Do you want to get some information about the latest inventions? Read the text and know how science and technology is helping to change the world positively.

Robot Birds

At the airport, birds are the main threat. When airplanes try to take off, birds often hit the airplanes and die. These robot birds can rescue real birds! The inventors will experiment with them at the Edmonton International Airport. If the robot birds can work adequately in the long run, it will be great news for the birds and us too!

Practice Nets

Here is a fantastic invention for basketball players who can’t spend much time training. This practice net has unique features. It can catch the basketball when a player shoots it into the net and send the ball back to the player automatically. The company is designing the practice nets which will come on the market soon.

Fish Robots

Fish robots invented by Swiss scientists look like minnows (米诺鱼). Scientists have used them to discover underwater lifestyles. When scientists put them under the sea, the result was terrific. All real fish behaved naturally towards them. These fish robots could move like fish and change directions randomly. Scientists are now planning to add more real fish’s behavior to those fish robots.

Lifesaver Drones

Many people die from shark attacks yearly. The creators of lifesaver drones will make sure that the drone can spot any shark in the water. After detecting the shark, the drone will then search if there is any swimmer nearby. If the shark tries to attack, it will rescue the swimmer and take him to the dry land. These lifesaver drones will be deployed at the Oasis which is popular among surfers and swimmers in 2023.

In the future, we may not need to rely on human donations for life-saving skin transplants.

That’s the goal of Xeno Therapeutics, a Boston-based biotech nonprofit. Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the group’s initial application for temporary skin transplant from genetically modified(修改) pigs. This means that they can start testing pig skin grafts on people who have experienced severe burns. It’s the first time that an animal organ has been cleared for human testing in the US.

Skin grafts can help protect these patients as they heal. At the moment, the only skin transplant available in the US come from people who have agreed to be organ donors, or patients who have undergone surgery to remove excess skin after dramatic weight loss.

Xeno Therapeutics, which gets its name from xenotransplantation, or animal-to-human transplants, has bred pigs that have skin remarkably similar to our own. Although pig skin normally produces a type of sugar human skin does not, these pigs have been genetically modified not to make it. Transplant from these pigs are therefore more likely to slide under the radar of the host’s immune system—at least temporarily. The idea is that they could be used for immediate burn treatment, followed human skin graft treatment later.

The nonprofit has been working closely with physicians at Massachusetts General Hospital, who will help conduct the clinical trials starting next month. The first trial will only be testing the grafts’ safety and tolerability in six patients with severe burns. Assuming the results are positive after a month, the grafts will need to undergo two more stages of testing before they can be approved for widespread clinical use.

Several other groups around the world are working to make animal organs suitable for clinical medicine. In Brazil, researchers are exploring using tilapia skin for use as temporary bandages for burn victims whose skin is regrowing. Just last week, scientists from Germany reported that they had made a crucial step in keeping baboons(狒狒) given genetically modified pig hearts alive for half a year. Their success suggests that pig hearts could one day be used to treat patients with heart failure.

Plastic bottles by the side of a road are a common sight, an unseemly reminder of how often consumer products are thrown away carelessly. Now some of those bottles may become part of the road. A California company has put recycled plastic into road repaving (重铺)，which could revolutionize the industry with environmental benefits.

Sean Weaver, president of TechniSoil Industrial in the northern California city of Redding, said, “With this new technique, the repaved roads are stronger, flatter, safer and last longer than those made with regular asphalt (沥青).”

More appealing to environmentalists, the repaved roads incorporate 100% of the old asphalt - sparing the air from dozens of trips by trucks pulling away and bringing in building materials - and provide a new market for plastic products that could otherwise wind up in a landfill.

“Everybody that's looked at it said this will be one of the most transformative road construction technologies ever,” Weaver said. “We're recycling what's there, and we're delivering a road that's better than the original, at no higher cost than it would cost you to repave that road the traditional way.”

The process involves four large construction vehicles linked together in what's called a recycling train which scoops up the top 3 inches of asphalt on a lane, grinds (磨碎)them on a mill and mixes them with TechniSoil's G5 binder (粘合剂),containing from 2% to 20% of liquefied plastic. The mixed product is deposited back on the road, paved and rolled over. There’s no heat involved in the operation, which essentially replaces the traditional binder - bitumen, a leftover from refining oil - with a stronger plastic composite. The other elements of asphalt, such as crushed rock, gravel, sand and filler, remain in place.