A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just a bunch of individual components (零件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. “The added difficulty with such a project is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to make them all on our own,” he said.

They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, and then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.

Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect- scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications (应用). “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”

An extinct mountain goat that was once common in the Pyrenees became the first animal to be brought back from extinction. Researchers used frozen DNA to produce a clone, but the newborn kid died within minutes of birth due to breathing difficulties.

The Pyrenean ibex is a type of mountain goat, which is believed to have died out completely in 2000. Before the death of the last known individual (a13-year-old female known as Celia), biologists took cells from her skin and ears. An earlier cloning attempt to use the skin cells failed. But the latest attempt involved the creation of 439 cloned embryos. Of these cloned embryos, 57 were put into the female domestic goats, but only one goat gave birth and the newborn cloned kid died after seven minutes as a result of lung disease.

Researchers say that other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung disease, but they say that overall the experiment was a major step forward in the effort to bring the ibex back to its mountain home. The leading researcher Jose Folch says, “the cloned kid was genetically like the ibex; in species such as the ibex, cloning is the only possibility to avoid its complete disappearance.”

The failure to produce a living clone from DNA that was frozen only a decade ago shows the difficulty researchers would face in trying to bring back species that have been extinct (灭绝的)   for decades or centuries. Researchers have had the idea of bringing back the Tasmanian tiger, which went extinct in 1936. There are, however, other species that have been seriously suggested for cloning, such as the giant panda, the African bongo antelope, the Sumatran tiger and the pygmy hippo. Supporters believe cloning provides hope of keeping these endangered animals alive before they die out.

Now a company is launching a new robot on personal service machines.Rather than keeping you company at home,GITA (pronounced Jee-Tah) helps you go hands-free while you walk down the street, to the grocery store or to visit your neighbors.Like the name, which means“outing" in Italian, the robotic servant is for short trips out and about.

Designed by the Piaggio Group, the smart device uses five cameras to see you,follow you around and carry up to 40 pounds of your belongings for four hours.It's similar to those robotic suitcases that trail behind you at the airport, but with an entirely different outside.Picture a large container but on wheels.That's what GITA looks like in the flagship orange color.Imagine having a hi-tech that can follow you around with your shopping inside.Ir's round and strong yet relatively smart and convenient.The robotic helper is a joy to engage with,sort of like a dog.

Operating GITA is simple.You just press one button to turn it on,one button for the cameras to scan your legs, and you're off.It actually does a pretty good job of following you and recognizing when you change directions.Its movement is oddly natural.When you speed up it falls behind a bit before trying to catch up,and when you stop,it stops-usually.GITA operates best on hard surfaces.However,it can't go upstairs.It can roll on slight inclines(斜坡）and keep up with a walking person at speeds up to 6 miles per hour.

A system of sounds and lights will let you know whether it is unpaired or needs a charge.And an app lets you share your robot with your "crew", so it can follow them, too.With a speaker, your GITA can carry candy and play theme music as you take the kids trick-or-treating.

A USA TODAY tech reporter gave GITA a test run in 2019.He said,"GITA certainly made quite an impression on passers-by as it rolled down New York's busy Madison Avenue."Yet having tech trail behind you takes some getting used to.You can't help but look behind you to make sure it's keeping up, somewhat like monitoring a pet.