Bricks are one of the oldest known building materials, dating back thousands of years. But researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found a new use for bricks: as energy storage units. A team of engineers and chemists have found a way to transform an ordinary house brick into a pseudo-battery — allowing it to conduct and store electricity. The bricks are powerful enough to illuminate（点亮）an LED light bulb and cost only about $ 3 to make.

“I love the idea of adding value to things that are inexpensive, things that are affordable, things that we kind of take for granted, ”said Julio D’Arcy, an assistant professor of chemistry at Washington University and one of the researchers on this project.

The brick battery relies on the reddish pigment（色素）known as iron oxide, or rust, that gives red bricks their color. The scientists pumped the bricks with several gases that react with iron oxide to produce a network of plastic fibers. These microscopic fibers coat the empty spaces inside the bricks — and conduct electricity.

“What we’re trying to do is: we’re trying to make specialized plastics that are only used on the nano（纳米）scale — where we use very little of the plastic, and we can actually insert that plastic inside construction materials. ” The study is in the journal Nature Communications.

In the future, D’Arcy says, a brick wall could potentially serve a double purpose: providing structural support and storing electricity generated from renewable energy sources, such as solar panels.

The technology is still at least a few years away from being ready for the commercial market. And right now the energy storage capacity of the bricks is still pretty low — about 1 percent of a lithium battery. But the team is now testing ways to improve brick performance — because it looks like you can teach an old brick new tricks.

Keller Rinaudo Cliffton’s first company, Romotive, made toy cars that became robots by fixing a smartphone on top. But Rinaudo Clifton soon realized that he didn’t want to just make toys—he wanted to find ways to solve important problems.

He found what he was looking for on a visit to a health institute (机构) in Tanzania. There he saw that they had developed a system allowing health workers to make emergency requests for medicine and vaccines (疫苗), but had no effective way to deliver them. So in 2014, Romotive became Zipline, and started designing and building delivery drones (无人机) called Zips. By 2016, the company began deliveries in Rwanda, starting with just one hospital, but growing to 20 within a year.

Zipline now also operates in other African countries like Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Ivory Coast, as well as parts of the US and Japan. Now as the world’s largest commercial drone delivery system, it says it has made more than 700,000 deliveries, carrying everything from vaccines and medical things to hot food and phone chargers. Zipline says its centralized storage system and fast deliveries result in less waste when delivering blood products, and people miss fewer vaccines in places where Zipline operates.

Its first drone, the Platform 1 Zip, looks like a small airplane that can carry a little under 2 kilograms, going as far as almost 100 kilometers away at speeds of around 100 kilometers per hour. Things are dropped from about 20-25 meters above the ground.

The company’s new Platform 2 Zip, which has gone through the research and development periods and is currently being tested out, is promised to be ready for customer flights by 2025, can carry about twice as much as the Platform 1.

The company says that Platform 2 Zip can deliver to much more precise (精确的) locations up to seven times as fast as a car, completing 16-kilometer deliveries in about 10 minutes. And by 2026, it expects to run more flights each year than most major US airlines.

Google’s self-driving car is designed to work without a gas pedal (踏板) or steering wheel (方向盘). Now, the company has decided that the car doesn’t have any windscreen wipers either, because there’s no need for passengers to see where they are being driven.

The car requires no input from a driver, except telling it the destination. There is no driving in the way we know it and all people inside the cars will be passengers who can spend their time paying no attention to the road. While the car may not need windscreen wipers, the absence of them may make passengers feel helpless if they are unable to see where they are going clearly.

Google’s two-seater “bubble” cars have buttons to begin and end the drive, but no other controls. An on-board computer uses data from sensors, including radar (雷达) and cameras, to make turns and keep away from people walking in the street and other vehicles. Under the vision made public by Google, passengers might set their destination by typing it into a map or using voice commands. The new car can’t go faster than 25 miles per hour (40 km/h). It is electric and has to be recharged after 80 miles (129 km). They can only be used in areas that have been thoroughly mapped by Google.

Google has been testing its self-driving cars since 2009 and its new model without a steering wheel since early this summer. It intends on making its driverless cars available to consumers in the next five years. The final goal of the project is computer-controlled cars that can get rid of human error, which results in about 90 percent of the 1.2 million road deaths worldwide each year and it was also inspiring to start with a blank sheet of paper.