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"Cloth"
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Atoms under the floorboards : the surprising science hidden in your home
The perfect way to enjoy science from the sofa, Atoms under the Floorboards introduces you to the incredible scientific explanations behind a variety of household phenomena, from gurgling drains and squeaky floorboards to rubbery custard and shiny shoes. *Is it better to build skyscrapers like wobbly jellies or stacks of biscuits? *Can you burn your house down with an electric drill? *How many atoms would you have to split to power a lightbulb? Atoms under the Floorboards answers all these questions, and hundreds more. You'll never look at your home the same way again... Source other than the Library of Congress.
Book
Modeling the contact curves of leather squeezing machines
The article is devoted to the analytical description of contact curves leather squeezing machines. The expressions for the ratio of strain rates during roller squeezing of the skin are determined when the deformation of the leather and the cloth is given as a power function. It has been established that changes in skin moisture during the squeezing process do not affect the model of contact curves when the deformation of the skin and cloth are given by power functions.
Journal Article
How we'll live on Mars
It sounds like science fiction, but Stephen Petranek considers it fact: Within twenty years, humans will live on Mars. We'll need to. In this book that mixes business, science, and human reporting, Petranek makes the case that living on Mars is an essential back-up plan for humanity and explains in detail just how it will happen. The race is on. Private companies, driven by entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, and Sir Richard Branson; Dutch reality show and space mission Mars One; NASA; and the Chinese government are among the many groups competing to plant the first stake on Mars and open the door for human habitation. Why go to Mars? Life on Mars has potential life-saving possibilities for everyone on earth. Depleting water supplies, overwhelming climate change, and a host of other disasters -- from terrorist attacks to meteor strikes -- all loom large. We must become a space-faring species to survive. We have the technology not only to get humans to Mars, but to convert Mars into another habitable planet. It will likely take 300 years to \"terraform\" Mars, as the jargon goes, but we can turn it into a veritable second Garden of Eden. And we can live there, in specially designed habitations, within the next twenty years. In this chronicle, Petranek introduces the circus of characters all engaged in an effort to be the first to settle the Red Planet. How We'll Live on Mars brings firsthand reporting, interviews with key participants, and extensive research to bear on the question of how we can expect to see life on Mars within the next twenty years.
Book
Flexible quasi-solid-state sodium-ion full battery with ultralong cycle life, high energy density and high-rate capability
Flexible power sources featuring high-performance, prominent flexibility and raised safety have received mounting attention in the area of wearable electronic devices. However, many great challenges remain to be overcome, notably the design and fabrication of flexible electrodes with excellent electrochemical performance and matching them with safe and reliable electrolytes. Herein, a facile approach for preparing flexible electrodes, which employs carbon cloth derived from commercial cotton cloth as the substrate of cathode and a flexible anode, is proposed and investigated. The promising cathode (NVPOF@FCC) with high conductivity and outstanding flexibility is prepared by efficiently coating Na
3
V
2
(PO
4
)
2
O
2
F (NVPOF) on flexible carbon cloth (FCC), which exhibits remarkable electrochemical performance and the significantly improved reaction kinetics. More importantly, a novel flexible quasi-solid-state sodium-ion full battery (QSFB) is feasibly assembled by sandwiching a P(VDF-HFP)-NaClO
4
gel-polymer electrolyte film between the advanced NVPOF@FCC cathode and FCC anode. And the QSFBs are further evaluated in flexible pouch cells, which not only demonstrates excellent energy-storage performance in aspect of great cycling stability and high-rate capability, but also impressive flexibility and safety. This work offers a feasible and effective strategy for the design of flexible electrodes, paving the way for the progression of practical and sustainable flexible batteries.
Journal Article
Barbarian days : a surfing life
Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses -- off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a native Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly -- he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui -- is served up with rueful humor. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world's greatest waves. As Finnegan's travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs.
Book
A Framework for Digital Twin-based Robotic Cloth Manipulation
Significant advancements have been made towards the automation of tasks involving highly deformable object manipulation. However, due to its complexity, predicting the behaviour of such objects, tasks requiring precision and flexibility remain far from full automation. In this paper, a method for the generation of a digital twin is proposed to serve as a solution for robotized cloth manipulation tasks. To estimate mechanical parameters and reconstruct a cloth’s digital twin, our approach integrates image processing and a genetic algorithm process. Specifically, a spatio-temporal graph of the cloth is built using Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (
SIFT
), and a genetic algorithm is used to optimize the parameters of a mass-spring-damper (MSD) model. Contrary to prior methods, which were relying on predefined cloth models or computationally expensive simulations (e.g., FEM), the proposed framework enables lightweight, data-driven parameter tuning from a single monocular RGB video showing the deformations of the cloth during a set of predefined movements by a pair of robotic arms. The generated digital twin is then used to calculate the optimal trajectory for the robotic arms in typical cloth manipulation tasks and is subsequently evaluated in real-world experiments. Tasks such as laying a cloth on a table and folding it in half are used to validate the method’s accuracy and applicability in both simulated and physical environments. The proposed method has potential applications in industrial textile handling, domestic service robotics, and elderly care, particularly in settings where low-cost, sensor-efficient automation is desirable.
Journal Article
The lost landscape : a writer's coming of age
Oates' chronicle of her hardscrabble childhood in rural western New York State describes the family members, first friendships, and early experiences with death that shaped her literary career.
BOOK
Growth of BiOBr/ZIF-67 Nanocomposites on Carbon Fiber Cloth as Filter-Membrane-Shaped Photocatalyst for Degrading Pollutants in Flowing Wastewater
BiOBr-based nanocomposite photocatalysts are used for removing the organic pollutants, but their poor adsorption/photocatalytic performances and the low potential for recycling limit their application. To solve the issue, herein we report a large-area recyclable CFC/BiOBr/ZIF-67 filter-membrane-shaped photocatalyst prepared by
in situ
growth of BiOBr/ZIF-67 nanocomposites on carbon fiber cloth (CFC). Fabrication process is based on hydrothermal synthesis of BiOBr nanosheets (diameter 0.5–1 μm) on carbon fiber cloth (as substrate material) and then a chemical bath route is used to grow ZIF-67 nanoparticles (diameter 300–600 nm)
in situ
on the surface of CFC/BiOBr. Resulted composite, CFC/BiOBr/ZIF-67, exhibits a high specific surface area (545.82 m
2
g
−1
) and a wide photoabsorption, accompanied by an absorption edge (~ 620 nm). In dark condition, CFC/BiOBr/ZIF-67 adsorbs bisphenol A (BPA) and orange 7 (AO7) within 60 min, respectively with 20.0% and 40.1% efficiency. This level of efficiencies are correspondingly 2.6 and 3.2 times more that of the bare CFC/BiOBr (7.6% for BPA and 12.4% for AO7). Under visible light irradiation, CFC/BiOBr/ZIF-67 can degrade 69.7% of BPA and 96.0% of AO7, in 120 min, which are, respectively, 1.3 and 1.8 times higher than the absorption efficiency of bare CFC/BiOBr (53.2% for BPA, 52.0% for AO7). When CFC/BiOBr/ZIF-67 is used as a filter membrane for photocatalytic removal of pollutants in flowing wastewater (AO7, rate: ~ 1.5 L h
−1
), 92.2% of AO7 can be decomposed after 10 filtering cycles. This study suggests CFC/BiOBr/ZIF-67 as a novel highly functional, recyclable and environmental friendly photo-driven membrane filter for purification and recovery of flowing surface waste waters.
Graphical abstract
Journal Article
The perilous princess plot
This is the story of two very different sisters--Eliza, who longs to ride into battle against villains and dragons, and Lavender, who would give anything to be a pampered princess. Before the end of the story both of them have had a chance to fulfill their dreams, though not quite in the way they intended. Accompanied by their depressed goat, Gertrude, with their granny's warnings about the Black Death ringing in their ears, they head out into the forest and come face to face with an evil count who definitely does not have their best interests at heart.
Book
An evidence review of face masks against COVID-19
The science around the use of masks by the public to impede COVID-19 transmission is advancing rapidly. In this narrative review, we develop an analytical framework to examine mask usage, synthesizing the relevant literature to inform multiple areas: population impact, transmission characteristics, source control, wearer protection, sociological considerations, and implementation considerations. A primary route of transmission of COVID-19 is via respiratory particles, and it is known to be transmissible from presymptomatic, paucisymptomatic, and asymptomatic individuals. Reducing disease spread requires two things: limiting contacts of infected individuals via physical distancing and other measures and reducing the transmission probability per contact. The preponderance of evidence indicates that mask wearing reduces transmissibility per contact by reducing transmission of infected respiratory particles in both laboratory and clinical contexts. Public mask wearing is most effective at reducing spread of the virus when compliance is high. Given the current shortages of medical masks, we recommend the adoption of public cloth mask wearing, as an effective form of source control, in conjunction with existing hygiene, distancing, and contact tracing strategies. Because many respiratory particles become smaller due to evaporation, we recommend increasing focus on a previously overlooked aspect of mask usage: mask wearing by infectious people (“source control”) with benefits at the population level, rather than only mask wearing by susceptible people, such as health care workers, with focus on individual outcomes. We recommend that public officials and governments strongly encourage the use of widespread face masks in public, including the use of appropriate regulation.
Journal Article