3 . Shadows are often associated with darkness and uncertainty. Now, researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) are giving shadows a positive spin by demonstrating a way to harness this common but often overlooked optical (光学的) effect to generate electricity.

The team created a device called a shadow-effect energy generator (SEG), which makes use of the contrast in illumination (照明) between lit and shadowed areas to generate electricity. It’s made up of a series of thin strips of gold film on a silicon layer, which is then placed on a flexible plastic base.

“In conventional optoelectronics (光电子学) where a steady source of light is used to power devices, shadows are undesirable, since they degrade the performance of devices. In this work, we took advantage of the illumination contrast caused by shadows as an indirect source of power. The contrast in illumination causes a voltage (电压) difference between the shadow and illuminated sections, resulting in an electric current. This novel concept of harvesting energy in the presence of shadows is unprecedented.” explained research team leader Professor Tan Swee Ching.

Mobile electronic devices such as smart phones, smart glasses and e-watches require efficient and continuous power supply. As these devices are worn both indoors and outdoors, wearable power sources that could harness surrounding light can potentially improve the function of these devices. While commercially available solar cells can perform this role in an outdoor environment, their energy harvesting efficiency drops significantly under indoor conditions where shadows are persistent. This new approach to maximizing the efficiency of energy harvesting is both exciting and timely.

“When the whole SEG is under illumination or in shadow, the amount of electricity generated is very low or none at all. When a part of the SEG is illuminated, a significant electrical output is detected. We also found that the best surface area for electricity generation is when half of the SEG is illuminated and the other half in shadow, as this gives enough area for charge generation and collection respectively.” said co- team leader Professor Andrew Wee.

The NUS researchers are also looking at developing wearable SEGs attached to clothing to harvest energy during normal daily activities. Another promising area of research is the development of low- cost SEG for efficient harvesting of energy from indoor lighting.

5 . In an attempt to explore unknown environments, a Chinese team created an octopus (章鱼) — inspired flexible robotic arm capable of sensing and controlling objects in limited spaces and underwater.

According to the study published in the latest edition of Science Robotics, the robot allowed blindfolded human operators to guide its arm, using suckers (吸盘) to pick up various objects, including a toy shark and a smooth metal ball, via a single-finger glove.

This new invention created by a team of researchers, led by Wen Li from Beihang University was inspired by the octopus, which moves its soft arms to catch its games with sensitive suckers.

A simple strategy like this can be used as a model for robotic grasping, controllable with a few inputs, as well as a highly deformable arm with sensing capabilities.

Wen’s team fixed electronics and circuits into the robots while maintaining their deformability. The researchers presented a stretchable electronics-integrated soft octopus arm with 16 air-driven devices and multiple degrees of freedom.

The robot's stretchable, liquid-metal-based electronic circuit can stand super stretching force to perform tasks autonomously in a limited environment, findings from the study showed.

The soft arm with two rows of sensory sucking cups that connect with the wearer's finger can perform a reaching-grasping-returning motion across a range of up to 1.5 times its original arm length, similar to the biological counterpart (对应方), the study revealed.

“This robotic model provides new prospects and development ideas for the future interactive applications of flexible robots, including medical robots, seabed exploration robots, and so on” said the expert.

6 . Laurence Kemball-Cook, a 30-year-old engineer and inventor, is the creator of Pavegen, a paving tile (地砖) that turns the force of people’s footsteps into clean, renewable energy.

“My vision is for Pavegen to be to cities what ‘Intel inside’ is for PCs,” he says. “I want to cover every single city in the world with our tiles. I want to turn every bridge, road and building into a kinetic-energy (动能的) device.”

The idea first came to him while he was studying industrial design and technology at university. He was challenged to design a strict light that’s powered by solar or by wind. “But when the sun’s not shining or when the wind’s not blowing there’s no power. So I tried for a year and I failed.” he recalled.

“I was really upset. Then one day I was walking through Victoria Station in London and I thought about all the people there. I’d read that 38,000 people an hour walked through the station. What if we could use that energy as a power source?”

Laurence admits, “The idea of generating energy from footsteps isn’t new and other people have tried it. But the power is so low that you can never do anything meaningful with that energy.”   Laurence took a different route. The weight of a footstep on his tile makes a horizontal flywheel inside it rotate (旋转). “The more people walk, the more this flywheel spins,” he explains. “Then we take the power from the flywheel as we need it. We can suck it out bit by bit.”

At the 2013 Paris Marathon, where Pavegen installed (安装) tiles at the finish, generating 3,141,926 joules—enough to recharge 1880 mobile phones or power an electric Nissan Leaf car for 24 km.

Laurence said, “Some people might define their aims as wealth or success, but for me it’s just, let’s get it out there and do good.”

7 . HARDCORE TANO*C is an independent Japanese music label that is known for releasing music compilations and albums focused on various forms of hardcore techno such as UK hardcore, happy hardcore, and gabber. The label was founded in 2003 by Yoshikazu Nagai (who at the time used the Akai Hito alias), originally under the name of Hardcore Tanoshii, but changed to its current name of HARDCORE TANO*C in 2007 after the release of the album HARDCORE SYNDROME. The label features a store which sells the most notable doujin (同人)music releases, and is well known for their frequent live events that are regularly organized throughout the years, including the annual TANO*C TOUR series of events and the S2TBTANO*C events done in collaboration with kors k’s S2TB Recording label.

From 2011 to 2018, HARDCORE TANO*C were very closely linked with BEMANI, most notably in beat mania IIDX and SOUND VOLTEX. Many of HARDCORE TANO*C’s members were frequent contributors to BEMANI,and KONAMI even collaborated with the label for a few of their own album releases. Their presence also expanded to various other music game titles.

Many guest artists have appeared in HARDCORE TANO*C compilations, including Ryu☆, kors k, DJ Shimamura, m1dy, M-Project, JAKAZiD (as Joshka), Hommarju, Camellia, lapix, C-Show, Maozon, Nhato, Dustvoxx, and Akira Complex.

By the end of 2017, HARDCORE TANO*C has started to produce major artist album releases, containing licensed works done for music games by the circle’s artists. From September 2018, a sub-label directed by DJ Myosuke named HARDCORE TANO*C HARD has been established, which focuses on harsher music. HARDCORE TANO*C is also heavily involved in the 2019 rhythm game WACCA, which is published by MARVELOUS!, with nearly its entire staff contributing to the game.

A song composed by various members of HARDCORE TANO*C, BATTLE NO.1, was planned to be in SOUND VOLTEX IV HEAVENLY HAVEN for the The 8th KONAMI Arcade Championship, under the artist name of TANO*C SOUND TEAM. KONAMI rejected the song (likely due to their poking fun (打趣) of the BEMANI Sound Team moniker, which was at its most extreme in the time of that event), and it later appeared instead in the HARDCORE TANO*C-produced game WACCA on August 1st, 2019. It also appeared in lowiro’s Arcaea as part of the Arcaea× HARDCORE TANO*C Collaboration (联动) and SEGA’s maimai でらっくす Splash. It was added to Muse Dash on February 5, 2021.

8 . Conflict in communities is usually about the task or the person. Of course, sometimes it’s hard to separate one from the other.

Task conflict happens when people have different ideas of what needs to be done. It points to potential differences in opinion about everything you can imagine that is essential for a group: mission, priorities of tasks, compensation mechanism (机制), decision-making mechanisms, etc. Task conflict is not a problem when people realize the source of the conflict is the task and not the people. Community members must resolve tension inclusively with everyone’s voice being heard and acknowledged. However, this does not mean that the solution must include everyone’s opinion. After the conversation, everyone should feel that they had a fair chance to express their opinion and that it was taken seriously by others and not brushed aside.

Conflict between people is tricky because it’s attacking a person’s essence and self-worth. Often this form of conflict, relationship conflict, happens when two conditions are met: First, people have different values or are holding different assumptions, and secondly, neither party can see beyond their own biases. With relationship conflict, the person is perceived to be the problem and is being attacked by others. Each party assumes that most people are on their side and that the other person is acting out of self-interest. This eventually leads to people disagreeing with each other, not for the task’s sake but to prove the other person is wrong.

Sometimes conflict originates in a task. People might prefer different tools or different approaches. If this initial controversy is ignored or not dealt with appropriately, the relatively easy task conflict turns into a more complex relationship conflict. When relationship conflict occurs, a lot of things are reactive rather than reflective. People stop thinking and act impulsively (冲动地).

All in all, remember that every culture has its own way of handling conflict. Some people consider it dishonest if an argument is not addressed openly, while in other cultures, such a discussion will not be acceptable. It comes down to “Don’t assume everyone thinks like you”.

9 . Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.

Edward Tian, a computer science major at Princeton University, has built an App called GPTZero to detect whether a text is written by Chat GPT, which is a popular chatbot that has caused fears over its possibility for immoral uses in American academic circles. His motivation to create the computer program was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism (剽窃). Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, there have been reports of students using the language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own. Many teachers have reached out to him after he released GPTZero, telling him about the positive results they’ve seen from testing it.

To determine whether an essay is written by a computer program, GPTZero uses two indicators: “confusion” and “burstiness (突发性)”. The first indicator measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is confused by the text, then it has a high complexity and it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to GPTZero — because it’s been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated. Besides, the second indicator compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.

In a demonstration video, Tian compared the App’s analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a Linked In post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing between human and AI. However, GPTZero isn’t foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he’s still working to improve the model’s accuracy.

Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. GPTZero is “not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used,” he said. “But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have protections.”