Will your job be done by a robot in the future? Bank of England economists predict that almost half of all UK jobs are under threat of robots. Those most at risk are physical labor, such as factory workers. But could even teachers soon have to compete against powerful electronic educators?

At fist sight, teaching might seem impossible to be replaced by robots. Teachers use a lot of soft skills. Those skills are hard to be copied by machines. They judge students’ needs and adapt materials to make them more effective. And they provide special care: looking out for students who drop behind or make trouble in class.

Anyhow, some believe the future of education will be technological. In an interview, futurist Thomas predicts that “by 2030 the largest company on the Internet is going to be an education-based company that we haven’t heard of yet.”

He thinks that online robot teachers will make education so efficient that students will be able to finish an entire undergraduate degree in six months of learning. A robot teacher learns what your “characters”, “interests” and “reference points” are, “and it knows how to teach you in a faster and faster way over time,” according to Thomas.

Over the last decade, there has been a huge increase in online learning. Many companies produce courses that allow millions to learn at home for free, at their own pace. But there are limitations. Without the face-to-face encouragement of a classroom environment, most of the students fail to complete online courses. How to encourage students to learn is one more skill that online teachers will need to master.

Indeed, Thomas admits there is some way to go and he thinks that we should hug the change, even though people will lose their jobs.

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara have designed a one-foot device that can jump more than 30 meters in the air, three times the current record for a jumping robot.

“The motivation came from a scientific question,” the lead author Elliot W. Hawkers, a mechanical engineer at UC Santa Barbara, says in a statement. “We wanted to understand what the limits were on engineered jumpers.”

“Many mechanical jumping systems are based on biological jumpers — or those in the animal kingdom, but animals have limits to their jumping ability based on how much energy they can produce in a stroke (收缩) of their muscle,” Charles Xiao, a researcher in Hawkes’lab, says in the statement.

Researchers in this study took a different approach, using a motor to take multiple strokes and increase the amount of stored energy in the spring. The small motor winds up a line that presses the spring, which is made of carbon-fiber compression bows (压缩弓) and rubber bands. When a release mechanism is unlocked, the device launches into the air.

Because the stored energy is greater, this device’s spring-to-motor ratio (比率) is also larger than what’s seen in the animal kingdom by about 100 times. The device is lightweight and aerodynamic, which allows it to jump the height of a 10-story building and increase its speed from zero to 60 mph in nine meters per second.

While this kind of device could be used to navigate difficult lands on the Earth, researchers say it could reach heights even greater on the moon, where gravity is weaker.

“On the Earth, jumping robots could overcome obstacles previously only navigated by flying robots while collecting vision-based data of the ground below,” write the authors. On the moon, the jumps of the presented jumper would be even higher: 125 meters high while covering half a kilometer in a single bound.

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