Desperately ill and seeking a miracle, David Bennett Sr. took the last bet on Jan. 7. when be became the first human to be successfully transplanted with the heart of a pig. “It creates the beat; it creates the pressure; it is his heart,” declared Bartley Griffith, director of the surgical team that performed the operation at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Bennett, 57, held on through 60 tomorrows, far longer than any previous patient who’d received a heart from another species. His remarkable run offered new hope that such procedures, known as xenotransplantation (异种移植), could help relieve the shortage of replacement organs, saving thousands of lives each year.

The earliest attempts at xenotransplantation of organs, involving kidneys from rabbits, goats, and other animals, occurred in the early 20th century, decades before the first successful human-to-human transplants. Rejection, which occurs when the recipient’s body system recognizes the donor organ as a foreign object and attacks it, followed within hours or days. Results improved after some special drugs arrived in the 1960s, but most recipients still died after a few weeks. The record for a heart xenotransplant was set in 1983, when an infant named Baby Fae survived for 20 days with an organ from a baboon (狒狒).

In recent years, however, advances in gene editing have opened a new possibility: re-edit some genes in animals to provide user-friendly spare parts. Pigs could be ideal for this purpose, because they’re easy to raise and reach adult human size in months. Some biotech companies. including Revivicor, are investing heavily in the field. The donor pig was offered by Revivicor from a line of animals in which 10 genes had been re-edited to improve the heart’s condition. Beyond that, the pig was raised in isolation and tested regularly for viruses that could infect humans or damage the organ itself.

This medical breakthrough provided an alternative for the 20% of patients on the heart transplant waiting list who die while waiting or become too sick to be a good candidate.

Guests arriving at the Aloft Hotel in Manhattan or one in Silicon Valley will soon be able to do something hotels have dreamed about offering for years: walk past the check-in desk and enter their rooms by using a smartphone as a room key. The boutique hotel brand from Starwood to Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. plans to offer this feature at two hotels, in the Harle neighborhood and in Cupertino, Calif, before the end of the quarter.

Starwood officials are hoping this will be one of the biggest technological changes in the industry since free Wi-Fi. "We believe this will become the new standard for how people will want to enter a hotel." says Frits van Passchen, Starwood's CEO. "It may be a novelty at first,but we think it will become table stakes for managing a hotel.

Not everyone is so sure. Past attempts to use technology to streamline the check-in process have had mixed results. Robert Habeeb, president of the First Hospitality Group, which is the owner of 55 hotels in the U.S, says he pulled out check-in kiosks at two of his Holiday Inn hotels after finding that most guests ignored them. He found that many travelers will sacrifice speed or ease to talk with a staff member and ensure their room has the right view or location, or to try for an upgrade. Other guests may still want to be greeted when they arrive.

Hotels have never been known for being in the forefront of technology. The industry is often a delay, in part because many hotels are owned and managed by separate companies, making investments in technology more complicated. Nevertheless, many hotel operators have been searching for ways to remove the bottlenecks that can form at a hotel's front desk. The delays are the bane(祸根）of many a road warrior's travel experience. “Everybody has to check in, but we are all doing it pretty much the same way we were 100 years ago, ”says Christopher Nassetta, chief executive officer for Hilton Worldwide holdings Inc.“It' s something we are seriously addressing.

Yet it is still not clear that virtual keys will do better than previous attempts to beat traditional check-ins. An effort several years ago to allow guests to enter rooms with the magnetic strip on their credit cards never became popular . Guests worried about security and were unwilling to give their kids credit cards instead of room keys.

In what is believed to be a world first, University of South Australia researchers have designed a self-sufficient solar-driven system that evaporates (蒸发) seawater and recycles it into freshwater, growing crops without any human intervention. It could help address global food shortages in the decades ahead, with the world’s population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050.

Professor Haolan Xu and Dr Gary Owens from UniSA’s Future Industries Institute have developed the vertical (垂直的) floating sea farm which consists of two parts: an upper layer room similar to a glasshouse and a lower water harvest room.

“In this case, clean water is supplied by a line of solar evaporators that absorb the seawater, trap the salts in the evaporator body and, under the sun’s rays, release clean water vapour (a) into the air which is then concentrated on water belts and transported to the upper plant growth part.” Dr Owens said.

The system, which is powered only by solar light, has several advantages over other solar sea farm designs currently being trialled, according to Professor Xu. “Other designs have build evaporators inside the growth room which takes up valuable space that could otherwise be used for plant growth. Also, these systems are very likely to suffer from overheating and crop death,” Professor Xu says.

“In our design, the vertical distribution (分布) of evaporator and growth room decreases the device’s overall footprint, maximizing the area for food production. It is fully automatic, low cost, and extremely easy to operate, using only solar energy and seawater to produce clean water and grow crops.”

Dr Owens says their design is only proof-of-concept at this stage, but the next step is to scale it up using a small line of individual devices to increase plant production. Meeting larger food supply needs will mean increasing both the size and number of devices.