Salvador Dali wasn’t exactly modest (谦逊的). And he’ll tell you so, too, face to face at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Here, the Spanish surrealist (超现实主义者) is alive and well, ready to talk to you in person about his art.

Well, sort of. This Dali is brought to life through the magic of artificial intelligence (人工智能). It’s a newly opened exhibition (展览) called "Dali Lives", and it is spread across the whole Dali Museum, which houses more than 2,000 Dali works in about 20,000 square feet of exhibit space. Three video boards showing a life-size Dali, standing 5’8” tall, form the exhibit — one at the museum gate, one on the third floor by the main exhibits (including Dali’s paintings and photographs, two technologically treated paintings allowing visitors to put themselves inside the paintings, and a special experience of "walking" through Dali’s 1934 painting "Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus") and one in the gift shop on the way out. Each one offers a different experience when you push a doorbell on the board to get Dali’s attention.

The most surprising thing about "Dali Lives" is that you’re dealing with a version (版本) of the artist himself. It looks like Dali, it sounds like Dali, it is Dali. The museum worked together with the San Francisco advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners to achieve this, feeding hundreds of news interviews and words from his written works into an artificial intelligence system to recreate the artist. The result was a living, moving version of Dali ready to converse with anyone there, answering their questions.

"Dali himself was at the forefront of technology and was always experimenting with and trying new things,"says Beth Bell, marketing director at the Dali Museum. "We think he would have loved these types of things. It’s in the spirit of Dali himself."

While it may sound like something crawling out of your horrible dreams, cyborg cockroaches (蟑螂机器人) have arrived as friends rather than enemies.

Scientists in Japan have designed a new remote-controlled insect, equipped with a battery “backpack” powered by solar panels. The cockroach, which is part insect and part machine, is intended to enter dangerous areas, monitor the environment or take on search and rescue missions without needing to be recharged.

Famously able to survive a nuclear war, cockroaches have been the inspiration for a number of technologies in recent years. Different teams of scientists have designed remote-controlled robo-bugs that can climb walls, carry objects and find humans during search-and-rescue missions.

The cockroaches are still alive, but wires attached to their two “cerci” (尾蚴) send electrical impulses that cause the insect to move right or left. A battery is necessary for the sending and receiving these electrical signals, which needs to be charged up. While it’s possible to build docking (对接) stations for recharging the battery, the need to return and recharge could disrupt time-tight missions.

The team wanted to create a more practical version that did not need to return to a docking station when it ran out of power. Therefore, they designed a solar cell that could constantly ensure that the cockroach stays charged while it works. However, cockroaches have a limited surface area available for all the components necessary to move its legs and keep it powered. The solution was to design a special “backpack” that could carry both the wireless leg-control module and rechargeable lithium polymer battery. This was attached to the top of the insect on its thorax (胸腹), and was 3D printed to fit perfectly to the curved surface of the Madagascar cockroach. It allowed for this electronic device to be stably installed on the insect for over a month.

Riding on an exercise bike at home may keep you in physical shape, but it can get pretty boring after a while. Aaron Puzey had been on his exercise bike for half an hour a day for years when he decided to look for a way to make it a bit more fun.

With virtual reality technology widely available nowadays, all he needed to do was find a way of applying it to his needs. So he set out to build an app for the Samsung Galaxy Gear VR headset(头戴式视图器) which would allow him to hook it up to Google Street view and make it seem like he's cycling through different real-life locations.

Building the app to download the 3D data from Street View and make it viewable in the VR headset was the toughest part of his project. Other than that, all he needed to do was tape a Bluetooth monitor to his exercise bike. Although the quality of the images sometimes leaves a lot to be desired, leaving complex scenes like trees looking like a mess, Aaron has been having a lot of fun on his journey.

Aaron's project is obviously no substitute(替代品) for real outdoor cycling as it lacks things like the wind blowing in your face or the pain of battling an uphill climb, but it has given him a goal, as well as the chance to take in the beauty of places he might have otherwise never seen. It definitely beats staring at a wall or at the TV for 30 minutes, anyway.

Obviously, Aaron's set up the officially allows him to ride a bike anywhere around the world. He says he has always wanted to see Japan, so once his ride comes to an end, he plans to start another one across the Land of the Rising Sun.