Natural polymers as alternative consolidants for the preservation of waterlogged archaeological wood

In recent years there has been increased interest in examining alternative polymers for the conservation of archaeological artefacts, particularly waterlogged timbers, providing better, renewable, greener alternatives to poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG). The degradation of PEG consolidants in the timbers of the 16th century warship Mary Rose has been examined and the rheological and thermal properties of PEG has been compared to its monomethyl and dimethyl ethers and several polysaccharide consolidants (chitosan, guar and 2-hydroxyethyl cellulose) in order to evaluate their potential as alternative consolidants for the conservation of waterlogged wooden artefacts. Additionally, the effect of the polymers on the archaeological wood was characterised by thermogravimetric analysis and solid state NMR. The results suggest that the future of conservation technologies lies with polysaccharide consolidant materials, which show enhanced compatibility with wooden artefacts with no detectable side-effects while also being cheap, with extremely low toxicity, renewable and sustainably resourced.ZW and OAS acknowledge financial support from European Research Council Starting Investigators Grant (No. 240629, ASPiRe), the EPSRC and the Mary Rose Trust. ERJ thanks Dr. D. Reid for useful discussions on ssNMR techniques and the EPSRC for a doctoral training grant.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Maney via https://doi.org10.1179/2047058414Y.000000014

Our Administrative System of Criminal Justice

To commemorate our founding in 1914, the Board of Editors has selected six influential pieces published by the Law Review over the past 100 years and will republish one piece in each issue. The fourth piece selected by the Board is Our Administrative System of Criminal Justice, an article written by Gerard E. Lynch that is among the most cited works in the Law Review’s history. This article illustrates how the practice of plea bargaining blurs the boundaries between adversarial and inquisitorial criminal justice systems. Judge Lynch now sits on the Second Circuit having eventually succeeded the late Judge Joseph M. McLaughlin, who also is honored in the pages of this book for the permanent mark he left on Fordham Law School and the Law Review. We think it is fitting that the Law Review feature two of the many contributions that judges of the Second Circuit have made to legal education and scholarship in this issue

Interprofessional Faculty Development: Integration of Oral Health into the Geriatric Diabetes Curriculum, from Theory to Practice.

Georgia Dounis,1 Marcia Ditmyer,2 Susan VanBeuge,3 Sue Schuerman,4 Mildred McClain,1 Kiki Dounis,1,5 Connie Mobley21Department of Clinical Sciences, 2Department of Biomedical Sciences, 3Department of Physiological Nursing, 4Department of Physical Therapy, University of Nevada Las Vegas School of Dental Medicine, Las Vegas, NV, USA; 5Department of Family Medicine, University of Nevada School of Medicine, Reno, NV, USABackground: Health care workforce shortages and an increase demand for health care services by an older demographic challenged by oral–systemic conditions are being recognized across health care systems. Demands are placed on health care professionals to render coordinated delivery of services. Management of oral–systemic conditions requires a trained health care workforce to render interprofessional patient-centered and coordinated delivery of health care services. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the effectiveness of an interprofessional health care faculty training program.Methods: A statewide comprehensive type 2 diabetes training program was developed and offered to multidisciplinary health care faculty using innovative educational methods. Video-recorded clinically simulated patient encounters concentrated on the oral–systemic interactions between type 2 diabetes and comorbidities. Post-encounter instructors facilitated debriefing focused on preconceptions, self-assessment, and peer discussions, to develop a joint interprofessional care plan. Furthermore, the health care faculty explored nonhierarchical opportunities to bridge common health care themes and concepts, as well as opportunities to translate information into classroom instruction and patient care.Results: Thirty-six health care faculty from six disciplines completed the pre-research and post-research assessment survey to evaluate attitudes, knowledge, and perceptions following the interprofessional health care faculty training program. Post-training interprofessional team building knowledge improved significantly. The health care faculty post-training attitude scores improved significantly, with heightened awareness of the unique oral–systemic care needs of older adults with type 2 diabetes, supporting an interprofessional team approach to care management. In addition, the health care faculty viewed communication across disciplines as being essential and interprofessional training as being vital to the core curriculum of each discipline. Significant improvement occurred in the perception survey items for team accountability and use of uniform terminology to bridge communication gaps.Conclusion: Attitude, knowledge, and perceptions of health care faculty regarding interprofessional team building and the team approach to management of the oral–systemic manifestations of chronic disease in older adults was improved. Uniform language to promote communication across health professionals, care settings, and caregivers/patients, was noted. Interprofessional team building/care planning should be integrated in core curricula.Keywords: team building, patient-centered care, oral–systemic, older adult

Eliminating irreproducibility in SERS substrates

Irreproducibility in surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) due to variability among substrates is a source of recurrent debate within the field. It is regarded as a major hurdle towards the widespread adoption of SERS as a sensing platform. Most of the literature focused on developing substrates for various applications considers reproducibility of lower importance. Here, we address and analyse the sources of this irreproducibility in order to show how these can be minimised. We apply our findings to a simple substrate demonstrating reproducible SERS measurements with relative standard deviations well below 1% between different batches and days. Identifying the sources of irreproducibility and understanding how to reduce these can aid in the transition of SERS from the lab to real world applications.Isaac Newton Trust Leverhulme Trust Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability Trinity College, University of Cambridg

Electromagnetically induced transparency in inhomogeneously broadened Lambda-transition with multiple excited levels

Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) has mainly been modelled for three-level systems. In particular, a considerable interest has been dedicated to the Lambda-configuration, with two ground states and one excited state. However, in the alkali-metal atoms, which are commonly used, hyperfine interaction in the excited state introduces several levels which simultaneously participate in the scattering process. When the Doppler broadening is comparable with the hyperfine splitting in the upper state, the three-level Lambda model does not reproduce the experimental results. Here we theoretically investigate the EIT in a hot vapor of alkali-metal atoms and demonstrate that it can be strongly reduced due to the presence of multiple excited levels. Given this model, we also show that a well-designed optical pumping enables to significantly recover the transparency

Interfacial assembly of dendritic microcapsules with host-guest chemistry.

The self-assembly of nanoscale materials to form hierarchically ordered structures promises new opportunities in drug delivery, as well as magnetic materials and devices. Herein, we report a simple means to promote the self-assembly of two polymers with functional groups at a water-chloroform interface using microfluidic technology. Two polymeric layers can be assembled and disassembled at the droplet interface using the efficiency of cucurbit[8]uril (CB[8]) host-guest supramolecular chemistry. The microcapsules produced are extremely monodisperse in size and can encapsulate target molecules in a robust, well-defined manner. In addition, we exploit a dendritic copolymer architecture to trap a small hydrophilic molecule in the microcapsule skin as cargo. This demonstrates not only the ability to encapsulate small molecules but also the ability to orthogonally store both hydrophilic and hydrophobic cargos within a single microcapsule. The interfacially assembled supramolecular microcapsules can benefit from the diversity of polymeric materials, allowing for fine control over the microcapsule properties.This work was supported by the Engineering Physical Sciences Research Council, Institutional Sponsorship 2012-University of Cambridge EP/K503496/1 and the Translational Grant EP/H046593/1; Dr. Yu Zheng and Dr. Richard M. Parker were also funded from the Starting Investigator grant ASPiRe (No. 240629) from the European Research Council and the Isaac Newton Trust research grant No. 13.7(c).This is the accepted manuscript of a paper published in Nature Communications (Zheng Y, Yu Z, Parker RM, Wu Y, Abell C, Scherman OA, Nature Communications 2014, 5, 5772, doi:10.1038/ncomms6772)

Preferential binding of unsaturated hydrocarbons in aryl-bisimidazolium·cucurbit[8]uril complexes furbishes evidence for small-molecule π-π interactions.

Whilst cucurbit[n]urils (CBn) have been utilized in gas encapsulation, only the smaller CBn (n = 5 and 6) have utility given their small cavity size. In this work, we demonstrate that the large cavity of CB8 can be tailored for gaseous and volatile hydrocarbon encapsulation by restricting its internal cavity size with auxiliary aryl-bisimidazolium (Bis, aryl = phenyl, naphthyl, and biphenyl) guests. The binding constants for light hydrocarbons (C ≤ 4) are similar to those measured with CB6, while larger values are obtained with Bis·CB8 for larger guests. A clear propensity for higher affinities of alkenes relative to alkanes is observed, most pronounced with the largest delocalized naphthalene residue in the auxiliary Bis guest, which provides unique evidence for sizable small-molecule π-π interactions

Synthesis of Polymer Dielectric Layers for Organic Thin Film Transistors via Surface-Initiated Ring-Opening Metathesis Polymerization

The use of surface-initiated ring-opening metathesis polymerization (SI-ROMP) for producing polymer dielectric layers is reported. Surface tethering of the catalyst to Au or Si/SiO_2 surfaces is accomplished via self-assembled monolayers of thiols or silanes containing reactive olefins. Subsequent SI-ROMP of norbornene can be conducted under mild conditions. Pentacene semiconducting layers and gold drain/source electrodes are deposited over these polymer dielectric films. The resulting field effect transistors display promising device characteristics, demonstrating for the first time that SI-ROMP can be used in the construction of organic thin-film electronic devices