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Blog – Page 5149

Environmental sensors are a step closer to simultaneously sniffing out multiple gases that could indicate disease or pollution, thanks to a Penn State collaboration. Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics in the College of Engineering, and Lauren Zarzar, assistant professor of chemistry in Eberly College of Science, and their teams combined laser writing and responsive sensor technologies to fabricate the first highly customizable microscale gas sensing devices.

They published their technique this month in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“The detection of gases is of critical importance to various fields, including pollution monitoring, public safety assurance and personal health care,” Cheng said. “To fill these needs, sensing devices must be small, lightweight, inexpensive and easy to use and apply to various environments and substrates, such as clothing or piping.”

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This study explores the relationship between the adoption of industrial robots and workplace injuries using data from the United States (US) and Germany. Our empirical analyses, based on establishment-level data for the US, suggest that a one standard deviation increase in robot exposure reduces work-related injuries by approximately 16%. These results are driven by manufacturing firms (−28%), while we detect no impact on sectors that were less exposed to industrial robots. We also show that the US counties that are more exposed to robot penetration experience a significant increase in drug-or alcohol-related deaths and mental health problems, consistent with the extant evidence of negative effects on labor market outcomes in the US. Employing individual longitudinal data from Germany, we exploit within-individual changes in robot exposure and document similar effects on job physical intensity (−4%) and disability (−5%), but no evidence of significant effects on mental health and work and life satisfaction, consistent with the lack of significant impacts of robot penetration on labor market outcomes in Germany.

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Saúl Morales RodriguézAuthor

The success of deep learning depends heavily on the availability of large datasets, but in robotic manipulation there are many learning problems for which such datasets do not exist. Collecting these datasets is time-consuming and expensive, and therefore learning from small datasets is an important open problem. Within computer vision, a common approach to a lack of data is data augmentation. Data augmentation is the process of creating additional training examples by modifying existing ones. However, because the types of tasks and data differ, the methods used in computer vision cannot be easily adapted to manipulation. Therefore, we propose a data augmentation method for robotic manipulation. We argue that augmentations should be valid, relevant, and diverse.

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Summary: Stem cells in human urine have the potential to regenerate tissue.

Source: wake forest baptist medical center.

The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) researchers who were the first to identify that stem cells in human urine have potential for tissue regenerative effects, continue their investigation into the power of these cells.

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LeviPrint is a system that uses acoustic manipulation for assembling objects without physical contact. It generates acoustic fields that trap small particles, glue droplets and elongated stick-like elements that can be manipulated and reoriented as they are levitated. It is a fully functional system for manufacturing 3D structures using contactless manipulation.

It was developed by researchers from the UPNA/NUP-Public University of Navarre Asier Marzo and Iñigo Ezcurdia, who together with Rafael Morales (Ultraleap Ltd, UK) and Marco Andrade (University of São Paulo, Brazil) are authors of the paper “LeviPrint: Contactless Fabrication using Full Acoustic Trapping of Elongated Parts.”

This research is due to be presented in August in Vancouver (Canada) at SIGGRAPH, a conference on and where companies such as Nvidia, Disney Research and Facebook Reality Labs present their work.

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In recent years, engineers worldwide have been trying to devise new battery and energy storage technologies that are more sustainable and cost-effective. One of the solutions attracting particular interest is sodium-based battery technology.

Sodium-ion batteries could have numerous advantages over conventional and widely used lithium-based batteries. Most notably, as is abundant on our planet and can be easily sourced, they could be affordable and easy to produce on a large-scale.

Despite their possible advantages, most developed so far exhibited low energy densities, due to the relatively large atomic size of sodium and its considerable weight. Typically, these batteries exhibit energy densities below 160 Wh kg-1, which is significantly lower than that of .

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