“Everyone should have the chance to play” is the idea behind All Terrain (地形) Georgia, a program that offers free all-terrain wheelchairs at Georgia’s parks to those with physical disabilities. Being in the woods, fishing, or having a picnic at one of Georgia’s state parks can help those people feel normal again. This is a cooperation program between the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the Aimee Copeland Foundation.

All-terrain wheelchairs look like an advanced version of everyday wheelchairs.They have a tank-like appearance, and their wheels are bigger. And bigger engines make them have more power to cross terrain quickly. Most importantly, these chairs are specially designed to make them reliably cross terrain that’s rough, wet, sandy or snowy. Therefore, they can give people who might not be able to cross more difficult types of terrain the ability to start a trip.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 11.1% of U.S. adults have serious difficulty walking or climbing steps. And yet, the most wheelchair-friendly national park in the country, South Dakota’s Badlands National Park, has only 3 roads out of 17 suitable for wheelchairs. Besides, traditional wheelchairs can be risky, uncomfortable, and difficult to use in the park, not to mention the fact that the price of some all-terrain wheelchairs can be between $13,000 and nearly $30,000.

Now, as long as you complete a form and meet the requirements, you can book an all-terrain wheelchair and use it for free at one of the cooperative state parks in Georgia. Do remember you need to have an adult around you during the trip. The adult must undergo a training program, carry a fully charged phone and be physically capable of seeking help, if necessary, by returning quickly to the place where the chair was checked out.

Last year, a number of all-terrain wheelchairs were put into service at 11 state parks and historic sites through All Terrain Georgia. Looking ahead, Melanie Dunn, the assistant director of the Aimee Copeland Foundation, said, “The foundation will soon have the ability to move the chairs to many other parks. Everyone deserves the chance to get close to nature and we can help them do it.”

Solar panels that grow spinach (菠菜) by pulling in steam from the air could offer a low-cost strategy to produce crops in the desert, a new study says. A new system, called WEC2P, consists of solar panels coated with hydrogel (水凝胶) , researchers in Saudi Arabia report. The hydrogel-lined solar panels are mounted (安装) on top of a large metal box that turns water vapor from the air into liquid water for growing crops. Over two weeks of hot weather last summer, the researchers were able to grow spinach with a crop survival rate of 95 percent.

According to the experts, the technology offers a “low-cost strategy” to improve food and water security. It’s described as “low cost” as the hydrogels use material as cheap as $1 per kilogram, although the combined cost of building and adopting such a system would be much more. As well as powering the growth of crops, harvesting steam from the air can also provide clean drinking water.

“Our goal is to create a system of clean energy, water, and food production, especially the water-creation part in our design,” said Wang.

“Our design makes water out of air using clean energy that would’ve been wasted and is suitable for scattered, small-scale farms in remote places like deserts and oceanic islands.” Commercial solar panels can usually transform less than a quarter of absorbed sunlight into electricity, while the remainder of the radiation is either lost as heat or heats up the panels, which in turn reduces their efficiency.

One potential issue with the system is it relies on high levels of humidity (湿度) — when there is a lot of steam in the surrounding air — and may not be quite as effective in very dry areas. “The performance and furthermore the cost of the system will have to be further and significantly improved before it can be made economically attractive,” said Wang.

In order to survive trips to Mars, humans need oxygen. Now, a team of scientists has designed a robot that could extract oxygen from water on the Red Planet.

The robot, which is called “AI chemist”, used a machine learning model to find a compound that could ignite an oxygen-producing chemical reaction on Mars. The compound, known as a catalyst (催化剂), is made entirely from elements found in Martian meteorites (陨石)   — which means, if such a system could work reliably, space travelers would not need to bring oxygen or even the catalyst needed to produce it.

Mars’ atmosphere contains only trace amounts of oxygen. But scientists have detected evidence of liquid water beneath the planet’s southern ice cap. To create the breathable gas, researchers wanted to find a way to break down this water into its hydrogen and oxygen molecules using materials found on Mars.

Their robot analyzed five meteorites that either came from Mars or had a composition similar to that of the Martian surface. Using a laser, it identified significant amounts of iron, nickel, calcium, magnesium, aluminum and manganese in the samples. From these six elements, the robot’s algorithm (算法) determined it could produce more than 3.7 million possible molecules to break down water and form oxygen on Mars. According to the researchers, finding the best one from this extensive list would take roughly 2,000 years of human labor, but for the AI chemist, it took only weeks.

“On Earth, we don’t use these six elements,” Yi Luo, a co-author of the study says. “They are not the best choices for catalysts, but it’s only what you’ve got on Mars.”

With its chosen catalyst, the system could produce oxygen from the Martian materials at around -37℃, demonstrating the chemical reaction could be possible on the cold Martian surface.

Notably, the robot was able to carry out the entire process — analyzing the rock samples, identifying the best possible catalyst and producing it without human intervention.