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  1. Abstract

    Mineralization is a long-lasting method commonly used by biological materials to selectively strengthen in response to site specific mechanical stress. Achieving a similar form of toughening in synthetic polymer composites remains challenging. In previous work, we developed methods to promote chemical reactions via the piezoelectrochemical effect with mechanical responses of inorganic, ZnO nanoparticles. Herein, we report a distinct example of a mechanically-mediated reaction in which the spherical ZnO nanoparticles react themselves leading to the formation of microrods composed of a Zn/S mineral inside an organogel. The microrods can be used to selectively create mineral deposits within the material resulting in the strengthening of the overall resulting composite.

     
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  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available September 1, 2024
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  7. Liu, Wenshe (Ed.)

    The SARS-CoV-2 main protease (Mpro) is a major therapeutic target. The Mproinhibitor, nirmatrelvir, is the antiviral component of Paxlovid, an orally available treatment for COVID-19. As Mproinhibitor use increases, drug resistant mutations will likely emerge. We have established a non-pathogenic system, in which yeast growth serves as an approximation for Mproactivity, enabling rapid identification of mutants with altered enzymatic activity and drug sensitivity. The E166 residue is known to be a potential hot spot for drug resistance and yeast assays identified substitutions which conferred strong nirmatrelvir resistance and others that compromised activity. On the other hand, N142A and the P132H mutation, carried by the Omicron variant, caused little to no change in drug response and activity. Standard enzymatic assays confirmed the yeast results. In turn, we solved the structures of MproE166R, and MproE166N, providing insights into how arginine may drive drug resistance while asparagine leads to reduced activity. The work presented here will help characterize novel resistant variants of Mprothat may arise as Mproantivirals become more widely used.

     
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available August 31, 2024
  8. Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 26, 2024
  9. Herein, the cognitive capability of a simple, paper‐based Miura‐ori—using the physical reservoir computing framework—is experimentally examined to achieve different information perception tasks. The body dynamics of Miura‐ori (aka its vertices displacements), which is excited by a simple harmonic base excitation, can be exploited as the reservoir computing resource. By recording these dynamics with a high‐resolution camera and image processing program and then using linear regression for training, it is shown that the origami reservoir has sufficient computing capacity to estimate the weight and position of a payload. It can also recognize the input frequency and magnitude patterns. Furthermore, multitasking is achievable by simultaneously applying two targeted functions to the same reservoir state matrix. Therefore, it is demonstrated that Miura‐ori can assess the dynamic interactions between its body and ambient environment to extract meaningful information—an intelligent behavior in the mechanical domain. Given that Miura‐ori has been widely used to construct deployable structures, lightweight materials, and compliant robots, enabling such information perception tasks can add a new dimension to the functionality of such a versatile structure.

     
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