【推荐3】The head of the Virgin Hyperloop (超级高铁) transport system says the company aims to begin carrying passengers by 2027.

The Virgin Hyperloop system is based on a technology called magnetic levitation (磁悬浮). It uses magnetic fields to lift a vehicle off the ground a little and to push it forward.

Some high-speed trains also use this technology. But unlike trains, a Hyperloop is designed to operate within tubes containing very little air. Electric force moves vehicles, called pods, through the tubes at high speeds. The system offers nearly silent travel and reportedly releases no carbon emissions.

The system’s pods are designed to move at much higher speeds, up to 1,200 kilometers per hour. It says such a vehicle could complete a trip between New York and Washington, D.C. in 30 minutes. That would be two times as fast as a jet flight and four times faster than a high-speed train.

The pods will seat 28 passengers and could be specially designed to travel long or short distances, or to carry goods, the company said.

While the system is still in early development, it is predicted that commercial operations could start as early as 2027. Virgin Hyperloop is looking to first develop passenger systems in India, where the transport system is overcrowded, and in Saudi Arabia, which lacks infrastructure (基础设施).

It could be the first form of transportation in 100 years to revolutionize travel, as cars, trains and airplanes did before. “It starts off with two people riding a Hyperloop. It ends with hundreds of millions of people riding on a Hyperloop and that’s what the 2020s—the roaring 2020s—will be,” he added.

Virgin Hyperloop has partners that include Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and the port operations company DP World, which is owned by the Dubai government.

【推荐1】It seems no one can really agree on the question of “What’s so funny?” So imagine trying to teach a robot how to laugh. But that’s exactly what a team of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan are trying to design an AI that takes its cues through a shared laughter system. The scientists describe their innovative approach to building a funny bone for the Japanese android ‘Erica’ in the latest issue of the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

“We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy(移情，共鸣)，”explained lead author Dr Koji Inoue, an assistant professor at Kyoto University in the Department of Intelligence Science and Technology within the Graduate School of Informatics. “One way a robot can empathize with users is to share their laughter.”

In the shared-laughter model, a human initially laughs and the Al system responds with laughter as an empathetic response. This approach required designing three subsystems-one to detect laughter, a second to decide whether to laugh, and a third to choose the type of appropriate laughter. The type of laughter is also important, because in some cases a polite chuckle may be more appropriate than a loud snort of laughter.

The team tested Erica’s new sense of humor by creating four different short dialogues between a person and Erica with her new shared-laughter system. Then they asked more than 130 people in total to listen to each dialogue within the three different conditions- shared-laughter system, no laughter, all laughter- and evaluated the interactions based on human-likeness, naturalness and understanding. The shared-laughter system performed better than either baseline.

“Robots should actually have a distinct character, and we think that they can show this through their conversational behaviors, such as laughing, eye gaze, gestures and speaking style,” Inoue added. “We do not think this is an easy problem at all, and it may well take more than 10 to 20 years before we can finally have a casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend.”

【推荐2】The World Cup will take place between November and December when Qatar can reach average temperatures of 40 to 50°C. With the tournament getting closer and closer, Dr. Saud Ghani, professor of Mechanical Engineering at Qatar University, has been in the spotlight by introducing the technology that will, in fact, cool the stadiums of the 2022 World Cup.

Nicknamed Dr. Cool, Ghani believes that stadiums’ architecture should be a positive link between design and climate. In his view, the buildings shouldn’t work against climate, but rather be smart and work with it. He developed a system based on sustainability(可持续), modularity, and functionality to cool stadiums.            

The first step to ensure hot air will not enter the stadiums would be to analyze their shapes to understand how the design could minimize this situation. During the process, numerous 3D models were built and tested using smoke and color lasers to analyze the airflow over the stadium, and variants, like spectator numbers and sweat production, were added. This helped to define the dimensions of the stadium’s upper openings, optimizing their shape to prevent the entry of hot air and provide shading.

After optimizing the architectural projects, the next step was to develop the refrigeration system itself, which took place through an important finding by Ghani. It was not necessary to cool the entire stadium. The system should focus on the pitch and reach about 2 meters above the highest seat.

As a result, a punctual cooling system was created and the cooling technology is estimated to be 40% more sustainable than existing techniques. Stadiums only need to be cooled down two hours before an event, which reduces energy consumption compared to other methods. In addition, there is a recycling system in the cold air, which is cooled twice before being expelled outside, reducing the absorption of hot outside air.

So far the stadiums has been in the spotlight and their cooling system is being tested by fans and players from all over the world.

【推荐3】An artificial intelligence (AI) tool can transform famous paintings into different art styles, or create brand-new artworks from a text prompt (提示), experts claim.

The text-to-image program DALL.E 2 was released by OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company, and is able to create multiple realistic images and artworks from a single text prompt.

Computer science PhD student Giannis Daras initially used the program to create images that contained text. The resulting images then contained what appeared to be randomly ordered letters. But when he fed those letters back into the program, he found it produced images of the same subject or scene, implying that they weren’t random at all. For example, if you type in “Vicootes” you will get a series of Al-generated pictures of vegetables, and “Apoploe vesrreaitars” will produce images of birds. This suggests that DALL.E2 could work by translating the inputted text into its own language, which it then uses to create the pictures we see.

Some of the words that the program produces itself seem to be developed from Latin. For example “Apoploe”, which can be used to produce images of birds, is similar to “Apodidae”, a Latin word relating to a family of bird species. Aaron Snoswell at Queensland University of Technology describes the words as more like a “vocabulary” rather than a language in an article. This is because, while some of the prompts appear to have a consistent output of an English word, this human categorization could still be different to how the machine interprets them.

However, Merzmensch Kosmopol, who is an AI artist, writer and researcher, found that removing certain letters in the prompts resulted in specific faults or certain parts of the image being covered. If the program worked simply by translating words into its language and then producing images from those words, this would not happen. Additionally, Raphael Milliere, a neuroscience researcher at Columbia University, also found that those words didn’t always enable the program to produce a reasonable image, like it would if the program worked using its language.

【推荐3】If you could travel back in time, which period of history would you visit? It’s a great question to ask your friends, and time travel is the subject of many science fiction films. Of course, sci-fi is familiar to most of us, but what is cli-fi? The simple answer is climate fiction which focuses on the subject of climate change.

Many of the cli-fi examples we watch tend to be disaster films. It could be solar flares (太阳耀斑), ice ages devastating (摧毁) the planet, extreme flooding swamping the earth with water, or super-storms that threaten life as we know it. While films and novels of this style are often subject to the typical images of a hero or heroine battling to save the day, what sets it apart from most sci-fi films is that the plots will often draw on apparently reasonable outcomes in the near future.

Climate change and the potential threats have long been established. Some believe that the issue of climate change has even led to more fans watching films to learn more about what's happening to the world – seeing it as a form of edutainment. A study conducted by the Yale programme on Climate Change Communication tested the effects that two climate fiction novels can have on its readers and found “significant positive effects” in terms of their attitudes and beliefs towards the climate crisis – for example, understanding global warming will harm them and future generations.

Most climate films are not only extremely popular action films, but also cause our fear of what some see as the approaching end of the world. This sounds bad, but according to a study conducted on 310 adults in the US, watching such scary films can help us feel more prepared and less alone in situations such as the pandemic (疫情). So, it looks like cli-fi is here to stay – and there seem to be some benefits. Whether it’s there to educate, entertain or prepare you for a climate crisis, it might have a role to play.