No abstract

Hygroresponsive biomimetic actuators that convert chemical potential energy contained within the humidity gradient into mechanical deformation are of particular significance for realizing a sustainable society.

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive Polar coding solution that integrates reliability calculation, rate matching and parity-check coding. Judging a channel coding design from the industry's viewpoint, there are two primary concerns: (i) low-complexity implementation in applicationspecific integrated circuit (ASIC), and (ii) superior & stable performance under a wide range of code lengths and rates. The former provides cost-& power-efficiency which are vital to any commercial system; the latter ensures flexible and robust services. Our design respects both criteria. It demonstrates better performance than existing schemes in literature, but requires only a fraction of implementation cost. With easilyreproducible code construction for arbitrary code rates and lengths, we are able to report "1-bit" fine-granularity simulation results for thousands of cases. The released results can serve as a baseline for future optimization of Polar codes. 1

No abstract

Self-healing hydrogels like tissues or organs which are repaired automatically in response to damage show great promise. However, it remains a challenge to develop novel functional nanoparticles as crosslinkers to prepare tough and self-healing nanocomposite hydrogels. Here, we report the preparation of water-soluble ultrasmall aluminum hydroxide nanoparticles with a diameter of 2-3 nm through a simple sol-gel method. Furthermore, a tough nanocomposite hydrogel is prepared by the in situ copolymerization of acylamide and 2-acrylamido-2-methyl propane sulfonic acid in the presence of aluminum hydroxide nanoparticles. The resulting hydrogels exhibit high compressive strength of 18.9 MPa and an elongation at break of ∼2100%. Importantly, the Al-NC gel displayed a high self-healing efficiency of 86% without any external stimulus at room temperature. Moreover, we found an interesting multi-hierarchical porous morphology of the Al-NC gel depending on the contents of the aluminum hydroxide nanoparticles. The tough nanocomposite hydrogel might provide a novel promising avenue for designing advanced self-healable soft materials for various biomedical applications.