Structural and mechanical properties of advanced polymer gels with rigid side-chains using coarse-grained molecular dynamics

Computational modeling was utilized to design complex polymer networks and gels which display enhanced and tunable mechanical properties. Our approach focuses on overcoming traditional design limitations often encountered in the formulation of simple, single polymer networks. Here, we use a coarse-grained model to study an end-linked flexible polymer network diluted with branched polymer solvent chains, where the latter chains are composed of rigid side-chains or “spikes” attached to a flexible backbone. In order to reduce the entropy penalty of the flexible polymer chains these rigid “spikes” will aggregate into clusters, but the extent of aggregation was shown to depend on the size and distribution of the rigid side-chains. When the “spikes” are short, we observe a lower degree of aggregation, while long “spikes” will aggregate to form an additional secondary network. As a result, the tensile relaxation modulus of the latter system is considerably greater than the modulus of conventional gels and is approximately constant, forming an equilibrium zone for a broad range of time. In this system, the attached long “spikes” create a continuous phase that contributes to a simultaneous increase in tensile stress, relaxation modulus and fracture resistance. Elastic properties and deformation mechanisms of these branched polymers were also studied under tensile deformation at various strain rates. Through this study we show that the architecture of this branched polymer can be optimized and thus the elastic properties of these advanced polymer networks can be tuned for specific applications.     

Metabolomics profiling of cell culture media leading to the identification of riboflavin photosensitized degradation of tryptophan causing slow growth in cell culture

As more protein biopharmaceuticals are produced using mammalian cell culture techniques, it becomes increasingly important for the biopharmaceutical industry to have tools to characterize the cell culture media and evaluate its impact on the cell culture performance. Exposure of the cell culture media to light, temperature stress, or adventitious introduction of low-level organisms during preparation can lead to the generation of chemical degradants or metabolites of the media components, which are potentially detrimental to the cell culture process. In this work, we applied a liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry based metabolomics methodology for the investigation of a media lot used for a mammalian cell culture process that had resulted in low growth rate and failure to meet required viable cell density (VCD). The study led to the observation of increased levels of tryptophan oxidation products and a riboflavin degradant, lumichrome, in the malfunctioning media lot, relative to working media lots. A compound found 7-fold higher in the working media lots appeared to be tetrahydropentoxyline, a condensation product of glucose and tryptophan. A second compound found at an over 50-fold higher level in the malfunctioning media lot with a proposed molecular formula of C(21)H(17)N(3)O(3) from high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) analysis remains unknown, although it is confirmed to be a degradant of tryptophan in the media. A study of the cell culture media performed under stress conditions using fluorescent light and heat showed that the media powder was highly resistant to light-induced degradation, while solution media could be easily degraded after brief light exposure. It is therefore suspected that inadvertent exposure of the media to light during preparation and storage has resulted in the poor performance of the media causing the low growth and VCD in the cell culture process.     

Centaurus: An Infrastructure for Service Management in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

In the near future, we will see dramatic changes in computing and networking hardware. A large number of devices (e.g., phones, PDAs, even small household appliances) will become computationally enabled. Micro/nano sensors will be widely embedded in most engineered artifacts, from the clothes we wear to the roads we drive on. All of these devices will be (wirelessly) networked using Bluetooth, IEEE 802.15 or IEEE 802.11 for short range connectivity creating pervasive environments. In this age where a large number of wirelessly networked appliances and devices are becoming commonplace, there is a necessity for providing a standard interface to them that is easily accessible by any user. This paper outlines the design of Centaurus, an infrastructure for presenting services to heterogeneous mobile clients in a physical space via some short range wireless links. The infrastructure is communication medium independent; we have implemented the system over Bluetooth, CDPD and Infrared, three well-known wireless technologies. All the components in our model use a language based on Extensible Markup Language (XML) for communication, giving the system a uniform and easily adaptable interface. Centaurus defines a uniform infrastructure for heterogeneous services, both hardware and software, to be made available to diverse mobile users within a confined space.     

The National Fund of the Republic of Kazakhstan (NFRK): From accumulation to stress-test to global future

Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF) have different titles, goals and rules, but they share the underlying objective of helping governments deal with the problems created by large and variable revenues (mainly from energy or other commodity related sectors). In Kazakhstan, such a fund (the National Fund of the Republic of Kazakhstan (NFRK)) was established in 2000. This fund operates as both a stabilisation and a savings fund. The first test for the NFRK was 2007–2009 financial crisis, where the NFRK “saved” the economy and guarantied its speedy recovery. The paper analyses the NFRK's operation up to 2007 and during the crisis years 2007–9, before drawing conclusions and implications for the future. Between 2001 and 2007 the NFRK conservatively accumulated assets, which proved to be useful in limiting the impact of the post-2007 crisis. However, the pre-2007 experience indicated structural weaknesses associated with discretionary executive authority and non-transparency. The paper concludes by observing that this history has created significant challenges for the future.     

Motivations for dieting: Drive for thinness is different from drive for objective thinness.

Drive for thinness is a cardinal feature of bulimia nervosa. However, the widely used Drive for Thinness (DFT) subscale of the Eating Disorder Inventory (Garner, 2004; Garner, Olmstead, & Polivy, 1983) appears to measure a desire to be thinner, not a desire to be objectively thin. We developed the Drive for Objective Thinness (DFOT) Scale and compared unrestrained and restrained eaters and those with bulimia nervosa on the DFT subscale, Goldfarb's Fear of Fat Scale (GFFS; Goldfarb, Dykens, & Gerrard, 1983), and the DFOT Scale. Restrained eaters had higher scores than unrestrained eaters on the DFT subscale and the GFFS, but both groups had low scores on the DFOT Scale. Only the group with bulimia nervosa showed elevated scores on the DFOT Scale. We conclude that restrained eaters diet mostly to avoid weight gain, that individuals with bulimia nervosa diet to achieve thinness and avoid fatness, and that the drive for objective thinness is a unique feature of bulimia nervosa. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual selection contributes to artists' advantages in realistic drawing.

To test a venerable explanation for artists' drawing ability, superior skill at visual selection, artists and nonartists traced a photograph of a face using 70 pieces of tape—not enough to depict everything. Artists and nonartists judged the drawings on accuracy. A mixed-model analysis of variance yielded a reliable advantage for artist drawers, no main effect of judge group, and a strong interaction, in which artist judges' ratings distinguished artist versus nonartist drawers, but nonartist judges' ratings did not. Thus, artists appear to make superior decisions about what to include in drawings and are also more sensitive to others' decisions. In a second study, using the same task, nonartists drew upright or inverted faces. An interaction was found in which artist judges rated faces drawn inverted as more accurate than faces drawn upright, but nonartist judges' ratings showed no differences. Results are discussed in terms of reconciling top-down and bottom-up accounts of skilled drawing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Extensions to the C programming language for enhanced fault detection

The acceptance of the C programming language by academia and industry is partially responsible for the ‘software crisis’. The simple, trusting semantics of C mask many common faults, such as range violations, which would be detected and reported at run-time by programs coded in a robust language such as Ada.

1 Ada is a registered trademark of the U.S. Government (Ada Joint Program Office)

This needlessly complicates the debugging of C programs. Although the assert macro lets programmers add run-time consistency checks to their programs, the number of instantiations of this macro needed to make a C program robust makes it highly unlikely that any programmer could correctly perform the task. We make some unobtrusive extensions to the C language which support the efficient detection of faults at run-time without reducing the readability of the source code. Examples of the extensions are automatic checking of error codes returned by library routines, constrained subtypes and detection of references to uninitialized and/or non-existent array elements.     

Integrating service discovery with routing and session management for ad-hoc networks

In this paper, we propose GSR: a new routing and session management protocol for ad-hoc networks as an integral part of a service discovery infrastructure. Traditional approaches place routing at a layer below service discovery. While this distinction is appropriate for wired networked services, we argue that in ad-hoc networks this layering is not as meaningful and show that integrating routing with discovery infrastructure increases system efficiency. Central to our protocol is the idea of reusing the path created by the combination of a service discovery request and a service advertisement for data transmission. This precludes the need to use separate routing and discovery protocols. GSR also combines transport layer features and provides end-to-end session management that detects disconnections, link and node failures and enables service-centric session redirection to handle failures. This enables GSR to accommodate service-centric routing apart from the traditional node-centric routing. We compare GSR with AODV in terms of packet delivery ratio, response time and average number of hops traveled by service requests as well as data. GSR achieves better packet delivery ratio with a minor increase of the average packet delivery delay.     

Combination of Ozonation and the Fenton Processes for Landfill Leachate Treatment: Evaluation of Treatment Efficiency

Single processes such as ozonation, ozone/hydrogen peroxide, Fenton and several combined treatment schemes were applied for leachate collected from a waste disposal site. The implementation of combined Fenton and ozonation processes resulted in the highest chemical oxygen demand removal (77% from initial value) among all the treatment methods applied, while biodegradability improvement was observed during the Fenton pre-treatment only. Some decrease of chemical oxygen demand was obtained during the single ozonation or combined schemes including ozone resulting in slight if any biodegradability improvement. The addition of hydrogen peroxide to ozonation did not enhance chemical oxygen demand, dissolved organic carbon or biochemical oxygen demand removal compared to ozone alone. Ferric chloride coagulation used as a pre-treatment stage did not improve subsequent chemical oxygen demand removal by ozonation or the Fenton processes. Taking into account the effective chemical oxygen demand, dissolved organic carbon removal and biodegradability improvement the single Fenton process seems to be a preferable treatment method for the leachate treatment. Some reduction in toxicity to Daphnia magna was observed after the application of the studied treatment methods.