80 years of electrospinning

Electrospinning is a relatively simple fibre-forming process and offers a unique method to produce nanofibers. The process exists at this moment 80 years and has seen a very turbulent history. There is a need to see what actually happened in this history. We have taken a brief look in the history of electrospinning. This paper is reporting on some of the aspects that electrospinning encountered. It is crucial to see that electrospinning has been used in different countries in different time periods. The history of electrospinning is mainly characterised by bad timing. The future of electrospinning looks however quit bright

Predicting drug penetration across the blood-brain barrier: comparison of micellar liquid chromatography and immobilized artificial membrane liquid chromatography

Several in vitro methods have been investigated for mimicking drug penetration across the blood-brain barrier (BBB) into the central nervous system (CNS). Both micellar liquid chromatography (MLC) and immobilized artificial membrane (IAM) liquid chromatography were tested in this contribution in order to construct models for BBB transfer prediction. MLC measurements were performed on a C18-column with sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), polyoxyethylene (23) lauryl ether (Brij35) or sodium deoxycholate (SDC) as surfactants in the micellar mobile phase. IAM liquid chromatography measurements were performed with a Dulbecco’s phosphate-buffered saline (DPBS) and a certain percentage of methanol as organic modifier in the mobile phase. This study aimed to obtain a high correlation between in vivo and predicted log BB values (= concentration of the drug molecule in the brain to concentration in the blood)

Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary. The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users' needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services

The next frontier of the anaerobic digestion microbiome : from ecology to process control

The anaerobic digestion process has been one of the key processes for renewable energy recovery from organic waste streams for over a century. The anaerobic digestion microbiome is, through the continuous development of novel techniques, evolving from a black box to a well-defined consortium, but we are not there yet. In this perspective, I provide my view on the current status and challenges of the anaerobic digestion microbiome, as well as the opportunities and solutions to exploit it. I consider identification and fingerprinting of the anaerobic digestion microbiome as complementary tools to monitor the anaerobic digestion microbiome. However, data availability, method-inherent biases and correct taxa identification hamper the accuracy and reproducibility of anaerobic digestion microbiome characterization. Standardisation of microbiome research in anaerobic digestion and other engineered systems will be essential in the coming decades, for which I proposed some targeted solutions. These will bring anaerobic digestion from a single-purpose energy-recovery technology to a versatile process for integrated resource recovery. It is my opinion that the exploitation of the microbiome will be a driver of innovation, and that it has a key role to play in the bio-based economy of the decades to come. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences

Tales of the Lost Worlds: An Immersive Audio Approach to Storytelling

The purpose of ‘Tales of the Lost Worlds: An Immersive Audio Approach to Storytelling’ is to compile an online immersive audio portfolio of three short stories made for YouTube and Facebook. The material is a mixture of pre-existing and new audio and visuals, each focused on an original story. The motivation behind this research is to consolidate a storytelling approach utilizing immersive audio to enrich the experience of a surrealistic world. A variety of techniques and plugins have been researched in order to mix ambisonics. The result is a diverse and coherent portfolio that displays competence in immersive mixing and a future of captivating storytelling.https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-production-technology/1217/thumbnail.jp

Covid-19: why the emerging public debt crisis needs urgent engagement by parliamentarians

As parliaments around the world adjust to working remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic, Franklin De Vrieze argues that it is vital that they not only scrutinise governments’ public health policies, but also have a role in overseeing the ensuing new public debt, particularly in developing countries

Preparing for the roll-back of Covid-19 emergency legislation: what needs to be done?

The Covid-19 pandemic has led many countries across the world to pass emergency legislation, but is there a danger that this legislation could lead to a permanent loss of civil liberties? Franklin De Vrieze explains what has to be done to prepare for the roll-back of these measures