If you have flown with JetBlue or Delta airlines lately, you might recall a new program that allows passengers to board their flights with a facial recognition scan. However, you might not have known that these systems were also the first stage of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) “Biometric Exit” program, which has been in place since June of last year, Slate reports.

According to Slate, the DHS has partnered with Delta to make face recognition scans mandatory (强制的) for certain international flights leaving Atlanta and New York. DHS is also working with JetBlue to develop a similar system for travelers flying from Boston to Aruba.

So, how does it work? Essentially, computers “match passport and visa photos of U.S. visa holders to photos taken at the airport from which they’re departing the country,” Mashable says. “This helps the U.S. make sure the people getting on the plane are the same people who hold those visas.”

Still, the two programs are slightly different. The Delta system compares a photo of the passenger’s face, taken by a kiosk (信息服务亭) at the boarding gate, to photos from State Department databases. It also checks passengers’ citizenship or immigration (移民) status. If you’re flying with JetBlue, you can voluntarily get your face scanned instead of using a physical ticket.

And these systems aren’t going away anytime soon; in fact, the program is expected to expand in the coming years. Homeland Security is currently negotiating to make face recognition a common feature across all American TSA security checkpoints, says U.S. Customs and Border Protection executive John Wagner.

Japan is aging faster than any other nation. By the end of this decade, there will be three retirees for every child under 15 and before long, one in six people will be over 80. Its population will soon be falling by nearly a million people every year and some people predict that, some time in the next century, the last Japanese person will die. Other countries are encouraging immigration to deal with their demographic woes. But not Japan, which is using different ways to reduce pressure put on health care and social services.

The Toto-made toilet, common in Japanese hotels, can push up to help the elderly. Now Toto is working with Daiwa House, Japan’s largest house builder, to equip toilets for retirees. These have medical sensors that measure blood sugar levels, the blood pressure and body fat of the user. The data is emailed to the local GP through a built-in internet device (装置). So make sure you eat your greens and stay regular, or the doctor will be in touch.

The over-75s account for more than a quarter of the deaths in car accidents on Japanese roads. Toyota is working with Professor Kawashima, who developed brain training games for Nintendo, to create intelligent cars that monitor brain activity in the elderly. Other technologies could also work to keep elderly drivers cautious.

Japan has twice as many pets as it has children. But real animals are difficult to look after as their owners age. Paro is a furry white baby seal robot which responds to petting by moving its tail and opening and closing its eyes. It shows emotions such as surprise, happiness and anger, and has sold well in nursing homes where it is reported to stimulate (刺激) responses among those with dementia (痴呆).

Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research has developed Riba, a nursing care robot that can lift the elderly out of bed.

The rechargeable lithium-ion (锂离子) battery market is worth more than ＄50 billion. Lithium-ion batteries, whose demand continues to go up day by day, are used in a wide range of electronic devices. They are made of four main components, and cathode (阴极) is one of them. The cathode’s active material type is what determines the capacity of a battery.

A recent study, led by Wang Yan, a material scientist of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, finds that lithium-ion batteries made with recycled cathodes work better than those with new cathodes.

“The battery industry is expected to grow sharply in the next decade. This high demand has led companies to go to extremes, like increasing deep-sea mining, to gain access to the minerals used in lithium-ion batteries,” Wang said. “Mining minerals will have environmental impacts. Recycling spent lithium-ion batteries offers a way out.”

But until now, the prospect of using recycled materials in lithium-ion batteries has some manufacturers (制造商) worrying that it could impact performance. Thus, lithium-ion batteries are still not widely recycled. Aware of decreasing resources and environmental impact, Wang and other researchers set out to find a way to make recycling lithium-ion batteries economically practical. Through experiments, they could recover more than 90% of the key metals from spent batteries. These recovered metals became the basis of the new recycled battery’s cathode’s active material.

In tests between Wang’s team’s recycled batteries and brand-new batteries of the same composition, the recycled batteries outperform the new ones in their ability to maintain capacity. It took 11,600 charge cycles for recycled cathode batteries to lose 30 percent of their original capacity. That was about 50 percent better than the 7,600 observed cycles for new cathode batteries, the team reported. Those thousands of extra cycles could translate into years of better battery performance, even after repeated use and recharging.