Mosquito-transmitted viruses such as dengue are a global and growing public health challenge. Without widely available vaccines, mosquito control is the primary tool for fighting the spread of these viruses. New mosquito control technologies are needed to complement existing methods, given current challenges with scalability, acceptability, and effectiveness. A field trial was conducted in collaboration with the Communities Organized to Prevent Arboviruses project in Ponce, Puerto Rico, to measure entomological and epidemiological effects of reducing Aedes aegypti populations using Wolbachia incompatible insect technique. We packed and shipped Wolbachia-males from California and released them into 19 treatment clusters from September 2020 to December 2020. Preliminary evaluation revealed sub-optimal Wolbachia-male densities and impact on the wild-type population. In 2021, we shifted to a phased release strategy starting in four clusters, reducing the mosquito population by 49% (CI 29-63%). We describe the investigation into male quality and other factors that may have limited the impact of Wolbachia-male releases. Laboratory assays showed a small but significant impact of packing and shipping on male fitness. However, mark-release-recapture assessments suggest that male daily survival rates in the field may have been significantly impacted. We compared induced-sterility levels and suppression of the wild population and found patterns consistent with mosquito population compensation in response to our intervention. Analysis of epidemiological impact was not possible due to very low viral transmission rates during the intervention period. Our entomological impact data provide evidence that Wolbachia incompatible-male releases reduced Ae. aegypti populations, although efficacy will be maximized when releases are part of an integrated control program. With improvement of shipping vessels and shipped male fitness, packing and shipping male mosquitoes could provide a key solution for expanding access to this technology. Our project underscores the challenges involved in large and complex field effectiveness assessments of novel vector control methods.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

A heat-switch-based electrocaloric cooler is reported in this letter. The device consists of two silicon heat switches and an electrocaloric module based on BaTO3 multilayer capacitors (MLCs). To operate the cooler, the heat switches are actuated synchronously with the application of electric fields across the MLCs. Heat flux versus temperature lift is fully characterized. With an electric field strength of 277 kV/cm, the system achieves a maximum heat flux of 36 mW and maximum temperature lift of greater than 0.3 °C, close to the expected MLC adiabatic temperature change of 0.5 °C. The cooler is shown to work reliably over thousands of actuation cycles.

A recent trend in intelligent machines and manufacturing has been toward reconfigurable manufacturing systems. Such systems move away from a fixed factory line executing an unchanging set of operations and toward the goal of an adaptable factory structure. The logical next challenge in this area is that of online reconfigurability. With this capability, machines can reconfigure while running, enable or disable capabilities in real time, and respond quickly to changes in the system or the environment (including faults). We propose an approach to achieving online reconfigurability based on a high level of system modularity supported by integrated, model‐based planning and control software. Our software capitalizes on many advanced techniques from the artificial intelligence research community, particularly in model‐based domain‐independent planning and scheduling, heuristic search, and temporal resource reasoning. We describe the implementation of this design in a prototype highly modular, parallel printing system.