This has been a year full of natural disasters, like hurricanes, wildfires and floods. Behind many of them, though, is an unfolding event that shows no sign of stopping: climate change. Here we meet some students who have been using science to help people deal with the effects of the changing climate. Their research places them among 30 finalists at the 10th Broadcom MASTERS, a research program open to middle-school investigators.

Ryan Honary, a 12-year-old student in California, has personal experience with wildfires. One day, he was with his father at a tennis tournament when he saw wildfires raging across his home state on TV. “I called my mom and asked if she was okay.” Ryan recalls. Once he knew that she was, he asked his dad why wildfires got out of control so often. “We’re planning to send people to Mars but we can’t detect wildfires,” Ryan says.

That’s when Ryan decided to create a way to detect wildfires early — before they get out of control. He linked together a series of mini computers that had sensors to detect smoke. When smoke was detected, data was transferred wirelessly to another computer, which served as a mini meteorological(气象的) station.

Ryan brought his entire system to a park and tested it by holding the flame from a lighter in front of each sensor. When they sensed a fire, they informed the detector. It then alerted an app that Ryan built for his phone. While creating that app, Ryan talked with Mohammed Kachuee, a graduate student at the University of California. He helped Ryan use machine learning to train his app with data from 2018 Camp Fire, the most destructive fire in California history. The app took lessons from how this fire had traveled over time. Using those data, the app “learned” to tell how flames at future events might spread.

Someday, Ryan hopes his sensors might be used throughout his state. “Five of the worst fires in California just happened in the last three months,” he notes.

An augmented-reality (增强现实的) helmet that gives cyclists a 360-degree view of the road could help prevent accidents.

Unlike cars, bicycles don't come with rear view mirrors (后视镜), which is why British product design firm DCA created the Optic helmet. The helmet has front and rear cameras and a drop-down visor (面罩) that can display road conditions in real-time from the rear camera onto a rider's field of view. The visor can show warnings. If a vehicle is overtaking (超过) the rider, it can warn the rider by combining data from the cameras on the front and back of the helmet. In addition, the Optic helmet can provide GPS navigation information for riders who want to track their performance. The design is now just a concept, but it won the “Best of the Best” Red Dot Design Award recently.

Richard Price, a designer at DCA and the brains behind the project, said the helmet is aimed at reducing cycling accidents. Because the helmet is just a concept design, some of the details have yet to be decided, such as the exact method for projecting video onto the visor. However, Price said Google Glass has already shown that this is practical. The Optic helmet will be able to connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth to allow maps and routing information to be updated, but actual navigation will be carried out by the helmet using its onboard (自身携带的) GPS unit. It can be controlled either by a touchpad next to the visor or by using gestures picked up by the front camera.

“Users can order what is shown in the visor to suit their needs and to make sure the display doesn't distract them.” Price said. Since the designs were made public, Price said the design firm has received plenty of positive feedback from cyclists and cycling companies. But actually, putting the device into production will require lots of money, so it is unclear when or if the helmet will be available to consumers.

Everybody Should Say Thank You to Ray TomGnson. Why should you thank Ray Tomlinson? You might have never heard of his name before, but do you know that the e-mail you use every day was his“child”?

Ray Tomlinson is known as “the father of e-mail”. He was born in New York in 1941. He attended college at the Renaselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he took part in a program with IBM, and in 1963 he received a bachelor(学士) of Science in electrical engineering.

In 1971, Ray created the first e-mail system, which allowed people to send messages electronically from the same computer. But he thought that there might also be a way to send messages from different computers, which led to the birth of the e-mail we know now. He chose the @ sign to separate local from global emails in the mailing address. “I used the ‘@’ sign to show that the user was ‘at’ some other hosts rather than being local,”said Ray in an interview. Person to person network email was born and user @ host became the standard for email addresses, as it remainstoday.

Ray Tomlinson died at the age of 74. Thanks Ray Tomlinson for inventing the email and putting the @ sign on the map. Though he may not be famous as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, Ray Tomlinson surely has his place among the geniuses(天才) that gave us the convenience that we call “computer technology”.