The development of stimuli‐responsive soft actuators, a task largely undertaken by material scientists, has become a major driving force in pushing the frontiers of microrobotics. Devices made of soft active materials are oftentimes small in size, remotely and wirelessly powered/controlled, and capable of adapting themselves to unexpected hurdles. However, nowadays most soft microscale robots are rather simple in terms of design and architecture, and it remains a challenge to create complex 3D soft robots with stimuli‐responsive properties. Here, it is suggested that kirigami‐based techniques can be useful for fabricating complex 3D robotic structures that can be activated with light. External stress fields introduce out‐of‐plane deformation of kirigami film actuators made of liquid crystal networks. Such 2D‐to‐3D structural transformations can give rise to mechanical actuation upon light illumination, thus allowing the realization of kirigami‐based light‐fuelled robotics. A kirigami rolling robot is demonstrated, where a light beam controls the multigait motion and steers the moving direction in 2D. The device is able to navigate along different routes and moves up a ramp with a slope of 6°. The results demonstrate a facile technique to realize complex and flexible 3D structures with light‐activated robotic functions.

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Kirigami, a technique that transforms 2D sheets into complex designable 3D sculptures, is often used in paper art. In article number 1906233, Yu‐Chieh Cheng, Hao Zeng, and co‐workers implement kirigami in light‐responsive thin‐film liquid‐crystal network actuators. A versatile 3D shape‐shifting and multigait rolling robot capable of light‐steered 2D motion is demonstrated.

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Abstract:The effect of metabolites from the indigenous Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans and temperature on the bioleaching of cadmium from soil was investigated in the present study. Bioleaching was found to be more effective than chemical leaching of cadmium. The metabolite, mainly sulfuric acid, which was shown to be growthassociated in the exponential phase, plays a major role in bioleaching. The maximum amount of cadmium leached was obtained after 8 days of precultivation when cells were directly involved in the leaching process. It indicates that cells in the exponential growth phase exhibit higher activity toward bioleaching. In contrast, the maximum amount of cadmium leached and the maximum initial rate for bioleaching were reached after 16 days of precultivation when only metabolites were involved in the bioleaching process. It implies that higher sulfuric acid concentration results in higher leaching efficiency. In addition, higher temperature leads to higher leaching efficiency. The optimal operation condition for bioleaching was determined to be a two-stage process: The first stage involves the precultivation of the indigenous A. thiooxidans at 30°C for 8 days followed by 20 minutes of centrifugation to discard cells. The second stage involves the bioleaching with the subsequent supernatant at 50°C.

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Outdoor images captured during inclement weather conditions generally exhibit visibility degradation. Localized light sources often result from activation of streetlights and vehicle headlights and are common scenarios in these conditions. The presence of localized light sources in hazy images may cause the generation of oversaturation artifacts when those images are restored by traditional state-of-the-art haze removal techniques. Therefore, we propose a novel haze removal approach based on the proposed hybrid dark channel prior technique in order to remedy the problems associated with localized light sources during image restoration. The overall results show that the proposed haze removal approach can recover haze-free images more effectively than can the other previous state-of-the-art haze removal approach while avoiding over-saturation.