Active sites for outer-sphere, inner-sphere, and complex multistage electrochemical reactions at polycrystalline boron-doped diamond electrodes (pBDD) revealed with scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM)

The local rate of heterogeneous electron transfer (HET) at polycrystalline boron-doped diamond (pBDD) electrodes has been visualized at high spatial resolution for various aqueous electrochemical reactions, using scanning electrochemical cell microscopy (SECCM), which is a technique that uses a mobile pipet-based electrochemical cell as an imaging probe. As exemplar systems, three important classes of electrode reactions have been investigated: outer-sphere (one-electron oxidation of ferrocenylmethyltrimethylammonium (FcTMA(+))), inner-sphere (one-electron oxidation of Fe(2+)), and complex processes with coupled electron transfer and chemical reactions (oxidation of serotonin). In all cases, the pattern of reactivity is similar: the entire pBDD surface is electroactive, but there are variations in activity between different crystal facets which correlate directly with differences in the local dopant level, as visualized qualitatively by field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM). No evidence was found for enhanced activity at grain boundaries for any of the reactions. The case of serotonin oxidation is particularly interesting, as this process is known to lead to deterioration of the electrodes, because of blocking by reaction products, and therefore cannot be studied with conventional scanning electrochemical probe microscopy (SEPM) techniques. Yet, we have found this system nonproblematic to study, because the meniscus of the scanning pipet is only in contact with the surface investigated for a brief time and any blocking product is left behind as the pipet moves to a new location. Thus, SECCM opens up the possibility of investigating and visualizing much more complex heterogeneous electrode reactions than possible presently with other SEPM techniques.     

Molecular Beam Epitaxy Growth of HgCdTe on Large-Area Si and CdZnTe Substrates

This paper presents the status of HgCdTe growth on large-area Si and CdZnTe substrates at Raytheon Vision Systems (RVS). The different technological tools that were used to scale up the growth from 4 inch to 6 inch diameter on Si and from 4 cm × 4 cm to 8 cm × 8 cm on CdZnTe without sacrificing the quality of the layers are described. Extremely high compositional uniformity and low macrodefect density were achieved for single- and two-color HgCdTe layers on both Si and CdZnTe substrates. Finally, a few examples of detector and focal-plane array results are included to highlight the importance of high compositional uniformity and uniformly low macrodefect density of the epitaxial layers in obtaining high operability and low cluster outages in single- and two-color focal-plane arrays (FPAs).     

Extreme negative rake angle technique for single point diamond nano-cutting of silicon

Experiments were conducted to evaluate cuts made with the rake face of the tool and the clearance face. The technique involved cutting in the corresponding opposite directions, i.e., forward with the rake face and backward with the clearance face. Cutting of single crystal silicon with both the rake and the clearance face resulted in a smooth ductile cut, with no evidence of fracture. This cutting technique may prove useful for furthering our understanding of the ductile machining of brittle materials.     

Processed dietary plants demonstrate broad capacity for angiotensin converting enzyme and angiotensin II receptor binding inhibition in vitro

While the consumption of fruit and vegetables is protective against cardiovascular disease, the relative efficacy of specific plants is poorly substantiated. In addition, although most plants are consumed in a ‘processed’ state (i.e., including cooking), the bioactivity of processed forms of plants is also generally unknown. Effects on elements of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) were studied in a selection of 131 dietary plant species, fungi or varietals, across 44 families, after standardised processing. Products were tested for in vitro inhibition of angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) and of angiotensin II (AngII) binding to its receptor (AT₁R). The results indicated that ACE inhibition activity was weakly correlated with AngII to AT₁R inhibition and that ACE inhibitory activity was positively correlated with total polyphenolic content. These results highlight that processed forms of dietary plants exhibit broad capacity for in vitro modulation of RAS. Furthermore, considering the extensive ACE inhibitory activity reported for peptides derived from many dietary proteins, this implicates broad potential for RAS regulation by several dietary factors. With RAS elements also known to function in the gastro-intestinal (GI) tract, there is a need to understand the physiological role of dietary factors on GI function, blood pressure regulation and salt excretion.     

Bacterial biosynthesis of indole-3-acetic acid

Production of the phytohormone indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) is widespread among bacteria that inhabit the rhizosphere of plants. Several different IAA biosynthesis pathways are used by these bacteria, with a single bacterial strain sometimes containing more than one pathway. The level of expression of IAA depends on the biosynthesis pathway; the location of the genes involved, either on chromosomal or plasmid DNA, and their regulatory sequences; and the presence of enzymes that can convert active, free IAA into an inactive, conjugated form. The role of bacterial IAA in the stimulation of plant growth and phytopathogenesis is considered.     

Cigarette smoking predicts development of depressive symptoms among U.S. adolescents

Latent inhibition (LI) refers to retarded conditioning to a stimulus as a consequence of its nonreinforced preexposure. LI is impaired in acute schizophrenic patients and in rats treated with amphetamine. Neuroleptic drugs enhance LI, and this effect is selective and specific for this class of drugs. The present experiments tested the proposition that neuroleptic-induced enhancement of LI stems from decreased capacity of stimulus-preexposed animals to switch responding according to the new stimulus-reinforcement contingency in the conditioning stage. LI was assessed using an off-baseline conditioned emotional response (CER) procedure in rats licking for water, consisting of three stages: preexposure to the-to-be conditioned stimulus, tone; conditioning, in which the preexposed stimulus was paired with a foot-shock; and test, in which LI was indexed by animals' degree of suppression of licking during tone presentation. Whereas in previous studies that demonstrated LI enhancement by neuroleptics, preexposure consisted of 10 to 40 tones, and conditioning included two tone-shock pairings, the present experiments used 40 tone preexposures, followed by an extended conditioning stage with five tone-shock pairings. It was expected that under these conditions no LI effect would be evident in untreated animals, but that animals treated with a neuroleptic drug, either during the entire LI procedure or only in conditioning, would show LI. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that LI was obtained in rats treated with haloperidol (0.1 mg/kg in experiment 1, 0.03 and 0.2 mg/kg in experiment 2) but not in the untreated controls. Experiment 3 showed that the same outcome was obtained when haloperidol (0.1 mg/kg) administration was confined to the conditioning stage. Experiment 4 showed that clozapine (5 mg/kg)-treated animals showed LI when the drug was confined to conditioning, but not to the preexposure stage. The implications of these results for the mechanism of action of neuroleptic drugs are discussed.     

High-resolution velocity estimation for all-digital, AC servodrives

Because the position transducers commonly used in AC servo drives (optical encoders and electromagnetic resolvers) do not inherently produce a true, instantaneous velocity measurement that can be used for full closed-loop velocity and position control, some signal processing technique is generally used to estimate the velocity at each sample instant. This estimated signal is then used as the velocity feedback signal for the velocity loop control. The authors present an analysis of the limitations of such approaches and offer an approach that optimally estimates the velocity at each sample instant. The approach is shown to offer a significant improvement in command driven systems and to reduce the effect of quantized angular resolution, which limits the ultimate performance of all digital servo drives. The noise reduction is especially relevant for AC servo drives due to the high current loop bandwidths required for their correct operation. Improved measurement performance over a classical DC tachometer is demonstrated     

Monte Carlo planning for active object classification

Classifying objects in complex unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics and is fundamental in many applications. Modern sensors and sophisticated perception algorithms extract rich 3D textured information, but are limited to the data that are collected from a given location or path. We are interested in closing the loop around perception and planning, in particular to plan paths for better perceptual data, and focus on the problem of planning scanning sequences to improve object classification from range data. We formulate a novel time-constrained active classification problem and propose solution algorithms that employ a variation of Monte Carlo tree search to plan non-myopically. Our algorithms use a particle filter combined with Gaussian process regression to estimate joint distributions of object class and pose. This estimator is used in planning to generate a probabilistic belief about the state of objects in a scene, and also to generate beliefs for predicted sensor observations from future viewpoints. These predictions consider occlusions arising from predicted object positions and shapes. We evaluate our algorithms in simulation, in comparison to passive and greedy strategies. We also describe similar experiments where the algorithms are implemented online, using a mobile ground robot in a farm environment. Results indicate that our non-myopic approach outperforms both passive and myopic strategies, and clearly show the benefit of active perception for outdoor object classification.     

Collocation and galerkin finite element methods for viscoelastic fluid flow—II. Die swell problems with a free surface

The die swell problem occurs when a fluid flows down a capillary and is emitted into a gas which exerts negligible shear and normal forces on the jet. The die swell problem is solved for Newtonian and viscoelastic fluids. The viscoelastic fluids use a nonlinear Maxwell model but we report calculations for only a small elastic component. Both Galerkin and collocation Finite Element Methods are used and compared. The role of natural boundary conditions in the Galerkin method is compared to the pointwise satisfaction of boundary conditions in the collocation method.