A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech integrated systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

    “It's extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components (元件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.

    They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it's connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.

    While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers' fields or on the battlefield. “Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.

    Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”

Father's Day

    The United States is one of the few countries in the world that has an official day on which fathers are honored by their children. On the third Sunday in June, fathers all across the United States are given presents, treated to dinner or otherwise made to feel special.

    However, the idea for creating a day for children to honor their fathers began in Spokane, Washington. A woman by the name of Sonora Smart Dodd thought of the idea for Father's Day while listening to a Mother's Day sermon in 1909. Having been raised by her father, Henry Jackson Smart, after her mother died, Sonora wanted her father to know how special he was to her. It was her father that made all the parental sacrifices and was, in the eyes of his daughter, a selfless and loving man. Sonora's father was born in June, so she chose to hold the first Father's Day celebration in Spikane, Washington on the 19th of June, 1910.

    In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge declared the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Roses are the Father's Day flowers: red to be worn for a living father and white if the father has died.

    When children can't visit their fathers or take them out to dinner, they send a greeting card. Traditionally, fathers prefer greeting cards that are not too sentimental. Most greeting cards are too special so fathers laugh when they open them. Some give heartfelt thanks for being there whenever the child needed Dad.

    Finding time to read is an important part of developing reading and writing skills for all kids. And there are many easy and convenient ways to make reading a part of each day — even when it's tough to find time to sit down with a book.

    Car trips, waits in checkout lines and the doctor's office are all opportunities for reading. Keep books or magazines in your car, or backpack to pull out whenever you're going to be in one place for a while. Even if you can't finish a book, read a few pages or discuss some of the pictures.

    Encourage kids to bring favorite books and magazines along wherever you go. While it's attractive to provide electronic games and readers, be sure to alternate electronic media with plenty of opportunities to read traditional print books.

    Reading opportunities are everywhere you go. While riding in the car, for example, encourage kids to spot words and letters (on billboards, store signs, etc.), turning it into a game (“Who'll be the first to find a letter B?”).

    Even daily tasks like cooking can provide reading moments. Kids can assist you as you cook by telling you how much flour to measure. Give your child a catalogue to read while you sort through the mail. Ask relatives to send your child letters, e-mail, or text messages, and read them together. Help your child create letters or messages to send back to the relatives. These types of activities help kids see the purpose of reading and of print.

    Even when you're trying to get things done, you can encourage reading. While cleaning, for instance, you might ask your child to read a favorite book to you while you work.

    Make sure kids get some time to spend quietly with books, even if it means cutting back on other activities, like watching TV or playing video games.

    Most important, be a reader yourself. Kids who see their parents reading are likely to imitate them and become readers, too!

    Cheating is nothing new. But it's becoming a lot more sophisticated. Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was caught out once. A photo taken after the speech she'd given on a "return to conservative principles" showed her left hand covered with crib notes. These included the words "energy, budget cuts, tax" and "lift Americans' spirits". The word "budget" had been crossed out. Video footage also showed her reading from her hand when asked what top three things a conservative-led congress should do. Writing notes on your hand is one way to cheat in an exam. But these days, it's a lot easier ... especially with the Internet.

    Anyone who wants to cheat in an exam can probably find the answers online. There are hundreds of sites offering solutions to all sorts of tests. And it's a lucrative business. One operator in Oregon made $700,000 in about nine months before his arrest. The owner of a website in Ohio pocketed more than $300,000. And a famous overseas site is estimated to sell about 146,000 sets of answers and take in about $10 million per year. Actually, getting hold of the exam answers isn't that hard. Some do the exam themselves and use button cameras or document-scanning pens to copy the tests. Others organize for a group to take tests repeatedly until they can memorize the entire exam between them. Others simply bribe exam administrators.

    At the moment, such business is booming. More and more companies now require their employees to take professional exams. And hundreds of businesses and trade organizations have introduced formal certification programs to measure employee skills. In the US alone, at least 2 million exams are taken every year for information technology certification. But employees also have to take exams for all sorts of professions from crane operators to court reporters to school bus drivers and financial planners. Test officials estimate that hundreds of thousands of test-takers have used the Internet to buy answers for professional tests. And a recent survey found that 28 percent of test centres had at least one cheating incident over the last five years. In one incident, tens of thousands of soldiers obtained answers to tests in a range of military skills.

    Many see this as a cause for concern. Many tests are for work in sensitive areas such as defence installations and hospitals. Now, how would you feel if you knew that the people in charge of the computers controlling nuclear weapons might have cheated in their tests, and may not really know what they're doing?

    Artificial intelligence (AI) technology may soon be a useful tool for doctors. It may help them better understand and treat diseases like breast cancer in ways that were never before possible.

    Rishi Rawat teaches AI at the University of Southern California's (USC) Clinical Science Center in Los Angeles. He is part of a team of scientists who are researching how AI and machine learning can more easily recognize cancerous growths in the breast. Rawat provides information about cancer cells to a computer. He says this data helps the machine learn." You can put the data into computers and they will learn the patterns and the pattern recognition is important to making decisions."

    David Agus is another USC researcher. He says machines are not going to take the place of doctors. "Computers will not treat patients, but they will help make certain decisions and look for things that the human brain can't recognize by itself. Once a confirmed cancerous growth is removed, doctors still have to treat the patient to reduce the risk of cancer returning. The form of treatment depends on the kind of cancer."

    Currently, researchers take a thin piece of tissue, put it on a small piece of glass and add color to better see the cells. That process could take days or even longer. Scientists say artificial intelligence can do something better than just count cells. Through machine learning, it can recognize complex patterns, or structures, and learn how the cells are organized.

    The hope is that machines will soon be able to make a quick identification of cancer that is free of human mistakes. "All of a sudden, we have the computing power to really do it in real time. We couldn't have done this, we didn't have the computing power to do this several years ago, but now it's all changed." Agus adds that the process could be done for almost no cost in the developing world. He says that having a large amount of information about patients is important for a machine to effectively do its job in medicine.

    The University of Southern California researchers are now only studying breast cancer. But doctors predict artificial intelligence will one day make a difference in all forms of cancer.

Bullying on campus is increasingly becoming a problem, but the move by the Sherrard School in California, to set equipment inside toilets to catch bullying incidents is getting a lot of attention.

The school has put up a campus alarm system in sensitive places such as toilets that employs voice recognition and sensitive word activation, so that if someone is being bullied, the system can alert members of staff by sending specific signals. The system uses artificial intelligence for voice recognition, but its effectiveness doesn't depend only on these technologies. More important than the technology are the members of the school staff that are arranged to respond quickly and effectively to the warning calls.

Basically, technology serves as a way of reporting instances of bullying to the school authorities. What is truly noteworthy is the authorities' realization that timely intervention is required to stop bullying. In most cases of bullying in schools, educators and the administrators have overlooked early warning signs. And this can, at times, prove fatal. For instance, in a recent tragic case in Indiana, three junior school students plotted and took the life of their 10-year-old classmate. If the school had paid closer attention to the bullying, the tragedy could perhaps have been prevented. 

Returning to the system in California, should it prove effective, relevant government bodies can consider applying similar mechanisms in other schools to hold back bullying on campus. However, it is significant for them to bear in mind that it is human action, not just technology, that can help address this universal issue. Technology can definitely serve as a vital tool, but it is the human element — attentiveness, care, and timely intervention — that ultimately holds the key to creating a safer environment for all students.