War is arguably the most extreme scenario for the exertion of violence. All warring parties suffer in one way or another but those who suffer most are usually those who least deserve it--the common folk. The paper wil...War is arguably the most extreme scenario for the exertion of violence. All warring parties suffer in one way or another but those who suffer most are usually those who least deserve it--the common folk. The paper will take as a case study one of the epic Mediterranean battles in the ongoing Christian versus Muslim conflict of the Early Modem Age. Happening in 1565, though micro in scale, the four-month engagement known as the Great Siege of Malta which was fought between the Ottoman Turkish troops and their Barbary Coast partners on the one side and the Hospitallers of the Order of St. John and their European and Maltese allies on the other side, was macro in its significance. This fierce clash left its destructive mark not only on the warring adversaries but the more so on the Maltese inhabitants who found themselves immersed in a war which was not strictly theirs but of which they were forced to endure the hardships, participate in the ongoing combat, and face the daily extreme psychological pressure and physical cruelty which are generally meted out to the defenceless and the most vulnerable in the war zone. No brutality was spared and extreme violence was the order of the day.展开更多
We disclosed the interiorly driven macroscopic Brownian motion behavior of self-powered liquid metal motors. Such tiny motors in millimeter scale move randomly at a velocity magnitude of centimeters per second in aque...We disclosed the interiorly driven macroscopic Brownian motion behavior of self-powered liquid metal motors. Such tiny motors in millimeter scale move randomly at a velocity magnitude of centimeters per second in aqueous alkaline solution, well resembling the classical Brownian motion. However, unlike the existing phenomena, where the particle motions were caused by collisions from the surrounding molecules, the current random liquid metal motions are internally enabled and self-powered, along with the colliding among neighboring motors, the substrate and the surrounding electrolyte molecules. Through uniformly dissolving only 1% （mass percentage） A1 into GaInl0, many tiny motors can be quickly fabricated and activated to take the Brownian-like random motions. Further, we introduced an experimental approach of using optical image contrast, which works just like the Wilson cloud chamber, to distinctively indicate the motor trajectory resulted from the generated hydrogen gas stream. A series of unusual complicated multi-phase fluid mechanics phenomena were observed. It was also identified that the main driving factor of the motors comes from the H2 bubbles generated at the bottom of these tiny motors, which is different from the large size self-fueled liquid metal machine. Several typical mechanisms for such unconventional Brownian-like motion phenomena were preliminarily interpreted.展开更多
文摘War is arguably the most extreme scenario for the exertion of violence. All warring parties suffer in one way or another but those who suffer most are usually those who least deserve it--the common folk. The paper will take as a case study one of the epic Mediterranean battles in the ongoing Christian versus Muslim conflict of the Early Modem Age. Happening in 1565, though micro in scale, the four-month engagement known as the Great Siege of Malta which was fought between the Ottoman Turkish troops and their Barbary Coast partners on the one side and the Hospitallers of the Order of St. John and their European and Maltese allies on the other side, was macro in its significance. This fierce clash left its destructive mark not only on the warring adversaries but the more so on the Maltese inhabitants who found themselves immersed in a war which was not strictly theirs but of which they were forced to endure the hardships, participate in the ongoing combat, and face the daily extreme psychological pressure and physical cruelty which are generally meted out to the defenceless and the most vulnerable in the war zone. No brutality was spared and extreme violence was the order of the day.
基金supported by Research Funding of Chinese Academy of Sciences and partially by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(51376102)
文摘We disclosed the interiorly driven macroscopic Brownian motion behavior of self-powered liquid metal motors. Such tiny motors in millimeter scale move randomly at a velocity magnitude of centimeters per second in aqueous alkaline solution, well resembling the classical Brownian motion. However, unlike the existing phenomena, where the particle motions were caused by collisions from the surrounding molecules, the current random liquid metal motions are internally enabled and self-powered, along with the colliding among neighboring motors, the substrate and the surrounding electrolyte molecules. Through uniformly dissolving only 1% （mass percentage） A1 into GaInl0, many tiny motors can be quickly fabricated and activated to take the Brownian-like random motions. Further, we introduced an experimental approach of using optical image contrast, which works just like the Wilson cloud chamber, to distinctively indicate the motor trajectory resulted from the generated hydrogen gas stream. A series of unusual complicated multi-phase fluid mechanics phenomena were observed. It was also identified that the main driving factor of the motors comes from the H2 bubbles generated at the bottom of these tiny motors, which is different from the large size self-fueled liquid metal machine. Several typical mechanisms for such unconventional Brownian-like motion phenomena were preliminarily interpreted.
