A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just a bunch of individual components (零件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. “The added difficulty with such a project is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to make them all on our own,” he said.

They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, and then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.

Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect- scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications (应用). “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”

This month, Germany’s transport minister, Alexander Dobrindt, proposed the first set of rules for autonomous vehicles. They would define the driver’s role in such cars and govern how such cars perform in crashes where lives might be lost.

The proposal attempts to deal with what some call the “death valley” of autonomous vehicles: the grey area between semi-autonomous and fully driverless cars that could delay the driverless future.

Dobrindt wants three things: that a car always chooses property damage over personal injury; that it never distinguishes between humans based on age or race; and that if a human removes his or her hands from the driving wheel — to check email, say — the car’s maker is responsible if there is a crash.

“The change to the road traffic law will permit fully automatic driving,” says Dobrindt. It will put fully driverless cars on an equal legal footing to human drivers, he says.

Who is responsible for the operation of such vehicles is not clear among car makers, consumers and lawyers. “The liability issue is the biggest one of them all,” says Natasha Merat at the University of Leeds, UK.

An assumption behind UK insurance for driverless cars, introduced earlier this year, insists that a human “be watchful and monitoring the road” at every moment.

But that is not what many people have in mind when thinking of driverless cars. “When you say ‘driverless cars’, people expect driverless cars.” Merat says. “You know — no driver.”

Because of the confusion, Merat thinks some car makers will wait until vehicles can be fully automated without operation.

Driverless cars may end up being a form of public transport rather than vehicles you own, says Ryan Calo at Stanford University, California. That is happening in the UK and Singapore, where government-provided driverless vehicles are being launched.

That would go down poorly in the US, however. “The idea that the government would take over driverless cars and treat them as a public good would get absolutely nowhere here,” says Calo.

Think of the empty cities in zombie(僵尸)movies. The streets, the shops and the schools still there just like they would be on a normal day, except there are no people to be seen. It is the emptiness that scares you.

Now a real-life "ghost city" is being built in the US. But fortunately, it has nothing to do with zombies - it is going to be a place to test the technology of the future

Called CITE - the Center for Innovation(创新), Testing and Evaluation(测评) - the city is the idea of technology company Pegasus Global Holdings. Covering an area of 15 square miles (39 square kilometers), it is the size of a small US city and sits in the middle of the New Mexico desert.

But why do we need an empty city that nobody will call home?

The reason is that we can't afford to test the latest technologies in the cities that we live in - they might not be ready and could cause problems and danger in our everyday lives.

"It will be a true laboratory without the problems and safety issues that come with people living there. Here you can break things and run into things, and get used to how they work, before taking them out into the market, Pegasus managing director Robert Brumley told technology magazine Wired.

In fact, without worrying about hurting people, anybody with a new idea can ask to test it in this city. Just think about the possibilities- driverless cars can move freely on the streets, homes with robots can be designed and energy sources like nuclear power can also be put to the test.

As good as the idea may seem, however, there are still doubts about CITE. "One of the most difficult things to do when developing these new technologies is to have them safely move around people, who can suddenly jump out in front of something," Reese Jones, a founder of Singularity University, US, told Fortune magazine.

Jones is worried that, even if a technology works perfectly well in CITE, introducing it to a real city will still be a whole different story because there will be people living in the city.

But no matter what, perhaps we should wait until CITE is finished in 2018. Maybe it will turn out to work just fine.