In the United States, a company is working on a project that could change the way we think about public transportation. Its planned system would move people around in steel tubes. Those passengers would be traveling at speeds of up to 1,200 kilometers per hour.

The futuristic transportation system is called Hyperloop. Workers plan to test the system next year in a specially built community called Quay valley. The town will be powered entirely by energy from the sun.

The Hyperloop transport system is the idea of businessman Elon Musk. Dirk Ahlborn is head of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. He says his company has taken Mr. Musk's idea and is developing a system that will be safe, environmentally friendly and fast.

It’s 100 percent solar-powered... we’re not going to get up to 760 miles per hour, but we believe we can actually break the records that are exiting right now.”

This means that a four-hour drive from Los Angeles, California to Las Vegas, Nevada, could someday take only 30 minutes by Hyperloop.

The system involves a series of capsules that float inside a long tube. These containers wouldn’t need to travel along a pathway or track. The system has been designed to operate above or below ground.

Inside the tube there is a low-pressure environment very similar to an airplane that’s at high altitudes. So now the capsule travelling inside the tube doesn’t meet with as much resistance, and therefore can travel really fast with very little energy.

Dick Ahlborn and his company will use an eight-kilometer track in Quay Valley to find the best way to set up passenger traffic and repair capsules. A larger system will cost an estimated 6 — 10 billion dollars to build.

If Mr. Ahlborn and his company succeed, we may one day see these very fast Hyperloop capsules speeding through tubes around the world.

The increase in online education has allowed a new type of teacher to emerge—an artificial one. But just how accepting students are of an artificial instructor remains to be seen. That’s why researchers at the University of Central Florida’s Nicholson School of Communication and Media are working to examine student perceptions of AI-based teachers. Some of their findings, published recently in the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, indicate that for students to accept an AI teaching assistant, it needs to be effective and easy to talk to.

According to Jihyun Kim, the lead author of the study, the hope is that by understanding how students relate to Al-teachers, engineers and computer scientists can design them to easily integrate into the education experience.

“To use machine teachers effectively, we need to understand students’ views on machine teachers, their learning experiences with them and more,” Kim says. “This line of research is needed to design effective machine teachers that can actually facilitate positive learning experiences.”

AI teaching assistants can help ease a teacher's workload, such as by responding to commonly asked questions by students. These questions, which often appear each semester and become numerous in online classes with hundreds of students, can become a large task for a teacher. The quick delivery of answers also helps students.

An example of an AI teaching assistant is one named Jill Watson that was created by a researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Jill was fed the thousands of questions and answers commonly asked in the researcher’s online class that he’d taught over the years. With some additional learning and adjustments, Jill was eventually able to answer the students’ commonly asked questions accurately without any human assistance as if she was one of the researcher’s human teaching assistants.

“I hope our research findings help us find an effective way to incorporate AI agents into education,” Kim says. “By adopting an AI agent as an assistant for a simple and repetitive task, teachers would be able to have more things scheduled such as meeting with students and developing teaching strategies.”

A recent study has showed that a wearable soft robot, named Reliebo, can improve the experience of patients in medical treatments, such as injections (注射) and other unpleasant treatments. The goal of the robot is to help ease pain and defend people against anxiety. The study, led by researchers at the University of Tsukuba, was inspired in part by the numerous needles people had to put up with while being vaccinated. Some people felt an intense di like for these needs, which led to fewer people getting vaccinated.

The robot is soft and covered in fur. It contains small airbags internally that inflate(膨胀) in response to hand movement. Participants in the study who wore the robot while subjected to a medium heat stimulation, experienced less pain in the test than those who did not wear the robot.

The research team checked the effectiveness of the wearable robot while being handled by participants under certain conditions, based on the clenching (紧握) of the hand. The team placed painful heat stimulation on the other arm that was not holding the robot. They then measured cortisol (皮质醇) levels from the participants’ saliva samples, suggesting levels of stress hormones. The pain felt by the patients was given specific ratings and was also recorded using an assessment table. The people in the study were given a survey test to assess their fear of injections before and after the experiment with the wearable robot was completed.

The study proved that a wearable-informed robot may serve as a prospective tool to ease the experience of patients who were receiving injections. The research team hopes to use this study to advance the robot for use during painful situations, such as getting medical shots or similar conditions.