While household robots today do the normal housework, social robots will be much more like companions than mere tools. For example, these robots will be able to distinguish when someone is happy or sad. This allows them to respond more appropriately to the user.

The Jibo robot, arranged to ship later this year, is designed to be a personalized assistant. You can talk to the robot, ask it questions, and make requests for it to perform different tasks. The robot doesn't just deliver general answers to questions; it responds based on what it learns about each individual in the household. It can do things such as reminding an elderly family member to take medicine or taking family photos.

         Social robots are not just finding their way into the home. They have potential applications in everything from education to health care and are already finding their way into some of these spaces.

Fellow Robots is one company bringing social robots to the market. The company's “Oshbot” robot is built to assist customers in a store, which can help the customers find items and help guide them to the product's location in the store. It can also speak different languages and make recommendations for different items based on what the customer is shopping for.

          The more interaction the robot has with humans, the more it learns. But Oshbot, like other social robots, is not intended to replace workers, but to work alongside other employees. “We have technologies to train social robots to do things not for us, but with us,” said Breazeal.

    In a natural disaster: a hurricane, flood, volcanic eruption, or other catastrophes. Minutes and even seconds of warning can make the difference between life and death. Because of this, scientists are working to use the latest technological advances to predict when and where disasters will happen. They are also studying how best to analyze and communicate this information once it is obtained.

    On September 29,1998, Hurricane Georges made landfall in Biloxi, Mississippi, after damaging Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and several islands of the Caribbean badly with heavy rains and winds up to 160 km per hour. Few people lost their lives along the Gulf Coast of the United States, although hundreds died in the Caribbean. This was a very different result, when a powerful Gulf Coast hurricane made an unexpected direct hit on Galveston, Texas, killing at least 6,000 people. Vastly improved hurricane warnings explain the different circumstances at either end of the 20th century—residents of Galveston had no advance warning that a storm was approaching, while residents of Biloxi had been warned days in advance, allowing for extensive safety precautions (预防).

    At the same time that people in Biloxi were thankful for the advance warning, some residents of New Orleans, Louisiana were less satisfied. A day before Georges made landfall, forecasters were predicting that the hurricane had a good chance of striking New Orleans. Emergency management officials must begin evacuations (疏散) well before a storm strikes. But evacuation costs money. The mayor of New Orleans estimated that his city's preparations for Georges cost more than 50 million. After Georges missed New Orleans, some residents questioned the value of the hurricane forecasts in the face of such high costs.

    The different views on the early warnings for Hurricane Georges show some of the complexities (复杂) related to predicting disasters. Disaster prediction is a process of providing scientific information to the government officials and other decision makers who must respond to those predictions.

    When you're a junior in high school, three little letters quickly become larger than life: SAT.

    At the start of my junior year, I realized that the environment was packed with competition. Surprisingly, this pressure didn't come from adults. It came from the other students. Everyone in my grade had college on the brain. To get into the college of our choice, we all believed, we had to outcompete and outscore everyone else with less sleep, because time for sleeping was time you didn't spend studying for the SAT.

    I let myself get swept up in the pressure. My new motto was, if I wasn't in every single honor level class, I wasn't doing enough. I was bad-tempered and I couldn't focus. I stopped talking to my friends and my mom, and I couldn't figure out who I was. I didn't have the confidence to know that my own passions and unique skills were what would make me stand out to colleges.

That's when I realized: I am not my SAT score. Trying to stick to what I thought colleges wanted masked who I really am. I decided to rely on my strengths and get away from the crazy pressure I was putting on myself.

    Instead of forcing myself into higher levels of math, I took on an extra history class. I learned how to love what I was doing and not what I thought I was supposed to do. I learned to shine as an individual, not a faceless member of the crowd. And I found that not only was this better for my happiness, but it also made me more effective and efficient when I studied.

    To me, individuality means having the confidence to decide who I am and who I want to be, and a number on a page is never going to change that. I am more sure of myself, and more ready to apply for college, than ever.

    Blue Note Jazz Festival 2018

    Jul 1-30, 2018

    Location:

    Several locations in New York

    The Blue Note Jazz Festival in New York City is the city's most popular jazz festival and focuses on bringing big-name artists to small crowds and up-and-coming acts to the public. The event takes over 15 places across the city and includes 150 world-class performers. Past artists include Questlove, Michael Bolton and Aretha Franklin.

    Grant Park Music Festival 2018

    Jun 14-Aug 19, 2018

    Location:

    Jay Pritzker Pavilion, South Shore Cultural Center, & Harris Theater for Music and Dance | 201 East Randolph Street, Chicago, Illinois

    Listening to classical music is said to improve your intelligence. Whether that's true or not, the Grant Park Music Festival will provide you with free, classical music, and you'd be smart to attend. The music at these concerts will leave you begging for more. It's free to attend, so come and enjoy some great music with your family and friends.

    Lake Park Friends Wonderful Wednesdays 2018

    Jun 21 – Jun 26, 2018

    Location:

    Lake Park | Milwaukee, Wisconsin

    Energy is way too contained(被抑制的)in an indoor music venue(场所). Let that energy go where it wants through a series of outdoor concerts with Lake Park Friends Wonderful Wednesdays. Wednesday is no longer the most boring day of the week. This time, there's something fun to do. A list of live music acts has made the middle of the week something too look forward to.

    YouthCUE Festival of Youth Choirs(合唱队)2018

    Aug 10- Aug 22 2018

    Location:

    Washing to National Cathedral | 3101 Wisconsin Ave NW Washing ton, DC

    YouthCUE Festival of Youth Choirs in Washington gives students the rare opportunity to perform in the Washington National Cathedral, a famous historic place. The festival is a showcase of student choirs from all over the country, accompanied(伴奏)by musicians from the local professional orchestra(管弦乐队).

    Cao Yuan, a PhD student from China, had two papers published on strange behaviour in atom-thick layers of carbon that have opened up a new field of physics.

    Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at MIT was already layering and rotating (旋转) sheets of carbon at different angles when Cao joined the lab in 2014. Cao's job was to find out what happened when one graphene (石墨烯) sheet was twisted only slightly wiht respect to the other, which one theory predicted would thoroughly change the material's behaviour.

    Many physicists doubted the idea. But when Cao set out to create the subtly twisted stacks, he spotted something strange. Exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero, the graphene—which ordinarily conducts electricity—became an insulator. That by itself was surprising. But the best was yet to come: with a slight change to the field, the twisted sheets became a superconductor, in which electricity flowed without resistance.

    The ability to get atom-thick carbon into a complex electronic state through a simple rotation now has physics demanding to engineer exciting behavior in other twisted 2D materials. Some even hope that graphene could shed light on how more-complex materials superconduct at much higher temperatures. "There are so many things we can do," says Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University. "The opportunities at hand now are almost irresistible."

    Hitting graphene's “magic angle”—a rotation between parallel sheets of around 1.1°—involved some trial and error, but Cao was soon able to do it reliably. His experimental skill was extremely important, says his supervisor Jarillo-Herrero. Cao pioneered a method of tearing a single sheet of graphene so that he could create a stack of two layers, from which he could then fine-tune alignment (微调校准).

    Cao loves to take things apart and rebuild them. A heart, he is “a tinkerer”, his supervisor says. On his own time, this means photographing the night sky using homemade cameras and telescopes—pieces of which usually lie across Cao's office. "Every ime I go in, it's a huge mess, with computers taken apart and pieces of telescope all over his desk," says Jarillo-Herrero.

    It was once common to regard Britain as a society with class distinction. Each class had unique characteristics.

    In recent years, many writers have begun to speak the 'decline of class' and 'classless society' in Britain. And in modern day consumer society everyone is considered to be middle class.

    But pronouncing the death of class is too early. A recent wide-ranging society of public opinion found 90 percent of people still placing themselves in particular class; 73 percent agreed that class was still a vital part of British society; and 52 percent thought there were still sharp class differences. Thus, class may not be culturally and politically obvious, yet it remains an important part of British society. Britain seems to have a love of stratification.

    One unchanging aspect of a British person's class position is accent. The words a person speaks tell her or his class. A study of British accents during 1970s found that a voice sounding like a BBC newsreader was viewed as the most attractive voice, Most people said this accent sounded 'educated' and 'soft'. The accents placed at the bottom in this study, on the other hand, were regional city accents. These accents were seen as 'common' and 'ugly'. However, a similar study of British accents in the US turned these results upside down and placed some regional accents as the most attractive and BBC English as the least. This suggests that British attitudes towards accent have deep roots and are based on class prejudice.

    In recent years, however, young upper middle-class people in London, have begun to adopt some regional accents, in order to hide their class origins. This is an indication of class becoming unnoticed. However, the 1995 pop song 'Common People' puts forward the view that though a middle-class person may 'want to live like common people' they can never appreciate the reality of a working-class life.