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两位领导人在签署重要协议后握手。

—He didn't want to. He (have) pizza for dinner the night before.

However, over the next few days, it turned out that we needed more than a chair and a bucket which were not quite comfortable. Donna decided we needed a bench. After dismissing unsuitable options from local stores, she found a perfect one online. The next day it arrived. Excitedly, she opened the box and started putting it together. We proudly high-fived each other as the pieces joined up and the bench started to look like one. After a few minutes' assistance from a neighbour, it was complete. What's more, it was the perfect fit for two 70-somethings to carry on late afternoon chats.

Soon, the bench attracted other neighbors. One day, someone called out from the sidewalk, "What do you do on that bench?" Quick-thinking Donna called back, "It's our ‘Thinking Bench'! We think about important things happening in our lives." Then, the name gradually evolved—after one neighbor sat alone deep in thought, he declared it a "Decision-Making Bench"; another time, when Donna was caught napping, she insisted she was "meditating (冥想)", adding yet another name.

Last fall, with the temperature falling, we came to the end of sitting outdoors. Were we faced with one dilemma-what to do about it in the winter? Well, we sat down and thought and meditated and decided to put it in Donna's garage for the winter.

When I glimpsed it a few times over the next months, the bench sat lonely, holding empty flower pots and some flat, old boxes. But now, after a long winter, spring flowers are ready to bloom in the warm sunshine, and we neighbours are ready to welcome "The Bench" back into our lives.

For most scientists, however, nature gives out something more—the ideas to improve people's life. They study bees to work out how small robots might "talk" to report the weather. They look at geckos' (壁虎的) feet to find how to make tape. They study fruit flies to help doctors save people's lives.

"There are so many fun ways that animals develop to solve problems, and some of them are ones we never think of," says Lisa Manning, a professor of the bioinspired (生物启发的) center. Zhenyu Gan is a robot engineer in the center. He makes robots with four legs or more, instead of robots with wheels.

To find out how legged robots could stand or walk, Gan looks to animals such as horses and mice. "The first thing we have to understand is how they move." Gan says.

"Usually, robots with two legs like people are clumsy. Just think about how a baby learns to stand and walk. But my robots have four legs or more, just like horses, making the robots walk or run easily and fast." says Gan.

Gan's robots have lots of uses. They can explore the moon. Hospitals use doglike robots to work with doctors. Police use legged robots to search fallen buildings for missing people.