The roles of interlayer spacing and water in the drying shrinkage of tobermorite based materials

The roles of the interlayer spacing and water in the drying shrinkage of a hydrothermal lime-silica product have been investigated. In this work, changes in the length and weight of the specimens and the interlayer spacing of tobermorite crystals in them, have been recorded at varying drying conditions. The 11.3Å line of the tobermorite remained unaltered even when heated at 130°C. The major part of the drying shrinkage occured between 43% RH and drying at 105°C, though accompanied by a minor part of the water loss. The results show that the measured drying shrinkage of the material is not determined by any change in the interlayer characteristics of tobermorite. The results do not support the drying shrinkage mechanism proposed by Feldman and Sereda.     

Discrete shading of three-dimensional objects from medial axis transform

In this paper, we present a discrete shading technique using medial axis transform (MAT) of 3D binary image data based on digital generalized octagonal distances. Our method is computationally attractive as it does not require the explicit computation of surface normals. We have compared our results with images rendered from voxel and octree representations while using analytical surface rendered images as bench marks. The quality of rendering by our method is certainly superior to those obtained from voxel and octree representations.     

A dependency annotation scheme for Bangla treebank

Dependency grammar is considered appropriate for many Indian languages. In this paper, we present a study of the dependency relations in Bangla language. We have categorized these relations in three different levels, namely intrachunk relations, interchunk relations and interclause relations. Each of these levels is further categorized and an annotation scheme has been developed. Both syntactic and semantic features have been taken into consideration for describing the relations. In our scheme, there are 63 such syntactico–semantic relations. We have verified the scheme by tagging a corpus of 4167 Bangla sentences to create a treebank (KGPBenTreebank).     

An engineered virus as a bright fluorescent tag and scaffold for cargo proteins--capture and transport by gliding microtubules

We have demonstrated substantial capture and transport of fluorescently-labeled engineered cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV) using Drosophila kinesin-driven microtubules (MTs). The capture occurred through both NeutrAvidin (NA)-biotin and antibody (IgG)-antigen interactions. The MTs were derivatized with rabbit anti-chicken IgG or biotin, and the virus was conjugated with chicken IgG or NA. The CPMV conjugate was introduced into standard MT motility assays via convective flow at concentrations as high as 1.36 nM, and became bound to the MTs in densities as high as one virus per microm of MT length. When the CPMV conjugate was present at 17 pM, the average speed of the MTs bearing the NA-virus was 0.59 +/- 0.08 microm/sec, and that of those bearing IgG-virus was 0.52 +/- 0.15 microm/sec. These speeds are comparable to those of the unladen MTs (0.61 +/- 0.09 microm/sec), the presence of the virus on the MT causing only a small decrease in MT gliding speeds. The fluorescent CPMV appears to be superior to fluorescent polystyrene spheres of the same size, as both a reporter tag and a scaffold for MT-transported cargo proteins, because of its negligible non-specific adsorption and superior brightness. This work is important for the development of sensors based on nanolocomotion and biological recognition, or new strategies for the nanoassembly of biological structures.