Plants use rapid movements to disperse seed, spores, or pollen and catch animal prey. Most rapid-release mechanisms only work once and, if repeatable, regaining the prerelease state is a slow and costly process. We present an encompassing mechanism for a rapid, repeatable, passive-dynamic motion used by a carnivorous pitcher plant to catch prey. Nepenthes gracilis uses the impact of rain drops ...

Numerical simulations of the 2D lid-driven cavity flow are performed for a wide range of Reynolds numbers. Accurate benchmark results are provided for steady solutions as well as for periodic solutions around the critical Reynolds number. Numerous comparisons with the results available in the literature are given. The first Hopf bifurcation is localized by a study of the linearized problem. 200...

We propose a novel universal acoustic characterization approach to spoken language identification (LID), in which any spoken language is described with a common set of fundamental units defined “universally.” Specifically, manner and place of articulation form this unit inventory and are used to build a set of universal attribute models with data-driven techniques. Using the vector space modeli...