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Merritt Lynge posted an update 6 months ago
Stimuli-responsive hydrogels can sense environmental cues and change their volume accordingly without the need for additional sensors or actuators. This enables a significant reduction in the size and complexity of resulting devices. However, since the responsive volume change of hydrogels is typically uniform, their robotic applications requiring localized and time-varying deformations have been challenging to realize. Here, using addressable and tunable hydrogel building blocks-referred to as soft voxel actuators (SVAs)-heterogeneous hydrogel structures with programmable spatiotemporal deformations are presented. SVAs are produced using a mixed-solvent photopolymerization method, utilizing a fast reaction speed and the cononsolvency property of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAAm) to produce highly interconnected hydrogel pore structures, resulting in tunable swelling ratio, swelling rate, and Young’s modulus in a simple, one-step casting process that is compatible with mass production of SVA units. By designing the location and swelling properties of each voxel and by activating embedded Joule heaters in the voxels, spatiotemporal deformations are achieved, which enables heterogeneous hydrogel structures to manipulate objects, avoid obstacles, generate traveling waves, and morph to different shapes. Together, these innovations pave the way toward tunable, untethered, and high-degree-of-freedom hydrogel robots that can adapt and respond to changing conditions in unstructured environments.Foot care is a common problem for homeless adults in cities, who often receive fragmented foot care services, resulting in increased foot problems, health complications, hospitalisation, limb removal and disabilities. Among the health factors that negatively affect the homeless, foot health is essential, but often neglected. This study employed a descriptive, cross-sectional research design to assess the foot care of homeless people and develop recommendations for clinical practice. Using Inlow’s 60-s foot screening method, the foot conditions of a purposive sample of 65 homeless adults were examined in British Columbia, Canada, in 2019-2020. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. Determinants, such as sex and years of homelessness significantly contributed to homeless individuals’ risk of developing foot problems. Differences in perceived and observed foot problems were influenced by equitable access to social health and healthcare services. Foot assessment is not well-covered by homeless health services and should be implemented as part of the standard medical review of homeless patients. Furthermore, foot assessment should be conducted by healthcare professionals, rather than relying on the standard practice of service users’ self-report. Finally, foot care should be based on tailoring assessments and interventions for the individualised needs of homeless service users. Future research must seek ways to integrate homeless individuals’ voices in the development, implementation and evaluation of foot care services.One of the key catalytic reactions for life on earth, the oxidation of water to molecular oxygen, occurs in the oxygen-evolving complex of the photosystem II (PSII) mediated by a manganese-containing cluster. Considerable efforts in this research area embrace the development of efficient artificial manganese-based catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Using artificial OER catalysts for selective oxygenation of organic substrates to produce value-added chemicals is a worthwhile objective. However, unsatisfying catalytic performance and poor stability have been a fundamental bottleneck in the field of artificial PSII analogs. Herein, for the first time, a manganese-based anode material is developed and paired up for combining electrocatalytic water oxidation and selective oxygenations of organics delivering the highest efficiency reported to date. Selleck ITF3756 This can be achieved by employing helical manganese borophosphates, representing a new class of materials. The uniquely high catalytic activity and durability (over 5 months) of the latter precursors in alkaline media are attributed to its unexpected surface transformation into an amorphous MnOx phase with a birnessite-like short-range order and surface-stabilized MnIII sites under extended electrical bias, as unequivocally demonstrated by a combination of in situ Raman and quasi in situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy as well as ex situ methods.Tracing the globally circulating severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) phylogenetic clades by high-throughput sequencing is costly, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. We here propose a rapid, simple, and cost-effective amplification refractory mutation system (ARMS)-based multiplex reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay to identify six distinct phylogenetic clades S, L, V, G, GH, and GR. Our multiplex PCR is designed in a mutually exclusive way to identify V-S and G-GH-GR clade variants separately. The pentaplex assay included all five variants and the quadruplex comprised of the triplex variants alongside either V or S clade mutations that created two separate subsets. The procedure was optimized with 0.2-0.6 µM primer concentration, 56-60°C annealing temperature, and 3-5 ng/µl complementary DNA to validate on 24 COVID-19-positive samples. Targeted Sanger sequencing further confirmed the presence of the clade-featured mutations with another set of primers. This multiplex ARMS-PCR assay is a fast, low-cost alternative and convenient to discriminate the circulating phylogenetic clades of SARS-CoV-2.2D monolayers represent some of the most deformable inorganic materials, with bending stiffnesses approaching those of lipid bilayers. Achieving 2D heterostructures with similar properties would enable a new class of deformable devices orders of magnitude softer than conventional thin-film electronics. Here, by systematically introducing low-friction twisted or heterointerfaces, interfacial engineering is leveraged to tailor the bending stiffness of 2D heterostructures over several hundred percent. A bending model is developed and experimentally validated to predict and design the deformability of 2D heterostructures and how it evolves with the composition of the stack, the atomic arrangements at the interfaces, and the geometry of the structure. Notably, when each atomic layer is separated by heterointerfaces, the total bending stiffness reaches a theoretical minimum, equal to the sum of the constituent layers regardless of scale of deformation-lending the extreme deformability of 2D monolayers to device-compatible multilayers.
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