杏吧原创

Open wide for the trainee dentist

She blinks and flinches just like a real patient at the mercy of the dentist鈥檚 drill. Roboticists at Japan鈥檚 Showa University say their lifelike dental training robot is now ready to be let loose on her first students. Showa Hanako 2 is a medical automaton capable of sneezing, head-shaking, coughing and gagging. She will even close her mouth, just as a real patient does when feeling that telltale jaw ache associated with the dentist reaching inside your mouth. As she is fitted with voice recognition technology, the trainee dentist can even conduct a rudimentary conversation with the robot, which will store and analyse each student鈥檚 performance and give feedback through a computer link.

What makes a tweet get retweeted?

Why does one tweet get passed on and not another? Nasir Naveed and colleagues at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany studied a combined dataset of over 60 million tweets and around 4.5 million users to find out how the specific content of a message can affect the probability of a retweet. Tweets containing URLs, usernames and hashtags 鈥� usually used to denote topics 鈥� were more likely to be retweeted than those without. Tweets with question marks worked well, as did those containing positive words. The most popular retweeted topics concerned social networking, public holidays and the economy.

Stop worrying about the internet

Has Google made us stupid? Are young people helplessly addicted to Facebook? No, there鈥檚 nothing to be worried about, according to a report released this week. An analysis of research into the effects of internet use, by charity Nominet Trust, concludes that 鈥渢here is no neurological evidence that the internet is more effective at 鈥榬ewiring鈥� our brains than other environmental influences鈥�. It also says that social networking sites are not in themselves a special source of risk to children, and using computers can help slow rates of cognitive decline. Relax, get online and stop worrying, in other words.