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Roboticists have begun to design biologically inspired robots with soft or partially soft bodies, which have the potential to be more robust and adaptable, and safer for human interaction, than traditional rigid robots. However, key challenges in the design and manufacture of soft robots include the complex fabrication processes and the interfacing of soft and rigid components. We used multimaterial three-dimensional (3D) printing to manufacture a combustion-powered robot whose body transitions from a rigid core to a soft exterior. This stiffness gradient, spanning three orders of magnitude in modulus, enables reliable interfacing between rigid driving components (controller, battery, etc.) and the primarily soft body, and also enhances performance. Powered by the combustion of butane and oxygen, this robot is able to perform untethered jumping.

A knot is a circle piecewise-linearly embedded into the 3-sphere. The topology of a knot is intimately related to that of its exterior, which is the complement of an open regular neighborhood of the knot. Knots are typically encoded by planar diagrams, whereas their exteriors, which are compact 3-manifolds with torus boundary, are encoded by triangulations. Here, we give the first practical algorithm for finding a diagram of a knot given a triangulation of its exterior. Our method applies to links as well as knots, and allows us to recover links with hundreds of crossings. We use it to find the first diagrams known for 23 principal congruence arithmetic link exteriors; the largest has over 2500 crossings. Other applications include finding pairs of knots with the same 0-surgery, which relates to questions about slice knots and the smooth 4D Poincaré conjecture.

In this paper, results from the analysis of the gimbal impact on the determination of the camera exterior orientation parameters of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) are presented and interpreted. Additionally, a new approach and methodology for testing the influence of gimbals on the exterior orientation parameters of UAV acquired images is presented. The main motive of this study is to examine the possibility of obtaining better geometry and favorable spatial bundles of rays of images in UAV photogrammetric surveying. The subject is a 3-axis brushless gimbal based on a controller board (Storm32). Only two gimbal axes are taken into consideration: roll and pitch axes. Testing was done in a flight simulation, and in indoor and outdoor flight mode, to analyze the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and photogrammetric data. Within these tests the change of the exterior orientation parameters without the use of a gimbal is determined, as well as the potential accuracy of the stabilization with the use of a gimbal. The results show that using a gimbal has huge potential. Significantly, smaller discrepancies between data are noticed when a gimbal is used in flight simulation mode, even four times smaller than in other test modes. In this test the potential accuracy of a low budget gimbal for application in real conditions is determined.

Galvanic replacement reactions provide a simple and versatile route for producing hollow nanostructures with controllable pore structures and compositions. However, these reactions have previously been limited to the chemical transformation of metallic nanostructures. We demonstrated galvanic replacement reactions in metal oxide nanocrystals as well. When manganese oxide (Mn₃O₄) nanocrystals were reacted with iron(ll) perchlorate, hollow box-shaped nanocrystals of Mn₃O₄/γ-Fw₂O₃ (\"nanoboxes\") were produced. These nanoboxes ultimately transformed into hollow cagelike nanocrystals of γ-Fe₂O₃ (\"nanocages\"). Because of their nonequilibrium compositions and hollow structures, these nanoboxes and nanocages exhibited good performance as anode materials for lithium ion batteries. The generality of this approach was demonstrated with other metal pairs, including Co₃O₄/SnO₂ and Mn₃O₄/SnO₂.

Inorganic nanoparticles coated with organic films can display surface chemistries that allow them to function like globular proteins. Water-soluble inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) and globular proteins (GPs) might seem “as different as chalk and cheese,” especially in the interior. The chemical structure of GPs is usually exact and well-defined, whereas NPs are almost always formed as a mixture of sizes and variation of shapes. The complexity and dynamism of three-dimensional atomic organization inside the protein globules and related functionalities are not present in the impenetrable crystalline cores of NPs. However, NPs and GPs do reveal similarities in overall size, charge, and shape, and the exterior surfaces of NPs can be coated with organic functional groups similar to those exposed by GPs, which suggest that NPs could function as protein mimics. This option is attractive because NPs are usually cheaper and more stable than proteins, but can they actually display the same functionalities and achieve enough specificity to replace proteins?

A bstract We propose an efficient grassmannian formalism for solution of bi-linear finite-difference Hirota equation (T-system) on T-shaped lattices related to the space of highest weight representations of gl( K 1 , K 2 | M ) superalgebra. The formalism is inspired by the quantum fusion procedure known from the integrable spin chains and is based on exterior forms of Baxter-like Q-functions. We find a few new interesting relations among the exterior forms of Q-functions and reproduce, using our new formalism, the Wronskian determinant solutions of Hirota equations known in the literature. Then we generalize this construction to the twisted Q-functions and demonstrate the subtleties of untwisting procedure on the examples of rational quantum spin chains with twisted boundary conditions. Using these observations, we generalize the recently discovered, in our paper with N. Gromov, AdS/CFT Quantum Spectral Curve for exact planar spectrum of AdS/CFT duality to the case of arbitrary Cartan twisting of AdS 5 ×S 5 string sigma model. Finally, we successfully probe this formalism by reproducing the energy of gamma-twisted BMN vacuum at single-wrapping orders of weak coupling expansion.