Hierarchically porous polymeric materials from ternary polymer blends

Hierarchically porous polymers with controllable pore size were generated through a novel polymer blending strategy in an A/B/C–B–C ternary blend system. Polylactide/high-density polyethylene/poly(styrene-ethylene/butylene-styrene) triblock copolymer (PLA/HDPE/SEBS) was used as a model system to demonstrate this technique. During melt blending, the SEBS was driven into the HDPE phase owing to the presence of the PE block in the copolymer. With proper volume fractions of PLA/HDPE/SEBS (e.g., 50/25/25), a bi-modal, dual co-continuous morphology was obtained and hierarchically porous polymeric materials were further generated by selectively removing the PLA and SEBS phases. Annealing and compositional variation were further employed to control the pore size and it is shown that the length scales of the two co-continuous morphologies can be controlled independently.     

Low Replicative Stress Triggers Cell-Type Specific Inheritable Advanced Replication Timing

DNA replication timing (RT), reflecting the temporal order of origin activation, is known as a robust and conserved cell-type specific process. Upon low replication stress, the slowing of replication forks induces well-documented RT delays associated to genetic instability, but it can also generate RT advances that are still uncharacterized. In order to characterize these advanced initiation events, we monitored the whole genome RT from six independent human cell lines treated with low doses of aphidicolin. We report that RT advances are cell-type-specific and involve large heterochromatin domains. Importantly, we found that some major late to early RT advances can be inherited by the unstressed next-cellular generation, which is a unique process that correlates with enhanced chromatin accessibility, as well as modified replication origin landscape and gene expression in daughter cells. Collectively, this work highlights how low replication stress may impact cellular identity by RT advances events at a subset of chromosomal domains.     

Microrobots Derived from Variety Plant Pollen Grains for Efficient Environmental Clean Up and as an Anti‐Cancer Drug Carrier

The production of large quantities of micromachines and microrobots is limited by fabrication methods and the use of synthetic templates. Pollen is one of the most stable structures in the world, capable of surviving harsh treatment and for millions of years. Pollen grains are available in large variety of shapes and sizes. The use of a wide variety of naturally abundant, nontoxic pollen grains for the efficient fabrication of platinum‐pollen (Pt‐pollen) hybrid microrobots capable of fast propulsion for environmental and biomedical applications is demonstrated. Nine different pollen grains are selected and modified (dandelion, pine, lotus, sunflower, poppy, camellia, lycopodium, cattail, and galla) to demonstrate the robustness of different types of pollen grains for potential applications in environmental remediation. The efficient mobility rendered by the fabricated microrobots enhances their performance in the removal of heavy metals in aqueous medium. Furthermore, they can be used as doxorubicin carriers.     

Tailoring Metal/TiO2 Interface to Influence Motion of Light‐Activated Janus Micromotors

Catalytic light‐powered micromotors have become a major focus in current autonomous self‐propelled micromotors research. The attractiveness of such machines stems from the fact that these motors are “fuel‐free,” with their motion modulated by light irradiation. In order to study how different metals affect the velocities of metal/TiO₂ micromachines in the presence of UV irradiation in pure water, Pt/TiO₂, Cu/TiO₂, Fe/TiO₂, Ag/TiO₂, and Au/TiO₂ Janus micromotors are prepared. The metals have different chemical potentials and catalytic effects toward water splitting reaction, with both the effects expected to alter the photoelectrochemically‐induced reaction and propulsion rates. Analysis of structures, elemental compositions, motion patterns, velocities, and overall performances of different metals (Pt, Au, Ag, Fe, Cu) on TiO₂ are observed by scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X‐ray spectroscopy, and optical microscopy. Electrochemical Tafel analysis is performed for the different metal/TiO₂ structures and it is concluded that the effective velocity is a result of the synergistic effect of chemical potential and catalysis. It is found that the Pt/TiO₂ Janus micromotors exhibit the fastest motion compared to the rest of the prepared materials. Furthermore, after exposure to UV light, every fabricated micromotor shows high possibility of forming assembled chains which influence their velocity.     

Fibers from fruit by-products enhance probiotic viability and fatty acid profile and increase CLA content in yoghurts

This study evaluated the effect of the supplementation of total dietary fiber from apple, banana or passion fruit processing by-products on the post-acidification, total titratable acidity, bacteria counts and fatty acid profiles in skim milk yoghurts co-fermented by four different probiotics strains: Lactobacillus acidophilus L10 and Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis BL04, HN019 and B94. Apple and banana fibers increased the probiotic viability during shelf-life. All the fibers were able to increase the short chain and polyunsaturated fatty acid contents of yoghurts compared to their respective controls. A synergistic effect between the type of fiber and the probiotic strain on the conjugated linoleic acid content was observed, and the amount of α-linolenic acid was increased by banana fiber. The results of this study demonstrate, for the first time, that fruit fibers can improve the fatty acid profile of probiotic yoghurts and point out the suitability of using fibers from fruit processing the by-products to develop new high value-added fermented dairy products.     

Mobility of queued call requests of a new call-queueing techniquefor cellular systems

A queueing algorithm for new call requests has been proposed to increase the system capacity of traditional fixed channel allocation (FCA) handoff channel reservation schemes. However, mobility of queued call requests was ignored in previous literature. In this paper, a detailed analysis on the effects of the mobility of queued call requests is included in the analytic model. This is important because we found that the mobiles with queued call requests are very likely to leave the cell before granted a free channel. Computer simulation is performed and the results are compared with the numerical ones. It is found that the mobility of the queued new call requests reduces the average queueing delay, but increases blocking probability generally     

Multimedia transmission in fiber-optic LANs using optical CDMA

In this paper, we address the problem of multimedia transmission in fiber-optic networks. We apply the code-division multiple-access (CDMA) technique for such a network. The necessary conditions for successful operation of the network are given. It is shown that for successful operation, new families of optical orthogonal codes (OOCs) are needed which will have not only good correlation properties within one code family, but also between families of different code lengths. Some possible constructions of multimedia OOCs and the corresponding basic structure of the receiver for the multimedia network are given. Specific examples of OOCs for the case of users with two different data rates are given, and the probability of error (using the Gaussian approximation) as a function of the number of low and high rate users is calculated     

Variable rate adaptive modulation for DS-CDMA

An adaptive coding scheme is introduced for a discrete sequence code-division multiple-access system. The system uses noncoherent M-ary orthogonal modulation with RAKE receiver and power control. Both a fast fading channel and a combined fast fading, shadowing and power control channel are considered. Analytical bounds and simulations are done to evaluate the performance of the system. It is found that there is significant improvement in the average throughput and the bit-error-rate performance in the adaptive coding scheme. The amount of improvement drops with the increase of diversity branches used. More importantly, it is found that adaptive coding scheme is relatively robust to shadowing, while fix-rate codes are ineffective in the shadowing environment. Finally, adaptive coding scheme is found to be robust to mobile speed, feedback delay, and finite interleaving depth     

Investigation of mode coupling in low and high NA step index plastic optical fibres using the Langevin equation

By employing the Langevin equation, we have examined a mode coupling in low and high NA step index plastic optical fibres. The numerical integration of the Langevin equation is based on the computer-simulated Langevin force. The solution matches the experimental data reported previously. We have shown that by solving the Langevin equation (stochastic differential equation) one can treat a mode coupling in multimode low and high NA step index plastic optical fibres, which is the result of fibre's intrinsic random perturbations.