【推荐1】Touching Emoji(表情符号)

Distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic has made both physical and social connections a touch more difficult to maintain. For Stanford University graduate student Millie Salvato, being apart from her mother on the opposite coast has proved challenging.

    1     In a new study, she and her colleagues demonstrated a wearable sleeve that can simulate (模拟) human touch and convey abstract social messages sent electronically. Salvato and her team measured how 37 participants expressed social information in different situations. In each test, one person wore a pressure-sensing device on an arm, and another touched it to respond to situations involving six intended meanings: attention seeking, gratitude, happiness, calming, love and sadness

After collecting 661 touch movements-squeezes, strokes, shakes, pokes, and the like-Salvato and her colleagues mapped the location and pressure of each.     2     Finally, they programmed a wearable sleeve to simulate these movements using eight embedded disks that shake when electronically signaled.

“It doesn’t feel like an actual human hand ... but it doesn’t feel like these separate motions either,” Salvato says, as one might expect from large moving disks. “It feels nice, honestly.”     3     For comparison, a previous study from Gerling’s laboratory found participants could match situations for touches from real human hands 57 percent of the time.

In the new study, “I think it’s interesting that participants can reliably understand what touch has been delivered to them at a pretty high rate, given the scarce amount of information that they have available to them,” Gerling says.

Previous research has found that social touch is important for physical and mental health.     4    

【推荐2】Buildings with windows filled with water could save energy greatly, according to researchers backing the new technology.

Traditional glass windows increase the heat and temperature in the room in summers, and let the heat inside escape in winters, resulting in more electricity consumed for air-conditioners and more carbon emissions (排放). Now, researchers at Loughborough University (UK) have created a water-filled window that can overcome these problems.

The “water-filled glass” (WFG) system, designed by Dr. Matyas Gutai, involves a sheet of water being trapped between a panel (嵌板) of glass, and the water is practically invisible. The windows are connected to an indoor storage tank (箱) using pipes hidden in the walls, allowing water to flow easily between the windows and the tank.

This system allows the house to cool and reheat themselves automatically. When sunlight streams through the glass, the windows keep the buildings cool as the water takes in external and internal heat. This warm water then flows back to the tank. And when the outdoor temperature drops, the stored warm water is brought back to the walls to reheat the building using a monitoring system similar to central heating. The heated water can also be used for domestic (家用的) purposes. Although some electricity is required to pump the water back and forth, it uses much less energy than traditional air-conditioners or heaters.

Dr. Gutai claimed that WFG can save energy from 47% to 72% compared to when using traditional windows. Once launched into the market, the windows will surely make a real splash, appealing to a large crowd of environmentalists and contributing to reducing our carbon footprint. Currently, the inventor team is testing the windows in two areas with different weather conditions. The research reveals that WFG systems perform well in any inhabited climate—keeping buildings in hot climates cool and buildings in cool settings warm—without requiring an additional energy supply.