The origin of life and the potential role of soaps

Single chain amphiphiles, such as fatty acids and alkyl sulfates, have found industrial uses as emulsifying agents, lubricants, detergents and soaps. Fatty acids are also used as excipients and, because of their biochemical activity, even as active ingredients in drug formulations. The applications are often linked to their amphipathic characters, i.e., their capacity to self‐assemble into micelles or reverse‐micelles. Their capacity to form bilayer structures with properties comparable to cellular membranes is less exploited in the industry. However, this property is central in the development of chemical model systems, so called protocells, aiming at understanding how cellular life emerged on the early Earth, at the time abiotic environment, and could evolve toward contemporary cells.     

POLYBiNN: Binary Inference Engine for Neural Networks using Decision Trees

Journal of Signal Processing Systems - Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have gained significant popularity in several classification and regression applications....     

Aluminium/tin (IV) oxide thermite composite: sensitivities and reaction propagation

ABSTRACT

Thermites are energetic composites made of metal and oxidizer particles that react according to an exothermic reaction and release large amounts of energy. Many possible metal and oxidizer couples exist in the literature. Here, the performance of the aluminum reducing metal and tin (IV) oxide (SnO₂) combination was reported as a function of the fuel/oxidizer mass ratio. The Al/SnO₂ energetic composite, in stoichiometric conditions, was insensitive to impact, sensitive to friction and extremely sensitive to electrostatic discharge. The combustion velocity was determined to be close to 600 m/s. Changing the stoichiometry affected both the sensitivity thresholds to the friction test (160 N to > 360 N) and flame propagation velocity (480–588 m/s) of the Al/SnO₂ composite. These results are reported for the first time.     

Autonomous car decision making and trajectory tracking based on genetic algorithms and fractional potential fields

Intelligent Service Robotics - This article deals with the issue of trajectory optimization of autonomous terrestrial vehicles on a specific range handled by the human driver. The main...     

Highly porous and thermally stable tribopositive hybrid bimetallic cryogel to boost up the performance of triboelectric nanogenerators

There have been tremendous efforts made to investigate various materials to enhance the electrical performance of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) but there is still demand for some techniques to further enhance the performance of tribomaterials. Therefore, we fabricated a bimetallic hybrid cryogel via cheap and facile UV-radiation as well as in situ reduction method. Fabricated TENG device made up of porous hybrid bimetallic cryogel film containing silver and gold nanoparticles as tribopositive material and poly dimethyl siloxane (PDMS) as a tribonegative layer with dimension of 1 × 2 cm² has the ability to produced output voltage of 262.14 V with current density of 27.52 mA/m² and 7.44 W/m² peak power density, which was sufficient to light up more than 120 white light emitting-diodes (LEDs). Porous and rough structure, interaction of nanoparticles was the reason behind the performance enhancement of tribopositive material. Thus, this study introduces a very stable and easily synthesized bimetallic hybrid cryogel as a tribopositive material to enhance the performance of tribomaterials to design high performance TENG devices.