One Concern is an AI company (人工智能公司) in California. It is using machine learning and AI to help firefighters. The company hopes its software (软件) can make exact predictions about earthquake damage. It can tell firefighters how to plan for an earthquake and how to do their jobs better when it happens.

Nicole Hu, a technology officer from One Concern, says the key is to feed the computers a lot of data (数据) about an area. The data may include information about homes and other buildings, the natural environment, and the size of an earthquake. The computers then use the information to make predictions about what would happen if there were an earthquake in the area. It then uses data from past earthquakes to see whether its predictions are any good, and changes its predictive models accordingly.

Gregory Deierlein, earthquake engineer at the Stanford University, says one of the most surprising things about the company’s software is its ability to make use of data from an earthquake as it’s happening, and to change its predictions in real time.

In the past, researchers would collect data after an event and a few years later they’d produce new models, says Deierlein. Now the new models appear in a matter of minutes.

Dan Ghiorso leads the Woodside Fire Protection District (区) near San Francisco, which covers about 32 square miles. He says in the past, when an earthquake hit, he’d have to make educated guesses (based on experience and training) about what parts of this district might be badly damaged and then drive to each place to have a look around. He hopes One Concerns’ software will change that.   “Instead of driving thirty-two square miles, in fifteen minutes on a computer I can get a good idea of the damage,” he says. ‘‘Instead of me taking my educated guess, they’re putting science behind the predictive models.”

Many sensing systems used in water have a problem: They rely on batteries that are often made from unsustainable materials, so such batteries will need replacing at some point.

To look for a cleaner, more long-lasting alternative, Zhonglin Wang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and his colleagues have created a self-charging buoy(浮标). It uses nanogenerators(纳米发电机)to gain power from the movement of waves.

The buoy consists of an acrylic(丙烯酸的)ball about 10 centimeters across and four nanogenerators connected to a part that collects the produced charge. As the water moves back and forth through the nanogenerators, they generate around 24.5 milliwatts of power.

It is suggested that the buoy could be used to check and monitor water levels for early flood warning systems. However, there are already many effective and cheap alternatives for this task, says Wouter Buytaert at Imperial College London. Non-contact methods, such as lidar(激光雷达), are probably more suitable for sensing water levels, he explains.

“The new power generation method could prove useful for situations in which non-contact methods aren’t workable, though, such as water quality sensing,”   Buytaert says. “There have been devices similar to the buoys in measuring and checking long-term water quality. But if such application is combined with the function of power collecting shown here, it could be more promising,”Buytaert says.

However, if used in rivers, the buoy would possibly be damaged by rising or violently moving water, especially if they are fixed at the rapids of the flood as an early warning system.“In these environments, there is often a high sand load in the river during a flood, so any sensor actually in the river is likely to get destroyed,” says Liz Stephens at the University of Reading, UK.

Humans have dried and salted foods since before recorded history. But keeping food by heat-treating and then sealing(密封) it in containers didn’t come along until the late 18th century.

In 1795, Napoleon Bonaparte offered a reward to whoever could develop a safe food preservation(保存)method for his traveling army. Nicholas Appert took on the challenge, and about 15 years later introduced a method that involved heat-processing food in glass jars(罐)with wire and sealing them with wax(蜡).That second technique is similar to the one some people still use sealing jars with paraffin wax-a method, FYI, which is no longer considered safe.

By 1810, Englishman Peter Durand had introduced a method for sealing food in “unbreakable” tin cans. It wasn’t until almost a century after Nicholas Appert took on Napoleon’ s food preservation challenge that Louis Pasteur was able to show how the growth of micro-organisms (微生物)causes food to go bad. Before that, people knew that canning methods worked, but not why. By the time of the U.S. Civil War, glass food preservation jars with metal clamps( a tool used for holding two things together) and replaceable rubber rings had been invented. These jars can still be seen today. Wire-clamped jars such as Lightning and Atlas jars were in use from the late 19th century until 1964, and still, turn up in yard sales.

In the late 1800s,William Charles Ball and his brothers got into the food preservation jar business and began buying up smaller companies. They quickly became leaders in the industry. Alexander Kerr invented the easy-to-fill wide-mouth canning jars in 1903 ( an invention that the Ball brothers quickly learned to use). Later, in 1915, Kerr developed the idea of a metal cover with a long-lasting attached gasket(垫圈) that a man named Julius Landsberger had invented. Kerr came up with a metal disk with a similar gasket, held in place by a metal ring. The modern 2-piece canning cover was born. Canning technology continues to develop.