A company, called Mario Cucinella Architects, has made the House of Music, a solar-powered ( 太阳能的) building in Pieve di Cento that celebrates the town’s long-standing musical tradition. Designed to represent an orchestra ( 管弦乐队), the building is made up of nine small music rooms that connect to a central open space. The curved oak front not only helps to make sound louder like an instrument’s music box, but also ensures high levels of energy efficiency (效率).

Finished in 2017 after four years of planning and building, the House of Music of Pieve di Cento is located in the former Lamborghini (a famous Italian car company) production area that had been changed into a park. The recently completed building gets an advantage from a cycling path that connects the House of Music to the town center and beyond to an area to the south. There is also a wooden bench running around the building and creating resting places facing the park.

To prevent heat, cold, or noise from passing through the building, Mario Cucinella Architects used a special design for the House of Music. The flat roofs are topped with a series of curved and raised disks (圆盘) that help make unwanted sunlight change its direction and are engineered to bring more natural air into the building. The energy-efficient design was influenced by the architects’ (建筑师的) study of the site.

The nine music rooms open up to a central outdoor space that serves as a meeting area. The architects noted, “The House of Music’s outside lighting makes it a comforting place that encourages people to continue to do musical activities after the earthquake that shook the area in 2012.”

Dr. De Momi, of the Politecnico di Milano (Italy), led an international team that trained a robot to imitate natural human actions. 【小题1】 Over time this should lead to improvements in safety during surgeries because unlike their human partners, robots do not tire and can complete an endless series of precise(精准的) movements. The goal is not to remove human skill from the operating room, but to complement it with a robot's particular skills and benefits.

“As a roboticist, I firmly believe that robotic (co)workers, or say, collaborators will definitely change the work market, but they won’t steal job opportunities. 【小题2】 ”De Momi explains.

To conduct their experiment De Momi’s team photographed a human being doing numerous reaching motions, in a way similar to handing instruments (手术工具) to a surgeon. These camera captures were input into the neural (神经) network of the robotic arm, which is essential to controlling movements. Next, a human operator guided the robotic arm in imitating the reaching motions that the human subject had initially performed. Although there was not a perfect match between the robotic and human actions, they were generally similar.

【小题3】 These observers determined whether the actions of the robotic arms were “biologically inspired,” which meant that their neural networks had effectively learned to imitate human behavior. About 70% of the time this is exactly what the human observers concluded.

These results are promising, although further research is necessary to confirm or refine De Momi’s conclusions. If robotic arms can indeed imitate human behavior, it would be necessary to build conditions in which humans and robots can cooperate effectively in high stress environments like operating rooms. 【小题4】 De Momi’s work is part of the growing field of healthcare robotics, which has the potential to change the way we receive health care sooner rather than later.

Airplane accidents are statistically rare. When they do happen, however, they are often fatal and people want answers as to why their loved ones lost their lives, and that is where black boxes come into play.

A black box, known as flight recorder, is an electronic recording device placed in an aircraft to help the investigation of air accidents. The term “black box” was a World War II British phrase, originating with the development of radio, radar, and electronic navigational aids in British and Allied combat aircraft. These often-secret electronic devices were literally covered in non-reflective black boxes or housings, hence the name “black box”.

There are two different flight recorder devices: the flight data recorder (FDR) as well as the cockpit voice recorder (CVR). Together, the FDR and CVR objectively document the aircraft’s flight history, which may assist in any later investigation. They are usually kept in the tail of an aircraft, where they are more likely to survive a crash. FDRs record things like airspeed, height and vertical acceleration (垂直加速度) and has about 25 hours of recording storage. The CVRs store the crew’s interactions with each other and air traffic control, as well as the background noise that can give vital clues to investigators in case of a crash. However, a CVR can store only two hours of cockpit voice recording.

Though the black box is useful, it’s looking increasingly likely that the little one will be replaced by streaming all essential data directly to a ground-based station. Air-to-ground systems can send flight data to a home base via satellite, which help to reduce time to search for a box, possibly avoiding a crisis. However, satellite and GPS capacity and data storage speeds are all areas that are being developed by scientists to support new innovations that are faster and lighter. The challenge is to build the systems to manage a large number of data that are needed to make it possible to track all commercial flight activity, especially the use of satellites and data storage.