Robots have long been drawing inspiration from animals, with the creation of robot dogs or snake-shaped robots. And yet, the field of robotics is far less enthusiastic about the other kind of living things—plants. Barbara Mazzolai, an Italian roboticist owes this to a misconception about plant behavior: that they cannot move or think. "It's not true at all," she says. To challenge this view, Dr Mazzolai and her team recently launched a machine called "FiloBot", a robot based on a climbing species.

To survive, a climbing plant must switch between several different behaviors. In forest environments, it must first grow out of the soil and travel along the ground in search of a support to hold onto, such as a nearby tree. Once a support is located, though, the plant fixes itself around the object and then growing towards the light. To choose the best angle to grow upwards, a climbing plant uses its shoots(芽) to receive information about light and gravity.

FiloBot has sensors on its main shoot. It can 3D-print its body with plastic and grow at a controllable rate. These functions researchers found, enabled FiloBot to cross gaps, and find things to attach to. The lack of heavy on-board computing device means that it is light and requires minimal care, while its slow pace means that it doesn't disturb things around it, making it possible to move through a complex, unseen environment, or monitoring disaster sites.

For now, FiloBot is still being tested. Its tendrils(卷须) have not left the laboratory. Still, it has already been employed in deconstructing plant behaviour. For example, it was long assumed that climbing plants find their supports by growing towards shade, though the exact mechanism was unclear. FiloBot could imitate this behaviour by detecting far-red light, which is typical of shaded areas, providing clues to how plants do it.

Dr Mazzolai hopes that such projects will inspire other roboticists to take their cues from plants and develop completely new technologies.

Of the estimated 2, 224 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic when it struck an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, a mere 700 people lived on. Here is one story of the Titanic survivors whose stories are still haunting more than a century after the ship's sinking, revealing the true facts of the disaster.

A junior wireless officer aboard the Titanic, Harold Bride was one of the two people responsible for sending SOS messages to nearby ships, thus allowing the Carpathian to rescue the Titanic survivors.

He and another man on duty, Jack Phillips, raced to send SOS signals to nearby ships－but as the communications specialists, they knew that the closest, the Carpathian, would likely not arrive until alter the Titanic sank. They worked wildly until Captain Edward Smith came and told them they were relieved of duty；the ship had nearly lost power, and only two lifeboats remained.

They made a run for Collapsible B and were just getting it into the water when a wave swept across the deck (甲板), throwing both Harold Bride and the upturned boat into the ocean.

Bride and 15 others struggled onto the waterlogged, sinking Collapsible B and survived until other lifeboats collected them and conveyed them to the Carpathian.

Once aboard the Carpathian, Bride got back to work and began helping the ship's wireless officer send messages from the other Titanic survivors.

When the Carpathian made land, Bride had to be carried ashore: he had injured one foot in the plunge into the ocean, and the other was frostbitten after a night in the Atlantic's icy waters.

When I was a child, the new year's activity for my family is dumpling-making, but it's been years since I've last experienced the uniquely carefree comfort and connection I felt during moments. My family has changed a lot, and gatherings like these simply don't come together with the same ease as they once did.

This year, I came home in the evening to a dark house with pieces missing. I noticed things that I wouldn't have before, like how my family slept earlier and got up later and how my dog had more trouble jumping up on my bed. After all, it's easier to become blind to its subtle changes when you occupy it virtually every day of the year, and much harder when you must be exposed to months of accumulated change all at once.

Personally, the most precious childhood privilege is not the free extra snacks from flight attendants, but the privilege of thinking of the people and relationships around you with a sense of permanence. I mean this in the sense that it escaped my eight-year-old brain to think about how my parents were aging as I did or about the sacrifices they made for me until suddenly, I was an adult as they were.

I turn 20 in a couple months, so I've been seized with a feeling of adulthood, which feels far stronger than the transition into legal adulthood at 18 ever felt. It seems as if the "teen" part of"19"keeps me attached to the same category as the one my newly 13-year-old self occupied, carrying with it a certain comfort in the social allowances made for the immaturity inherent (固有的) to youth. But marching into 20 is different.

I'd so desperately wanted to move away and get a taste of independence upon starting college, but now I know that such freedom comes with loss and responsibility. Now I start to understand the governance of a circularity (循环) inherent to our lives and have a newfound appreciation for the things that remain the same.