A team of researchers at ETH Zurich has the perfect long-lasting solution to our fog problem. They have developed a very thin and gold-based transparent coating that can transform sunlight into heat, which can be applied to glass to prevent it from fogging.

The special coating is developed using titanium oxide (氧化钛) and gold particles. It selectively absorbs infrared (红外线的) radiations from the sunlight and creates a heating effect that is powerful enough to keep fog away from the surface of glass. The coating basically employs heat to stop fogging. The coating absorbs a large part of the infrared radiation, which causes it to heat up —by up to 8℃                                .

Previously, products like anti-fogging sprays create a very thin film of water on the surface to remove fog. The problem with such surfaces is pollution. Along with water, the sprays also soak up dirt, dust, oil, and various other dirty substances, and just a little dirt on the surface makes it useless. However, the new coating repels (排斥) water. Furthermore, the coating is significantly thinner, which makes it more transparent as well as flexible. It is heated passively and requires, during daytime, no additional energy source.

Gold might be expensive, but the researchers stress that their coating requires so little that the material costs remain low. Their coating is produced with standardized and readily scalable (可称量的) methods, all cost-effectively. However, although this product can work at very low levels of solar irradiation, it does rely on a certain amount of light.

The researchers will develop the coating further for other applications. In the process, they will examine whether other metals work just as well as gold. There is no need to fear, however, this would cause a car or a building to heat up more in the summer. The researchers have already filed a patent. Hopefully, this groundbreaking product will soon be available on the market.

For more than 60 years, Lego bricks (乐高) have sparked children's imaginations. Now, a new version of these toys is in the works. They’re Lego Braille Bricks, and they’re being tested around the world.

Lego Braille Bricks are designed to help people learn Braille. That’s a system of writing in which letters are represented by raised dots. People who are blind or visually impaired use their fingertips to read it.

According to the World Health Organization, 36 million people worldwide are blind. In the United States, it’s estimated that only 10% of blind children learn Braille. Lego Braille Bricks can help change that. The small dots on the bricks are arranged as Braille letters. Blind children can use these dots to learn Braille.

Lego plans to launch Braille Bricks next year. For some schools and institutions, Braille Bricks will be free. Each will contain about 250 bricks. Along with the alphabet, the bricks will feature numbers and math symbols.

The Danish Association of the Blind was one of the first organizations to come up with the idea of using Lego bricks to teach Braille. Thorkild Olesen is the president of the group. Olesen is blind. He says many teachers don’t have the tools and skills to help kids learn Braille. So they teach with audio tools, such as audio books. “Like any other people, we need to express ourselves in writing,” Olesen said. “Audio is great. But it can never replace Braille. Braille is the single most important tool for us in order to learn to spell correctly, write, and gain literacy like sighted people.”

Cloud computing is set to change how people communicate,work and learn.But do you know it may also affect how you are hired for a job in the future?

It was once more common for people to find jobs advertised in the newspaper and then physically send applications to organizations. Now we primarily look online using job sites and apply for those jobs using cloud recruitment (招聘) services.

However, many new technologies, with the help of artificial intelligence(AI),are changing recruitment and the way we communicate with those holding the key to our dream jobs.

AI recruitment technology, such as ENGAGE Talent, is making it easier for recruiters to find potential employees by analyzing networking sites, like LinkedIn, for appropriate candidates. Primarily based on keywords, circumstance changes or current company performance, it can find candidates that haven’t clearly expressed an interest in changing jobs. Helen Poitevin, research director of IT research firm Gartner, stated, “This method of finding a passive candidate is the subject of a lot of investment and innovation today.”

Another innovation designed to help recruiters is AI assistants, similar to Apple’s Siri. CNN reported that graduates in the future might have to be overseen by a virtual assistant before getting a real interview for highly competitive graduate programs.

Companies such as Hire Vue have already developed software that plays prerecorded questions for candidates and analyzes their responses for different factors, including grammar, facial expressions and tones. It can then produce a result that defines the candidate’s qualities and recommends whether they should be considered.

The US graduate Sarah Ali has been through eight Hire Vue interviews. She told CNN, “Once I understood the AI interview process, I started thinking of it as a game and how I could optimize (优化) myself.”

This interview process has yet become the mainstream outside the US, but with the power of cloud computing, how long will it be before this tech is used worldwide?