Transformation of Robotics Education in the Era of Covid-19: Challenges and Opportunities

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted many aspects of our social and professional life. To this end, Higher Education institutions reacted rather vastly to this unpreceded situation although many issues have been reported in the international literature since the emergence of the first global lockdown. As we are now transitioning back to the ‘normality’, universities and businesses consider the so-called ‘blended’ or ‘hybrid’ model as a means of facilitating the transition phase. In view of this decision, several studies can be identified wherein blended learning scenarios are proposed and described. The present work constitutes such an effort. Precisely, while adjusting the lens to the didactic of Robotics courses, we propose a blended learning model via which the laboratory activities are performed without the physical presence of the students in the physical context. The aforementioned objective is attained under the aid of the Virtual Reality technology coupled with the Digital Twin model. We hope that the ideas presented in this manuscript will motivate and inspire more researchers, instructional designers, and educators to consider the adoption of such alternative instructional techniques to mitigate the shortcomings that the remote education setting brings and further to improve the overall learning experience

Microwave synthesis, characterization and perspectives of wood pencil-derived carbon

More than 14 billion pencils are manufactured and used globally every year. On average, a pencil is discarded after 60% of its original length has been depleted. In the present work we propose a simple and affordable way of converting this non-neglectable amount of waste into added value carbon product. In particular, we demonstrate the microwave synthesis of carbon from the wood pencil with and without chemical activation. This could be a process stage before the final recycling of the expensive graphite core. In the latter case, irradiation of the wood pencil in a domestic microwave oven heats up the pencil's graphite core, thus inducing carbonization of its wood casing. The carbonized product consists of amorphous carbon nanosheets having relatively low surface area. However, if the wood pencil is soaked in 50% KOH aqueous solution prior to microwave irradiation, a significantly higher surface area of carbon is obtained, consisting of irregular-shaped porous particles. Consequently, the obtained carbon can easily decolorize a methylene blue aqueous solution, can be used to make pocket warmers or gunpowder, and lastly, serves as an excellent adsorbent towards Cr(VI) removal from water, showing a maximum adsorption capacity of 70-75 mg/g within 24 h at 23 degrees C, pH = 3.Web of Science121art. no. 41

Traumatic Floating Clavicle: Is This a Rare Injury?

Bipolar clavicle dislocation is thought to be a rare injury pattern. Even experienced orthopaedic surgeons may have not come across this entity during their careers. We report a misdiagnosed case of a 65-year-old male who underwent a motorcycle accident and was surgically treated six months post-injury. This case has been the ground for research since then. We have come to the conclusion that this type of injury is probably not so uncommon as previously thought. Careful evaluation is of immense importance during diagnosis protocol, and practitioners should be aware of this injury pattern in order to avoid misdiagnosis

Fast microwave carbonization of aluminum-coated plastic wastes and perspectives: The examples of CDs and snack bags

Aluminum-coated plastics, such as CDs and snack bags, are widely used and consumed around the world. Since millions of CDs and trillions of snack bags end up in landfills and oceans as plastic waste every year, we suggest here an easy, fast, and cost-effective method for transforming this significant volume of garbage into added-value carbon using microwave technology. The proposed method differs from existing time- and energy-consuming pyrolytic processes employed in the traditional carbonization of this sort of waste. Conceptually, direct irradiation of the aluminum-coated plastic items in a domestic microwave oven heats up the metallic coating, thus triggering carbonization of the plastic substrate. The resulting carbon, which is characterized by means of X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) techniques, has structural similarities to carbons produced from CDs and snack bags using pyrolytic methods. In other words, the microwave technique produces similar effect, but it is faster and more energy efficient. We finally demonstrate some practical uses of the derived materials in gunpowder production, carbothermal production of metals and grey paint formulations