Vapor-Driven Propulsion of Catalytic Micromotors

Chemically-powered micromotors offer exciting opportunities in diverse fields, including therapeutic delivery, environmental remediation, and nanoscale manufacturing. However, these nanovehicles require direct addition of high concentration of chemical fuel to the motor solution for their propulsion. We report the efficient vapor-powered propulsion of catalytic micromotors without direct addition of fuel to the micromotor solution. Diffusion of hydrazine vapor from the surrounding atmosphere into the sample solution is instead used to trigger rapid movement of iridium-gold Janus microsphere motors. Such operation creates a new type of remotely-triggered and powered catalytic micro/nanomotors that are responsive to their surrounding environment. This new propulsion mechanism is accompanied by unique phenomena, such as the distinct off-on response to the presence of fuel in the surrounding atmosphere, and spatio-temporal dependence of the motor speed borne out of the concentration gradient evolution within the motor solution. The relationship between the motor speed and the variables affecting the fuel concentration distribution is examined using a theoretical model for hydrazine transport, which is in turn used to explain the observed phenomena. The vapor-powered catalytic micro/nanomotors offer new opportunities in gas sensing, threat detection, and environmental monitoring, and open the door for a new class of environmentally-triggered micromotors

SkyMath: Technical Report

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to solve varieties of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including mathematical reasoning. In this work, we present SkyMath, a large language model for mathematics with 13 billion parameters. By applying self-compare fine-tuning, we have enhanced mathematical reasoning abilities of Skywork-13B-Base remarkably. On GSM8K, SkyMath outperforms all known open-source models of similar size and has established a new SOTA performance

Vapor-Driven Propulsion of Catalytic Micromotors

Chemically-powered micromotors offer exciting opportunities in diverse fields, including therapeutic delivery, environmental remediation, and nanoscale manufacturing. However, these nanovehicles require direct addition of high concentration of chemical fuel to the motor solution for their propulsion. We report the efficient vapor-powered propulsion of catalytic micromotors without direct addition of fuel to the micromotor solution. Diffusion of hydrazine vapor from the surrounding atmosphere into the sample solution is instead used to trigger rapid movement of iridium-gold Janus microsphere motors. Such operation creates a new type of remotely-triggered and powered catalytic micro/nanomotors that are responsive to their surrounding environment. This new propulsion mechanism is accompanied by unique phenomena, such as the distinct off-on response to the presence of fuel in the surrounding atmosphere, and spatio-temporal dependence of the motor speed borne out of the concentration gradient evolution within the motor solution. The relationship between the motor speed and the variables affecting the fuel concentration distribution is examined using a theoretical model for hydrazine transport, which is in turn used to explain the observed phenomena. The vapor-powered catalytic micro/nanomotors offer new opportunities in gas sensing, threat detection, and environmental monitoring, and open the door for a new class of environmentally-triggered micromotors

Skywork: A More Open Bilingual Foundation Model

In this technical report, we present Skywork-13B, a family of large language models (LLMs) trained on a corpus of over 3.2 trillion tokens drawn from both English and Chinese texts. This bilingual foundation model is the most extensively trained and openly published LLMs of comparable size to date. We introduce a two-stage training methodology using a segmented corpus, targeting general purpose training and then domain-specific enhancement training, respectively. We show that our model not only excels on popular benchmarks, but also achieves \emph{state of the art} performance in Chinese language modeling on diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a novel leakage detection method, demonstrating that test data contamination is a pressing issue warranting further investigation by the LLM community. To spur future research, we release Skywork-13B along with checkpoints obtained during intermediate stages of the training process. We are also releasing part of our SkyPile corpus, a collection of over 150 billion tokens of web text, which is the largest high quality open Chinese pre-training corpus to date. We hope Skywork-13B and our open corpus will serve as a valuable open-source resource to democratize access to high-quality LLMs

Pitch Improvement in Attentional Blink: A Study across Audiovisual Asymmetries

Attentional blink (AB) is a phenomenon in which the perception of a second target is impaired when it appears within 200–500 ms after the first target. Sound affects an AB and is accompanied by the appearance of an asymmetry during audiovisual integration, but it is not known whether this is related to the tonal representation of sound. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of audiovisual asymmetry on attentional blink and whether the presentation of pitch improves the ability to detect a target during an AB that is accompanied by audiovisual asymmetry. The results showed that as the lag increased, the subject’s target recognition improved and the pitch produced further improvements. These improvements exhibited a significant asymmetry across the audiovisual channel. Our findings could contribute to better utilizations of audiovisual integration resources to improve attentional transients and auditory recognition decline, which could be useful in areas such as driving and education

An Automatic Machine Vision-Guided System for the Propagation of Potato Test-Tube Plantlets

In manually propagating potato test-tube plantlets (PTTPs), the plantlet is usually grasped and cut at the node point between the cotyledon and stem, which is hardly located and is easily damaged by the gripper. Using an agricultural intelligent robot to replace manual operation will greatly improve the efficiency and quality of the propagation of PTTPs. An automatic machine vision-guided system for the propagation of PTTPs was developed and tested. In this paper, the workflow of the visual system was designed and the image acquisition device was made. Furthermore, the image processing algorithm was then integrated with the image acquisition device in order to construct an automatic PTTP propagation vision system. An image processing system for locating a node point was employed to determine a suitable operation point on the stem. A binocular stereo vision algorithm was applied to compute the 3D coordinates of node points. Finally, the kinematics equation of the three-axis parallel manipulator was established, and the three-dimensional coordinates of the nodes were transformed into the corresponding parameters X, Y, and Z of the three driving sliders of the manipulator. The experimental results indicated that the automatic vision system had a success rate of 98.4%, 0.68 s time consumed per 3 plants, and approximate 1 mm location error in locating the plantlets in an appropriate position for the medial expansion period (22 days)

Study on the Design and Experimental Research on a Bionic Crab Robot with Amphibious Multi-Modal Movement

Bionic amphibious robots are the intersection of biology and robotics; they have the advantages of environmental adaptability and maneuverability. An amphibious robot that combines walking and swimming move modes inspired by a crab (Portunus) is presented in this article. The outstanding characteristic of the robot is that its environmental adaptability relies on the bionic multi-modal movement, which is based on two modular bionic swimming legs and six modular walking legs. We designed the biomimetic crab robot based on the biological observation results. The design, analysis, and simulation of its structure and motion parameters are introduced in this paper. The swimming propulsion capability and the walking performance are verified through indoor, pool, and seaside experiments. In conclusion, the designed bionic crab robot provides a platform with practical application capabilities in amphibious environment detection, concealed reconnaissance, and aquaculture

Effect of Bionic Crab Shell Attitude Parameters on Lift and Drag in a Flow Field

Underwater bionic-legged robots encounter significant challenges in attitude, velocity, and positional control due to lift and drag in water current environments, making it difficult to balance operational efficiency with motion stability. This study delves into the hydrodynamic properties of a bionic crab robot’s shell, drawing inspiration from the sea crab’s motion postures. It further refines the robot’s underwater locomotion strategy based on these insights. Initially, the research involved collecting attitude data from crabs during underwater movement through biological observation. Subsequently, hydrodynamic simulations and experimental validations of the bionic shell were conducted, examining the impact of attitude parameters on hydrodynamic performance. The findings reveal that the transverse angle predominantly influences lift and drag. Experiments in a test pool with a crab-like robot, altering transverse angles, demonstrated that increased transverse angles enhance the robot’s underwater walking efficiency, stability, and overall performance