Over the last seven years, most states have banned texting by drivers, and public service campaigns have tried a wide range of methods to persuade people to put down their phones when they are behind the wheel.

Yet the problem, by just about any measure, appears to be getting worse. Americans are still texting while driving, as well as using social networks and taking photos. Road accidents, which had fallen for years, are now rising sharply.

That is partly because people are driving more, but Mark Rosekind, the chief of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said distracted(分心)driving was “only increasing, unfortunately.”

“Big change requires big ideas.” he said in a speech last month, referring broadly to the need to improve road safety. So to try to change a distinctly modern behavior, lawmakers and public health experts are reaching back to an old approach: They want to treat distracted driving like drunk driving.

An idea from lawmakers in New York is to give police officers a new device called the Textalyzer. It would work like this: An officer arriving at the scene of a crash could ask for the phones of the drivers and use the Textalyzer to check in the operating system for recent activity. The technology could determine whether a driver had just texted, emailed or done anything else that is not allowed under New York’s hands-free driving laws.

“We need something on the books that can change people’s behavior,” said Félix W. Ortiz, who pushed for the state’s 2001 ban on hand-held devices by drivers. If the Textalyzer bill becomes law, he said, ”people are going to be more afraid to put their hands on the cell phone."

Drums

When we think of a drum we usually think of a musical instrument. The drum has also been used for years as an important tool for communication. The human voice is very good for communication, but it cannot be heard very far. As early humans began to live in groups, runners were sent from village to village with important messages, but that took a lot of time. It was discovered that beating on hollow logs could be heard for greater distances, and so a new form of communication called “talking drums” was born.

In many early communities, a large drum was set in the middle of the village to help send messages to nearby tribes. The drums could be hit with hands and sticks. Some of the larger drums could be heard up to sixteen miles away!

A group in West Africa made an amazing talking drum system. Their drums were made of round pieces of wood that were four to five feet long. A skin (often an elephant ear) was stretched over one end of the wood and was held in place by a rope. The skin was tightened or loosened to make higher and lower sounds. They had learned to use the drums so well that they could actually copy the language that they spoke! The drums sounded like a person speaking in a voice loud enough to be heard far away.

Most systems of drum communication used a series of beats that meant something. The messages usually told of danger, death, war, or other news of great importance. The message could be sent very far by a relay system. That is, one village would send a message and a nearby village would hear it. They would then repeat the message on their drums, sending it to their neighbors. Some relay systems worked so well that they could send a message about 200 miles very quickly.

Although “talking drums” became a good system of communicating over distances, it had one very big problem. Their enemies could understand the drum messages, so they would know what was being said or planned. Communication by drums certainly wasn’t perfect!

As we all know, insects can be remarkably agile (灵活的) in flight. This is really hard to build into flying robots, but MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen has developed an insect-sized drone (无人机) that approaches insects’ agility.

Typically, drones require wide open spaces. “If we look at most drones today, they’re usually quite big,” says Chen. “Most of their applications involve flying outdoors. The question is: Can you create an insect-sized drone that can move around in very crowded and complex spaces?”

According to Chen, he overcame many problems when building the drone. The insect-sized drone requires a fundamentally different construction from a larger one. The large drone is usually powered by a motor, but the motor loses efficiency as you shrink it. So, Chen says, “For an insect-sized drone, you need to look for alternatives.” The principal alternative until now has been employing a small, rigid actuator (执行器) built from new materials. Chen designed a more agile tiny drone using soft actuators instead of hard ones.

......