Water‐Dispersible,pH‐Stable and Highly‐Luminescent Organic Dye Nanoparticles with Amplified Emissions for In Vitro and In Vivo Bioimaging

A new strategy is presented for using doped small‐molecule organic nanoparticles (NPs) to achieve high‐performance fluorescent probes with strong brightness, large Stokes shifts and tunable emissions for in vitro and in vivo imaging. The host organic NPs are used not only as carriers to encapsulate different doped dyes, but also as fluorescence resonance energy transfer donors to couple with the doped dyes (as acceptors) to achieve multicolor luminescence with amplified emissions (AE). The resulting optimum green emitting NPs show high brightness with quantum yield (QY) of up to 45% and AE of 12 times; and the red emitting NPs show QY of 14% and AE of 10 times. These highly‐luminescent doped NPs can be further surface modified with poly(maleic anhydride‐alt‐1‐octadecene)‐polyethylene glycol (C18PMH‐PEG), endowing them with excellent water dispersibility and robust stability in various bio‐environments covering wide pH values from 2 to 10. In this study, cytotoxicity studies and folic acid targeted cellular imaging of these multicolor probes are carried out to demonstrate their potential for in vitro imaging. On this basis, applications of the NP probes in in vivo and ex vivo imaging are also investigated. Intense fluorescent signals of the doped NPs are distinctly, selectively and spatially resolved in tumor sites with high sensitivity, due to the preferential accumulation of the NPs in tumor sites through the passive enhanced permeability and retention effect. The results clearly indicate that these doped NPs are promising fluorescent probes for biomedical applications.     

Metallic Conductive Nanowires Elaborated by PVD Metal Deposition on Suspended DNA Bundles

Metallic conductive nanowires (NWs) with DNA bundle core are achieved, thanks to an original process relying on double‐stranded DNA alignment and physical vapor deposition (PVD) metallization steps involving a silicon substrate. First, bundles of DNA are suspended with a repeatable process between 2 µm high parallel electrodes with separating gaps ranging from 800 nm to 2 µm. The process consists in the drop deposition of a DNA lambda‐phage solution on the electrodes followed by a naturally evaporation step. The deposition process is controlled by the DNA concentration within the buffer solution, the drop volume, and the electrode hydrophobicity. The suspended bundles are finally metallized with various thicknesses of titanium and gold by a PVD e‐beam evaporation process. The achieved NWs have a width ranging from a few nanometers up to 100 nm. The electrical behavior of the achieved 60 and 80 nm width metallic NWs is shown to be Ohmic and their intrinsic resistance is estimated according to different geometrical models of the NW section area. For the 80 nm width NWs, a resistance of about few ohms is established, opening exploration fields for applications in microelectronics.     

Influence of the build orientation on the fatigue strength of EOS maraging steel produced by additive metal machine

This paper presents a research dealing with the dependence of the fatigue strength of maraging steel parts, manufactured by direct selective laser sintering, on the production build orientation. Three sets of specimens have been manufactured according to the ISO 1143 Standard (2010) by EOSINT M280 additive manufacturing machine, with the following heat and mechanical treatments, in agreement with the recommendations by the material manufacturer and current literature. The expected outcomes are the Fatigue Limit values of the material and the maximum number of cycles observed at different stress levels for three different build orientations (three different angles, 0°, 45° and 90°, between the build direction and the longitudinal axis of the samples). The results have been processed and compared by statistical methods in order to determine the fatigue curves in the finite life domain and the fatigue limits, along with their confidence bands and intervals, and to investigate the significance of the build orientation factor.     

Influence of surface recrystallization on the low cycle fatigue behaviour of a single crystal superalloy

This paper investigated the effect of surface recrystallization (RX) on the low cycle fatigue (LCF) behaviour of a single crystal (SX) superalloy. LCF tests on both raw and recrystallized samples showed that fatigue life was significantly reduced by surface RX. Fractography indicated that fatigue cracks initiated from the casting defects in RX layer and multiple crack initiations were commonly observed. Moreover, RX grains exhibited predominantly transgranular cracking, in contrast to the intergranular fracture reported in literature. The fatigue crack propagation behaviour was discussed in light of fracture mechanics and crack growth life model. The fatigue cycles required to penetrate RX layer were estimated to be about one magnitude lower than that in forming an equivalent crack in SX specimens. It is suggested that the earlier crack initiation and promoted crack propagation in RX layer, as well as the trend of multiple initiations, are responsible for the fatigue degradation by RX.     

Selective Coloration of Melanin Nanospheres through Resonant Mie Scattering

Black melanin inks are prepared to selectively exhibit colors under strong light, inspired by human hair. High absorbance of melanin suppresses multiple scattering, causing resonant Mie scattering predominant. Various colors can be developed as the resonant wavelength dictated by nanosphere diameter. Therefore, the melanin inks can be used to encrypt and selectively disclose multicolor patterns for anticounterfeiting applications.     

Decomposition of singular large sparse matrix by adding dummy links and dummy degrees

Abstract

This paper proposes a simple scheme to decompose an n×n nonpositive definite matrix, A, associated with simultaneous equations, A X = B, into a triple‐factors (lower triangular, diagonal, and upper triangular matrices), i.e., Å = L D U, without interchanging rows or columns of A, but with A expanded with new rows and new columns to an m×m matrix Å. Whenever a near‐zero diagonal element, say ā_ii , is encountered and used as a pivoting element, an appropriate positive real number, say p, is added to this diagonal element, and a new term —px_k is also added to the i‐th equation, where x_k is a new variable called “dummy variable'’. If we also add a new equation —px_i + px_k = 0 to enforce the new added variable x_k equal to x_i then the modified i‐th equation has the same effect as the original equation. Therefore, the original solution X can be found directly from the expanded solution of the modified expanded equation. The method is very useful in solving the following problems: (1) nonlinear problems near the limit state, (2) postbuckling analysis, (3) system equations with constraint conditions, and (4) getting eigenvectors from eigenvalues.