In the movie The Wrong Trousers, a pair of futuristic trousers lets people walk on walls and ceilings. Inspired by the movie, researchers in England created “The Right Trousers,” a set of trousers embedded (嵌入) with electrical pumps to force air into tiny tubes (软管) that expand and can help elderly or disabled people with issues like getting up or improving blood flow. Now, material scientists, computer programmers and fabric designers are working to advance robotic clothing.

In June, researchers in Australia created robotic fibers, which can make fabric move automatically. Last year, scientists at MIT built fiber batteries that could be embedded into clothes and power robotic clothing. In recent years, Google partnered with brands like Levi’s and Adidas to put sensors in jackets, backpacks and shoes, letting users access their phones instantly. Researchers said they could soon unlock an era where clothing will act more like a computer, sensing how your body feels and telling your clothes how to help.

At the University of New South Wales in Australia, researchers are creating fabrics that car shape-shift. Thanh Nho Do, a senior lecturer at the school, said his team has created tiny tubes that can weave into sheets of fabric. These tubes can make fabric take various preprogrammed shapes. But challenges still remain for Do’s team, especially around making these robotic tubes smaller so they can weave easily with other fabrics.

Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio from Yale University agreed that many challenges remain before smart clothing reaches their full potential. “It will be challenging to make these clothes, equipped with fibers and technology, strong enough to go through multiple cycles in the laundry (衣店),” she said. Despite that, she says researchers will figure out a way forward. “Recent breakthroughs,” she said, “point toward a not-so-distant future where smart clothing will be a part of our everyday life. ”

Electric scooter (踏板车) companies are turning to technology to try to reduce accidents and injuries among riders and pedestrians (行人). The problem has become so serious that countries including Singapore, France and Spain have banned e-scooters on pedestrian walkways. A study of more than 100 riders surveyed in Washington D. C. found that nearly three in five were injured while riding on a sidewalk, even in places where it was banned.

Swedish operator Voi—which has more than 6 million scooter riders across 50 European cities—has worked with Dublin startup Luna to develop a system of cameras and sensors that can make out what surface a scooter is riding on, as well as the presence of nearby pedestrians.

The technology works in real time. A small camera fixed on the e-scooter films the lane (车道) ahead, while an algorithm (计算程序)—trained on thousands of pictures and videos—makes out the surrounding environment. With this information, the scooter can be programmed to react in a number of ways. “It could slow down its speed as the rider goes up on a sidewalk; it could reduce the speed if it discovers pedestrians on the pathway... It could give warnings to both the rider and the surroundings if the technology discovers behavior that we feel is unsafe,” says Shahin Ghazinouri, Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Voi.

Exactly how Voi’s scooters will react is yet to be decided, he adds, and will depend on results from a year-long trial of the technology in Northampton, England. During the first stage of the trial, e-scooters fitted with Luna’s technology were ridden by Voi employees. Luna CEO Andrew Fleury expects, in the second stage, the scooters will be rolled out across Northampton for public use.

Other e-scooter companies are developing similar systems. Alexandre Santacreu, the author of the International Transport Forum’s 2020 report on micromobility, says that while the technology developed by e-scooter companies is promising, addressing city infrastructure(基础建设) and motor vehicle speed limits should come first. Accidents among riders and pedestrians often “happen in places where scooter riders do not feel safe on the streets and they go onto the walkways,” he says. To deal with this, cities must introduce more cycle routes and work on slowing down cars, says Santacreu.

Just because a scientist puts a GPS tracking collar on a wild polar bear does not mean the animal will willingly keep it on. They can remove it, if one becomes annoying. But scientists have now found a way of using signals from those dropped collars to track the ice itself.

The scientists identified 20 collars that transmitted movement data consistent with ice drift (漂流) rather than polar bear motion between 2005 and 2015. The resulting records of how melting ice drifts in Hudson Bay are unique; there are no easily accessible on-the-ground sensors, and satellite observations often cannot accurately capture the motion of small ice sheets.

The team compared the removed collars’ movements to widely used ice-drift modeling data from the U. S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). Collar data indicated that the NSIDC model underestimates the speed at which ice moves around in Hudson Bay — as well as the overall extent of drift. Over the course of several months the model could diverge (偏离) from an ice sheet’s location by a few hundred kilometers, the scientists say.

This means the bears may be working harder, when moving against the direction of the ice, than scientists had assumed, “Since we’re underestimating the speed of drift, we’re likely underestimating the energetic effort of polar bears,” says Ron Togunov, who led the study.

The study reveals timely insight into how highly mobile ice moves. As melting increases in coming years, such ice will likely become more common farther north, in the central Arctic, says Andy Mahoney, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska, who was not involved in the study. Scientists had known NSIDC data could underestimate drift speeds, Mahoney says, but “any time we can find a data gap and plug it is a good thing.”

Plus, such data could improve predictions about how oil spills or other pollutants may spread in seas littered with drifting ice, says Walt Meier, a senior NSIDC research scientist. The findings may even influence future NSIDC models. “It'’s a really nice data set.” Meier says. “And certainly one we’ll take under consideration.”