Fine-scale analysis of biomineralized mollusc teeth using FIB and TEM

When it comes to mineral synthesis, there is a lot we can learn from nature. Although we can synthesize a range of materials in the laboratory, the experimental conditions are often constrained to particular ranges of temperature, pH, etc. Biological systems, on the other hand, seem to be able to produce individual minerals and complex composite mineral structures under a variety of conditions, many of which are far from those applied to create their synthetic counterparts. Understanding how nature does this could provide a means to produce novel biomimetic materials with potential applications in a diverse range of fields from medicine to materials engineering

Refraction of Electromagnetic Energy for Wave Packets Incident on a Negative Index Medium is Always Negative

We analyze refraction of electromagnetic wave packets on passing from an isotropic positive to an isotropic negative refractive index medium. We definitively show that in all cases the energy is always refracted negatively. For localized wave packets, the group refraction is also always negative.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Simulation of a periodic dielectric corrugation with an equivalent anisotropic layer

A periodic, corrugated, dielectric layer is simulated by an anisotropic dielectric layer of equal thickness. The tensor elements of the equivalent dielectric layer are given in terms of the permittivity of the dielectric material, the period of the surface corrugation, and the width of the corrugations. The validity of this technique is verified by comparing the reflection coefficient of the equivalent layer with that of the corresponding corrugated layer using the moment method. Employing a multiple layer approach, the technique is extended to handle periodic surfaces with arbitrary cross sections which can be used to design millimeter wave dielectric plate polarizers and absorbers.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44544/1/10762_2005_Article_BF01015940.pd

Mobile Service Clouds: A self-managing infrastructure for autonomic mobile computing services

Abstract. We recently introduced Service Clouds, a distributed infrastructure designed to facilitate rapid prototyping and deployment of autonomic communication services. In this paper, we propose a model that extends Service Clouds to the wireless edge of the Internet. This model, called Mobile Service Clouds, enables dynamic instantiation, composition, configuration, and reconfiguration of services on an overlay network to support mobile computing. We have implemented a prototype of this model and applied it to the problem of dynamically instantiating and migrating proxy services for mobile hosts. We conducted a case study involving data streaming across a combination of PlanetLab nodes, local proxies, and wireless hosts. Results are presented demonstrating the effectiveness of the prototype in establishing new proxies and migrating their functionality in response to node failures.