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The development of electrical equipment has resulted in an increase in the demand for electrical switches whose key element is contact. The orbital riveting technology has been successfully applied in assembling silver contacts. With the increase in production, attention has been paid to the possibility of obtaining significant savings by replacing part of the rivet with copper. As a result, bimetallic contacts have been created. It has also been proved that the direct transfer of orbital riveting technology from monometallic to bimetallic contacts narrows the technological window that the cost-effectiveness of the whole process is debatable. One of the factors behind the use of orbital forming is the decisive reduction in friction. A similar effect is given by ultrasonic assistance in microforming processes. Within this work, based on the laboratory experiment results, it was suggested to replace the orbital riveting with ultrasonic riveting in relation to the miniature bimetallic contacts.

This chapter describes the potential relationships, where they may exist, for direct transfer of organic compounds between plants, plant communication and allelopathic interactions. Defines the boundaries for allelopathic interactions, summarizes terminology and outlines standard approaches to the study of allelopathic interactions.

We present a novel learning-based framework for face reenactment. The proposed method, known as ReenactGAN, is capable of transferring facial movements and expressions from an arbitrary person’s monocular video input to a target person’s video. Instead of performing a direct transfer in the pixel space, which could result in structural artifacts, we first map the source face onto a boundary latent space. A transformer is subsequently used to adapt the source face’s boundary to the target’s boundary. Finally, a target-specific decoder is used to generate the reenacted target face. Thanks to the effective and reliable boundary-based transfer, our method can perform photo-realistic face reenactment. In addition, ReenactGAN is appealing in that the whole reenactment process is purely feed-forward, and thus the reenactment process can run in real-time (30 FPS on one GTX 1080 GPU). Dataset and model are publicly available on our project page (Project Page: https://wywu.github.io/projects/ReenactGAN/ReenactGAN.html).

Widespread use of substrate-borne vibrational signals by insects presents a unique opportunity to develop alternative methods of pest control, enabled by better understanding insect behaviour and advances in technology. One such method is currently under development for use against the invasive leafhopper Scaphoideus titanus, a vector of Flavescence doree in European vineyards. Basic understanding of the vector’s sexual behaviour and observations of naturally occurring antagonistic interactions between males enabled development of vibrational broadcasts that obscured signal characteristics important for mate recognition and localization in small-scale field tests. The naturally occurring antagonistic interactions constitute acoustic noise that can be characterized, adjusted and broadcasted using modified acoustic technology. Steps in development of this technology to maximize reliability and energy efficiency are outlined, as well as plans for large-scale field testing and future perspectives. While several specific factors work in favour of using vibrational disruption in the system S. titanus (pest) and grapevine (host) and possibilities of direct transfer to other systems are limited, success of this approach is nevertheless hoped to stimulate the development of vibrational playback in general for control of other insect pests.

This chapter focuses on the contamination, bioaccumulation, and toxicological effects of dioxins and related compounds (DRCs), such as polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs), polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs), and dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls (DL-PCBs), in Asian developing countries, with a particular emphasis on open dumping sites of municipal waste. A comprehensive investigation of soils has suggested clearly that dumping sites (DS) are potential sources of DRCs, whereas the concentrations of DRCs in soils from urban and agricultural areas in Asian developing countries were comparable to or lower than those in general background soils from developed nations. In India, notably higher concentrations of DRCs were detected in human milk from women residing around DS, compared with those from reference sites (RS) and other Asian developing countries, indicating that the residents around DS ingest greater amounts of DRCs, possibly via the intake of contaminated bovine milk and fish. Elevated concentrations of DRCs were also detected in wild animals inhabiting the Indian DS area, such as crow and pig, and the accumulated DRC profiles suggested direct transfer of these contaminants from contaminated soil. Toxic equivalents (TEQs) of DRCs and the liver to adipose concentration ratios of PCDD/Fs in pigs had statistically significant positive correlations with the levels of hepatic cytochrome P450 (CYP) 1A-like protein, suggesting the induction of CYP1A by DRCs and CYP1A-dependent hepatic sequestration of PCDD/Fs. In addition, decreases in plasma-free thyroxine and immunoglobulin G were observed in pigs from the DS. Thus, DS in developing countries are one of the main challenges for further research due to the long-term effects on environmental quality and human/animal health. The continuous formation of DRCs in DS and their elevated residues detected in breast milk from residents living around such DS warrant effect studies of these contaminants on their offspring. Comprehensive and long-term monitoring programs are urgently needed with proper capacity building in Asian developing countries, to mitigate DRC emission and their risk on ecosystems and human health.