Have you ever lost something in a hard-to-reach space, like behind a couch or a cupboard? Wouldn’t it be nice to just be able to squeeze in and out? New innovations in the field of robotics will soon be able to make this mice idea into a reality.

In a study published on Jan 25 in the science journal Matter, engineers from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Carnegie Mellon University in the US have developed small robots that can quickly change back and forth from liquid to solid states.

According to the website Mashable. the scientists were inspired by sea cucumbers. They are able to change the stiffness (僵硬度) of their body or reduce the potential for physical damage. The robots in the study were made from gallium (镓), a soft meta with a low melting point of 30 C. The scientists then used changes in the magnetic field to control the magnetic particles inside the gallium material to provide heat. This heat then allowed the robots to change between solid and liquid states as well as to move around.

As the website Tech Xplore pointed out, other similar materials require external heat sources such as heat guns and electrical currents to induce a change of states; but now, the robots can use a heat source inside itself to change states independently. During the robots” experimental trials. the scientists conducted a number of tests. These tests included having the robots melt into liquid and re-form to escape a prison-like cage. It can remove a foreign object from and deliver medicinal drugs to a model stomach. The robot is also able to build and repair hard-to-reach circuits. The robots’ ability to switch between states of matter allows for a number of possible uses and advancements in different fields, such as the biomedical and circuit assembly (组装) industries.

Still, in the words of senior author Carmel Majidi at Carnegie Mellon University, for now these are all just “proofs of concept” which show the abilities of these new kind of robots.

Facial recognition technology is mostly connected with uses such as the identification of human faces, but scientists believe they’ve found a new use for it — conserving seals (海豹).

A research team at Colgate University has developed SealNet, a database of seal faces created by taking pictures of seals in Maine’s Casco Bay. The team found the tool’s accuracy in identifying the ocean animals is close to 100%, which is a great achievement in an ecosystem home to thousands of seals.

Krista Ingram, a biology professor at Colgate, said the researchers are working on expanding their database to make it available to other scientists. She also said broadening the database to include rare species, such as the Hawaiian seal, could help save those species. And categorizing (分类) seal faces and using machine learning to identify them can also help scientists know clearly where in the ocean seals are. “Understanding their patterns really helps,” she said. “For moving ocean animals that move around a lot and are hard to photograph in the water, we need to be able to tell them apart,” she said.

SealNet is designed to detect the face in a picture, collect it and recognize it based on facial patterns such as eyes and nose shape. The Colgate team published its paper in April in the scientific journal. The paper said that the “image data that can be dealt with using SealNet software offers an important tool for ecological and behavioral studies of ocean animals in the developing field of conservation technology.”

Tjomme Dooper, head of partnerships and growth from IT company FruitPunch, said he was getting a few scientists to work on a challenge to make SealNet simpler. “What this does is help the biologists study the behavior of seals, and also population changes,” Dooper said. “Seals are an important indicator species for the ecosystem around them.”

An asteroid(小行星)is moving very fast toward Earth, threatening every human being on the planet. Humanity has one shot to save itself with brave, selfless heroes piloting a spacecraft into the universe to destroy the asteroid.

But that’s the movies. On Monday evening, NASA showed what the reality was like. There was an asteroid, but it wasn’t threatening the Earth. And there was a spacecraft, relying on advanced technology from the Earth. The human heroes of the mission were actually at a physics and engineering lab between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. And there was a collision(碰撞). In this case it was the final act of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test(DART), a spacecraft that was launched in November, 2021 and then raced around the sun for 10 months as it pursued its target—a small space rock, Dimorphos, seven million miles from Earth.

”For the first time, humanity has demonstrated the ability to change the orbit of an asteroid,“ said Ralph Semmel, director of the lab. In its last moments, the spacecraft sent back a series of photographs. DART had spotted Dimorphos only an hour earlier, as a dot of light. Then, Dimorphos grew bigger and bigger, until its surface filled the screen. The engineers were on their feet, cheering. ”Normally, losing signal from the spacecraft is very bad,“ Semmel said. ”But this time, it was the ideal outcome.“

With movies like ”Deep Impact“, Hollywood has long been enthusiastic about the prospect of disaster raining down from the universe. ”In reality, big asteroids that would cause planet-wide destruction occur very rarely, once every 10 million years or so. Hence, planners at NASA and elsewhere devote their attention to smaller ones in space, which would not set off mass extinctions, but can release more energy than a nuclear bomb. If any of those asteroids turns out to be on a collision course with Earth, the DART mission shows that changing its orbit is a realistic possibility.