94,403 research outputs found
DNA-coated Functional Oil Droplets
Many industrial soft materials often include oil-in-water (O/W) emulsions at
the core of their formulations. By using tuneable interface stabilizing agents,
such emulsions can self-assemble into complex structures. DNA has been used for
decades as a thermoresponsive highly specific binding agent between hard and,
recently, soft colloids. Up until now, emulsion droplets functionalized with
DNA had relatively low coating densities and were expensive to scale up. Here a
general O/W DNA-coating method using functional non-ionic amphiphilic block
copolymers, both diblock and triblock, is presented. The hydrophilic
polyethylene glycol ends of the surfactants are functionalized with azides,
allowing for efficient, dense and controlled coupling of dibenzocyclooctane
functionalized DNA to the polymers through a strain-promoted alkyne-azide click
reaction. The protocol is readily scalable due to the triblock's commercial
availability. Different production methods (ultrasonication, microfluidics and
membrane emulsification) are used with different oils (hexadecane and silicone
oil) to produce functional droplets in various size ranges (sub-micron, and ), showcasing the generality of
the protocol. Thermoreversible sub-micron emulsion gels, hierarchical
"raspberry" droplets and controlled droplet release from a flat DNA-coated
surface are demonstrated. The emulsion stability and polydispersity is
evaluated using dynamic light scattering and optical microscopy. The generality
and simplicity of the method opens up new applications in soft matter and
biotechnological research and industrial advances.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl
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Ubiquitous Internet in an integrated satellite-terrestrial environment: The SUITED solution
yesThe current Internet architecture appears to
not be particularly suited to addressing the
emerging needs of new classes of users who wish
to gain access to multimedia services made available
by ISPs, regardless of their location, while
in motion and with a guaranteed level of quality.
One of the main objectives of so-called nextgeneration
systems is to overcome the limitations
of today¿s available Internet by adopting an
approach based on the integration of different
mobile and fixed networks. The SUITED project
moves in this direction since it aims at contributing
to the design and deployment of the global
mobile broadband system (GMBS), a unique
satellite/terrestrial infrastructure ensuring
nomadic users access to Internet services with a
negotiated QoS. A description of the main features
of the GMBS architecture, characterized
by the integration of a multisegment access network
with a federated ISP network is given in
this article. The GMBS multimode terminal is
schematically described, and an overview of the
so-called QoS-aware mobility management
scheme, devised for such a heterogeneous scenario,is provided
Cross-Kerr-based information transfer processes
The realization of nonclassical states is an important task for many
applications of quantum information processing. Usually, properly tailored
interactions, different from goal to goal, are considered in order to
accomplish specific tasks within the general framework of quantum state
engineering. In this paper we remark on the flexibility of a cross-Kerr
nonlinear coupling in hybrid systems as an important ingredient in the
engineering of nonclassical states. The general scenario we consider is the
implementation of high cross-Kerr nonlinearity in cavity-quantum
electrodynamics. In this context, we discuss the possibility of performing
entanglement transfer and swapping between a qubit and a continuous-variable
state. The recently introduced concept of entanglement reciprocation is also
considered and shown to be possible with our scheme. We reinterpret some of our
results in terms of applications of a generalized Ising interaction to systems
of different nature.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, RevTeX
Does training with amplitude modulated tones affect tone-vocoded speech perception?
Temporal-envelope cues are essential for successful speech perception. We asked here whether training on stimuli containing temporal-envelope cues without speech content can improve the perception of spectrally-degraded (vocoded) speech in which the temporal-envelope (but not the temporal fine structure) is mainly preserved. Two groups of listeners were trained on different amplitude-modulation (AM) based tasks, either AM detection or AM-rate discrimination (21 blocks of 60 trials during two days, 1260 trials; frequency range: 4Hz, 8Hz, and 16Hz), while an additional control group did not undertake any training. Consonant identification in vocoded vowel-consonant-vowel stimuli was tested before and after training on the AM tasks (or at an equivalent time interval for the control group). Following training, only the trained groups showed a significant improvement in the perception of vocoded speech, but the improvement did not significantly differ from that observed for controls. Thus, we do not find convincing evidence that this amount of training with temporal-envelope cues without speech content provide significant benefit for vocoded speech intelligibility. Alternative training regimens using vocoded speech along the linguistic hierarchy should be explored
Challenges encountered during acid resin transfer preparation of fossil fish from Monte Bolca, Italy
Copyright: Palaeontological Association May 2015.
This is an open access article, available to all readers online, published under a creative commons licensing (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The file attached is the published version of the article
Real-time detection of grid bulk transfer traffic
The current practice of physical science research has yielded a continuously growing demand for interconnection network bandwidth to support the sharing of large datasets. Academic research networks and internet service providers have provisioned their networks to handle this type of load, which generates prolonged, high-volume traffic between nodes on the network. Maintenance of QoS for all network users demands that the onset of these (Grid bulk) transfers be detected to enable them to be reengineered through resources specifically provisioned to handle this type of traffic. This paper describes a real-time detector that operates at full-line-rate on Gb/s links, operates at high connection rates, and can track the use of ephemeral or non-standard ports
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