The people who called into the help hotlines and domestic violence shelters said they felt as if they were going crazy. One woman said the code numbers of the digital lock at her front door changed every day and she could not figure out why. Still another said she kept hearing the doorbell ring, but no one was there.

Their stories are part of a new pattern of behavior in domestic abuse cases tied to the rise of smart home technology. Internet-connected locks, speakers, lights and cameras marketed as the newest conveniences are now also being used as a means for monitoring, revenge and control.

In more than 30 interviews with The New York Times, domestic abuse victims, their lawyers, shelter workers and emergency responders described how the technology was becoming an alarming new tool. Abusers—using apps on their smartphones, which are connected to the Internet-enabled devices—would remotely control everyday objects in the home, sometimes to watch and listen, other times to scare or show power. Even after a partner had left the home, the devices often stayed and continued to be used to threaten and confuse.

For victims, the experiences were often aggravated by a lack of knowledge about how smart technology works, how much power the other person had over the devices, how to legally deal with the behavior and how to make it stop.

“People have started to ask what to do about this,” said Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence. When it came to discussing the misuse of emerging technologies, she said: “we don’t want to introduce the idea to the world, but now that it’s become so common, the cat’s out of the bag.”

Connected home devices have been increasing in domestic abuse cases over the past year. Several lawyers said they were arguing about how to add language to the current restraining orders to cover smart home technology.

Four years ago, more than 700 computer scientists competed in a contest to build an artificial intelligence (AI) that could pass an 8th-grade science exam. They all flunked. Even the most developed system couldn’t score higher than 60 points on the test. AI can’t match the language and logic (逻辑) skills that students are expected to have when they enter middle school.

Later, a system named Aristo was developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a lab in the US. It recently passed an 8-grade science exam taken by many US students, the New York Times reported. It correctly answered more than 90% of the questions. Then it was given a 12th-grade exam and it scored more than 80 points.

Aristo was able to pass the exam because it can not only understand language but also use logical thinking to solve difficult problems. For example, it can understand what a forest fire is and how it could affect animals like rabbits. The Aristo system used Bert, a kind of technology developed by Google, to answer the questions. Bert has “read” thousands of Wikipedia articles and books. If it looks at a sentence with a missing word, it can correctly guess what the word is. With the help of Bert, Aristo has “read” a lot of science questions and answers. Over time, it was able to find logical patterns (模式) on its own.

Aristo’s success means that AI systems are getting better at understanding language and even respond to language. However, we can’t compare this technology to real human students and their logical ability, said Jingjing Liu, a Microsoft researcher, who has been working on similar technologies.

On the top of millions of homes and offices, affordable and efficient solar panels provide further smaller-scale- electricity during daylight hours. People drive zero-emission (排放) cars that were developed like Audi and BMW which run on hydrogen fuel—created using solar energy which turns waste water into hydrogen and oxygen. Solar energy is potential power in the continuous sunlight of space.

The idea of solar power and its potential to be Earth’s giant power source has roots way back before the threat of climate change and using up petrol. The first idea of solar energy was developed back in 1883, when writer Isaac Asimov published a 1941 story, describing a space station beaming down vast amounts of solar energy using microwave beams. US scientist Peter Glaser drew up plans in 1968 to make Asimov’s dreams a reality, only to be stopped by the technological limitations of the time.

But technologies for a solar-powered world are here today, quieting critics who claim global solar power will never overcome issues over long-distance transmission from sunny to less sunny areas, or find storage solutions to allow it to carry on making power when it gets dark.

China, for instance, is already building high-voltage power lines to spread output across the country from quickly developing solar power facilities. The first three months of 2015, alone, saw the Asian giant add 5 gigawatts (千兆瓦) of solar capacity to the entire solar supply of major European nation like France.

Storage solutions already being used worldwide have successfully proved the working of two methods. One uses solar energy to create melt salts, whose heat-keeping qualities allow them to provide the power to drive electricity turbines (涡轮机) through the night. Other solar plants, meanwhile, are using the sun’s rays to compress gas that is then released after dark to drive those turbines.