursday.

Baidu is selling its new design as a way to free up space for things like “extra seating, vending machines, desktops, or gaming consoles”. The company said its new self-driving car has dramatically lowered the production costs from previous versions, by about half. Those cost savings will be passed on to passengers as the company prepares to introduce the cars to its existing robotaxis around the country, according to CEO Robin Li.

“We are moving towards a future where taking a robotaxi will be half the cost of taking a taxi today,” he said in a statement. “This massive cost reduction will make tens of thousands of self-driving cars available across China.”

Baidu made its name as a massive search engine provider, but it has also long spent money on self-driving technology in the world’s largest car market. In April, the company announced — along with another Chinese self-driving startup — that it would start letting people in certain areas book taxi rides without anyone behind the wheel. Other companies have showed off vehicles without steering wheels before, including GM and Honda, Google, and Mercedes-Benz.

In April, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told analysts that the automaker was aiming to start mass production of its own robotaxi without steering wheels or pedals in 2024. Baidu said Thursday that its new model was ready for production, but did not disclose a manufacturing partner.

【推荐3】If you’re not ready to keep a dog or a cat, Panasonic has introduced yet another companion robot that dutifully pays attention to you just like a real pet.

Nicobo isn’t easy to describe; it’s as if someone flipped a bowl over, gave it some lively eyes, a wagging tail, and then wrapped in an old sock. It has no ability to locomote—it won’t come when you call it-but it’s attached to a moving base so that it can turn from side to side and look up and down. Co-developed by robotics researchers from the Toyohashi University of Technology, Nicobo also includes a camera for recognizing faces, multiple directional microphones for recognizing voices and turning to pay attention, touch sensors (传感器)so it knows when it’s being touched or hugged, and a light sensor so that like a cat, it can enjoy a nap in bright sunlight.

Instead of picking up laundry or cleaning your floors, Nicobo is all about providing simple companionship. So when someone pets it, the robot’s tail starts wagging in appreciation. But it can also have days when its mood isn’t so cheerful and that’s probably when it won’t think twice about farting (放屁)around you.

Nicobo can also talk, but in the beginning, it only speaks a single word. But eventually, it can speak full sentences in katakoto-the Japanese word for broken language, or baby talk. You’re never going to have a long conversation with Nicobo, but is simple sentences will help reinforce (加强) the feeling that it’s truly attentive and listening to your feelings, even if it can’t do anything about them. Sometimes that’s all a human needs.

Getting your hands on Nicobo is a little complicated. For starters, Panasonic is only planning to initially(起初) make 320 units of the little robot, with a price tag of around $ 360. But it’s handing preorders through its own crowdfunding(众筹)platform with the goal of raising 10,000,000 YEN(about $ 95,000)before production actually happens. And it looks like all the preorders for Nicobo are already claimed.

【推荐3】Ford is turning McDonald's coffee waste into headlights

Ford is recently including coffee chaff — coffee bean skin that comes off during the roasting process — into the plastic headlights housing (大灯外壳) used in some cars. It has asked McDonald's, which doesn't roast its own coffee, to connect it with suppliers.

In recent years, as consumers become more concerned about plastic pollution and carbon emissions, companies have made sweeping commitments to reduce their impacts on the environment. They've also been developing new, sustainable materials to build consumer products.

Traditionally, Ford uses plastic and talc (滑石粉) to make its headlights housing. The coffee version is more sustainable because it's lighter and doesn't use the talc which, as a mineral, isn't renewable. Coffee chaff, on the other hand, is widely available, and much of it goes to waste. Eventually, Ford hopes to use the material for more parts.

Ford decided to work with coffee chaff a few years ago. But it's been experimenting with organic materials for over a decade. The auto company has been using soy-based foam (泡沫) in its cushions since 2011. It also uses waste from wheat, coconut, tomato and other plants in its cars in order to help meet some of its sustainability goals, which include using more renewable materials. Once the Ford team figured out how coffee chaff could be used to build car parts, it reached out to McDonald's because of the restaurant chain's scale and its sustainability goals. Like Ford, McDonald's also wants to bring renewable and recycled materials into its products. The partnership between Ford and McDonald's is an example of how brands with different projects can work together.

“We've conventionally thought of cooperation as within the food industry,” said Lan Olson, senior director of Global Sustainability at McDonald's. “The Ford partnership can help McDonald's see what kind of larger impacts are possible, when it works with a company in another field. This is just scratching the surface of trying to understand what's possible,” Olson said.

【推荐2】When it comes to praising your child for their actions, parents walk a fine line between being helpful or harmful to their child’s development. However, if you’ve got some rising toddlers in your home that need to learn to brush their teeth, don’t worry. It’s just fine to praise them.

“Our study does suggest that praise can be a really positive feature of parenting. Praise wins the gold when compared to boring instruction, at least when it comes to dental hygiene. You can’t go wrong if you say ‘good job!’ when your child successfully brushes their own teeth,” said Julia Leonard, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University.

The study followed 81 three-year-olds just learning to brush their teeth. Parents were required to video their child’s tooth-brushing endeavors(尝试)for 16 nights, hitting record as they handed the brush to their child and pushing stop when they took it back.

That allowed researchers to capture all of the parent’s praise-“Well done! Good job!”— and instructional endeavors such as “Brush the backs of your teeth.” and “Hey, don’t stop. You’re not done yet.” After uploading the videos, parents were told to score their child’s mood (extremely bad to extremely good) and their own stress levels during the nightly endeavor. Those scores ranged from a scale of 0 (easy-peasy) to 10 (I’m pulling all their teeth out now).

Interestingly, a child’s toothbrushing success was directly related to the level of praise in the parents talk. Children brushed longer on days when their parents used more praise and less instruction. The work is the first to show that parent praise relates to child persistence.

However, the study could not show a direct cause and effect, only an association, Leonard stressed. “We don’t know that praise causes kids to brush longer. We just know it’s associated with more brushing, she said. More research is needed to see if the study’s findings could be applied to other tasks that require a child’s persistence.