Why Are Biological Systems Homochiral?

Self-assembling and self-organizable dendrons, dendrimers, and dendronized polymers produce chiral supramolecular architectures that have been developed as biological mimics. Here we review our work on the self-assembly of homochiral, heterochiral, and racemic dendritic dipeptides, and address one of the most fundamental questions of biological systems: Why are biological systems homochiral and not heterochiral or racemic and, if they were heterochiral or racemic, how would they look and function by comparison with contemporary homochiral biological systems?     

Difference in hydrophobic and hydrophilic multilayered systems

Functional clothing, sportswear and military uniforms, are mainly made of polyester or cotton fabrics for dealing with sweat absorption and heat transfer produced by the human body. The human body typically wears two or three garments, such as innerwear, T-shirt, and jacket, thus comprising a multilayered system. Garments’ responses to heat transfer and vapor flow differ depending on whether their physical structures are hydrophobic or hydrophilic. Hence, this study analyzes differences in heat transfer and vapor flow, induced by the human body covered with multilayered garment systems, consisting of three polyester or cotton layers. In particular, it verifies three differences in the heat transfer and relative humidity, amount of relative humidity, and response time of thermal equilibrium in multilayered systems by using a new measurement system, “H&M evaluation device”. Resultant data provide precise information regarding several differences in hydrophilic and hydrophobic multilayered fabric systems.     

The use of network delay estimation for multimedia data retrieval

Multimedia data have specific temporal presentation requirements. For example in video conferencing applications the voice and images of the participants must be delivered and presented synchronously. These requirements can be achieved by scheduling or managing system resources. We present a technique called limited a priori scheduling (LAP) to manage the delivery channel from source to destination for digital multimedia data. By using delay estimation a LAP scheduler can retrieve stored digital media spanning arbitrary networks with unspecified delays. The use of delay estimation also facilitates selective degradation of service in bandwidth and buffer limited situations. Such degradation enables the continuous real-time playout and synchronization of various media arriving from different sources. The performance of the LAP scheduler is described based on implementation and experimentation using Ethernet     

Realizing the hydrogen economy through Semantic Web technologies

Diminishing reserves of cheap, recoverable crude oil, together with increasing tensions between the Middle East and the West, will likely threaten our access to affordable oil in the future. Alternative fossil fuels such as coal, tar sand, and heavy oil will only worsen global warming. Hydrogen, however, is plentiful and clean, stores energy more effectively than batteries, burns twice as efficiently in a fuel cell as gasoline does in an internal-combustion engine, leaves only water behind, and can power cars. But many challenges remain before fuel cells will replace oil and other fossil fuels. Overcoming these challenges requires a deep understanding of the components' microscopic structure, detailed analytical information about how the various components interact, and the ability to predict how the components will perform under load conditions. To solve these problems, materials scientists are turning to knowledge management techniques, particularly Semantic Web technologies, to make sense of and assimilate the vast amounts of microstructural, performance, and manufacturing data that they acquire during their research.     

A real-time robotic model of human reference resolution using visual constraints

Evidence from recent psycholinguistic experiments suggests that humans resolve reference incrementally in the presence of constraining visual context. In this paper, we present and evaluate a computational model of human reference resolution that directly builds a semantic interpretation of an utterance without the need for a separate syntactic analysis phase, which typically involves the construction of parse trees. The model is implemented on a robot using real audio and video inputs, (thus it operates in real time), and is distributed over several computers, which run in parallel. Results from experiments with the model confirm the viability of the algorithm to process semantic interpretations, in particular reference incrementally, as demonstrated to be employed by humans.     

Use of X-ray fluorescence for sorting vinyl from other packaging materials in municipal solid waste

X-ray fluorescence of the chlorine atom is a suitable method for identifying vinyl in a mixed plastics stream in municipal solid waste. The chlorine X-ray is weak and does not penetrate paper labels. There is also a rapid decrease in measured chlorine X-ray intensity as the sample is moved away from the X-ray source and detector which could be a potential problem for bottles of uneven shape.