THE UN-STILL LIFE

Contrary to the common definition of still life painting as a grouping of inanimate objects, I want my still life paintings to be full of life. I have always been intrigued by the numerous approaches and different mediums used by artists for still life arrangements. I want the objects I paint to appear three dimensional. I strive to effectively create the illusion of actual senses: smell, taste, and touch. To accomplish this, I carefully arrange objects in my composition so color, line, and form work to enhance a rhythmic flow. Contrasting warm and cool colors help add to this flow. My brush strokes turn with the curve of the objects to help create the illusion of depth and motion. This is what I call the Un-Still Life

Target detection and localization using thermal camera, mmWave radar and deep learning.

Reliable detection, and localization of tiny unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), birds, and other aerial vehicles with small cross-sections is an ongoing challenge. The detection task becomes even more challenging in harsh weather conditions such as snow, fog, and dust. RGB camera-based sensing is widely used for some tasks, especially navigation. However, the RGB camera's performance degrades in poor lighting conditions. On the other hand, mmWave radars perform very well in harsh weather conditions also. Additionally, thermal cameras perform reliably in low lighting conditions too. The combination of these two sensors makes an excellent choice for many of these applications. In this work, a model to detect and localize UAVs is made using an integrated system of a thermal camera and mmWave radar. Data collected with the integrated sensors are used to train a model for object detection using the yolov5 algorithm. The model detects and classifies objects such as humans, cars and UAVs. The images from the thermal camera are used in combination with the trained model to localize UAVs in the cameras Field of View(FOV)

Photo-responsive polymeric structures based on spiropyran

Spiropyrans are one of the most popular classes of photochromic compounds that change their optical and structural properties in response to external inputs such as light, protons and metal ions, making them ideal molecules for the fabrication of multifunctional stimuli-responsive materials. Nowadays, the emphasis in polymeric materials incorporating spiropyran units, focuses on the effectiveness of their reversible response to external photonic stimuli. Photo-control of a range of key characteristics for flow systems, such as wettability, permeability, photo-modulation of flow by photo-actuation of valves, photonic control of uptake and release of guests using films and coatings, and colorimetric sensing of various species, are highlighted and discussed

Innovation in a crisis: rethinking conferences and scholarship in a pandemic and climate emergency

It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions

Experimental Polymer Mechanochemistry and its Interpretational Frameworks

Polymer mechanochemistry is an emerging field at the interface of chemistry, materials science, physics and engineering. It aims at understanding and exploiting unique reactivities of polymer chains confined to highly non-equilibrium stretched geometries by interactions with their surroundings. Macromolecular chains or their segments become stretched in bulk polymers under mechanical loads or when polymer solutions are sonicated or flow rapidly through abrupt contractions. An increasing amount of empirical data suggests that mechanochemical phenomena are widespread wherever polymers are used. In the past decade, empirical mechanochemistry has progressed enormously, from studying fragmentations of commodity polymers by simple backbone homolysis to demonstrations of self-strengthening and stress-reporting materials and mechanochemical cascades using purposefully designed monomers. This progress has not yet been matched by the development of conceptual frameworks within which to rationalize, systematize and generalize empirical mechanochemical observations. As a result, mechanistic and/or quantitative understanding of mechanochemical phenomena remains, with few exceptions, tentative. In this review we aim at systematizing reported macroscopic manifestations of polymer mechanochemistry, and critically assessing the interpretational framework that underlies their molecular rationalizations from a physical chemist's perspective. We propose a hierarchy of mechanochemical phenomena which may guide the development of multiscale models of mechanochemical reactivity to match the breadth and utility of the Eyring equation of chemical kinetics. We discuss the limitations of the approaches to quantifying and validating mechanochemical reactivity, with particular focus on sonicated polymer solutions, in order to identify outstanding questions that need to be solved for polymer mechanochemistry to become a rigorous, quantitative field. We conclude by proposing 7 problems whose solution may have a disproportionate impact on the development of polymer mechanochemistry