Exploring the Influence of Wind Turbine\u27s Blades on Its Output and Efficiency

Wind turbines are machines that convert wind energy into electricity. The efficiency of this conversion is measured by comparing the incoming wind\u27s speed and the output power. This paper focuses on how the properties of blades affect the output and power of wind turbines. The attributes of turbine blades that affect output and efficiency, such as blade size and angle of entry, are considerable. Although results generally match with theory models, we find a size limit with blade length

A Human Powered Micro-generator for Charging Electronic Devices

A hand-pulled generator has been designed and tested. A preliminary result has been obtained and discussed. This device was created to provide no outlet and off-grid charging. Nothing is worse than going out into the wilderness and having a phone or a necessary electronic device run out of battery. This presentation overviews the device\u27s design, build, and electrical system. Two different tests are run to prove the device is capable of charging the storage battery. The device presented can provide 14 minutes of charging time with one hour of string-pulling. It is concluded that this device can be beneficial to people with electronic devices that need off-grid charging

Manufacturing and Testing the Permanent Magnet Linear Motor with Two Structures

Controlled mechanical motion is vital for many useful applications in technology. For many of these applications, linear motors have advantages over traditional rotating motors. In this work, we have built a permanent magnet linear motor to test and measure energy efficiency. We find a maximum 30% total energy efficiency and 79% energy transfer rate. In addition, a C-shape support structure is added to the moving part in order to increase the moving accuracy. The test shows that, with the support structure, the fluctuation on vertical direction decreases significantly, but the friction of the system increases a bit

Pico-Power Production from a Squirrel-Cage Darrieus HAMCT

The United Nations has recognized the need for renewable energy sources through the Sustainable Development Goals. Pico-hydrokinetic energy has the potential to be portable and far-reaching. Applications range from small land-locked communities to portable sources of energy for the holiday hike or field operations. This research is in its early stages and has not been tested with hydrokinetic sources. However, by using air pressure and applying hydrokinetic principles, an idea can be formed to the effectiveness of a squirrel-cage darrieus HAMCT. Research showed this device can be used in horizontal-axis and vertical-axis orientations. The turbine along with its updated generator boasts stability and promising results in energy production. As pico-power generator is categorized up to 5 kW, this turbine produces between 1.4 and 1.8 W of energy. There is plenty more research this project needs for it to become a viable energy source for remote locations

GL-CLeF: A Global-Local Contrastive Learning Framework for Cross-lingual Spoken Language Understanding

Due to high data demands of current methods, attention to zero-shot cross-lingual spoken language understanding (SLU) has grown, as such approaches greatly reduce human annotation effort. However, existing models solely rely on shared parameters, which can only perform implicit alignment across languages. We present Global--Local Contrastive Learning Framework (GL-CLeF) to address this shortcoming. Specifically, we employ contrastive learning, leveraging bilingual dictionaries to construct multilingual views of the same utterance, then encourage their representations to be more similar than negative example pairs, which achieves to explicitly aligned representations of similar sentences across languages. In addition, a key step in GL-CLeF is a proposed Local and Global component, which achieves a fine-grained cross-lingual transfer (i.e., sentence-level Local intent transfer, token-level Local slot transfer, and semantic-level Global transfer across intent and slot). Experiments on MultiATIS++ show that GL-CLeF achieves the best performance and successfully pulls representations of similar sentences across languages closer.Comment: Accepted at ACL2022 Main Conferenc

Exploration of an Actin Promoter-Based Transient Expression Vector to Trace the Cellular Localization of Nucleorhabdovirus Proteins in Leafhopper Cultured Cells

Continuously cultured cell lines derived from planthopper and leafhopper have greatly facilitated the investigation of rice viruses transmitted by these insects. However, the lack of a suitable transient expression vector has limited their utility. Here, by cloning and analyzing the promoter sequence of the gene encoding cytoplasmic actin from the leafhopper Nephotettix cincticeps, we successfully developed the first efficient transient expression vector for cultured leafhopper cells, which can also be used to express exogenous proteins in other insect culture cell lines, including those derived from Recilia dorsalis leafhopper and Spodoptera frugiperda (Sf9). Furthermore, insertion of the Hr5 viral enhancer element and knockdown of the endogenous Dicer2 gene notably improved the vector’s expression efficiency in leafhopper cells. Using the optimized vector, we have for the first time traced the cellular localization of the proteins encoded by rice yellow stunt virus (RYSV) in cells of its insect vector and demonstrated that P6 protein is a component of the viroplasm

Lemur: Harmonizing Natural Language and Code for Language Agents

We introduce Lemur and Lemur-Chat, openly accessible language models optimized for both natural language and coding capabilities to serve as the backbone of versatile language agents. The evolution from language chat models to functional language agents demands that models not only master human interaction, reasoning, and planning but also ensure grounding in the relevant environments. This calls for a harmonious blend of language and coding capabilities in the models. Lemur and Lemur-Chat are proposed to address this necessity, demonstrating balanced proficiencies in both domains, unlike existing open-source models that tend to specialize in either. Through meticulous pre-training using a code-intensive corpus and instruction fine-tuning on text and code data, our models achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across diverse text and coding benchmarks among open-source models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate Lemur's superiority over existing open-source models and its proficiency across various agent tasks involving human communication, tool usage, and interaction under fully- and partially- observable environments. The harmonization between natural and programming languages enables Lemur-Chat to significantly narrow the gap with proprietary models on agent abilities, providing key insights into developing advanced open-source agents adept at reasoning, planning, and operating seamlessly across environments. https://github.com/OpenLemur/Lemu

Expounding the role of tick in Africa swine fever virus transmission and seeking effective prevention measures: A review

African swine fever (ASF), a highly contagious, deadly infectious disease, has caused huge economic losses to animal husbandry with a 100% mortality rate of the most acute and acute infection, which is listed as a legally reported animal disease by the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE). African swine fever virus (ASFV) is the causative agent of ASF, which is the only member of the Asfarviridae family. Ornithodoros soft ticks play an important role in ASFV transmission by active biological or mechanical transmission or by passive transport or ingestion, particularly in Africa, Europe, and the United States. First, this review summarized recent reports on (1) tick species capable of transmitting ASFV, (2) the importance of ticks in the transmission and epidemiological cycle of ASFV, and (3) the ASFV strains of tick transmission, to provide a detailed description of tick-borne ASFV. Second, the dynamics of tick infection with ASFV and the tick-induced immune suppression were further elaborated to explain how ticks spread ASFV. Third, the development of the anti-tick vaccine was summarized, and the prospect of the anti-tick vaccine was recapitulated. Then, the marked attenuated vaccine, ASFV-G-ΔI177L, was compared with those of the anti-tick vaccine to represent potential therapeutic or strategies to combat ASF