Mechanical safety of reinforced concrete structures at all stages of the life cycle

Ensuring the mechanical safety of operated buildings at all stages of the life cycle is an urgent task. This is especially important when planning major repairs and reconstruction in buildings, as well as determining the period of safe operation from the moment of the survey, i.e. clarification of the remaining service life. The total service life at the design stage is set by the customer and the general designer in accordance with the recommendations of GOST 27751-2014 «Reliability for constructions and foundations. General principles». Mechanical safety and durability are ensured when calculating structures using the limit state method, assigning protection measures depending on the operating conditions, as well as complying with the requirements of SP 255.1325800.2016 «Buildings and structures. Operating rules. General Provisions». A method for preliminary assessment of the mechanical safety of buildings and their structures is proposed for consideration, which eliminates some of the shortcomings of existing methods for calculating the residual life by physical wear (damage) of building structures based on the results of a visual inspection, the basis of which is the dependence of the allowable safe operation period on the percentage of reduced bearing capacity. It is proposed to use the results of a visual inspection performed in accordance with GOST 31937-2011 «Buildings and constructions. Rules of inspection and monitoring of the technical condition»

Smoothing for Discrete Time Systems Using Operator Factorization

Gold nanoparticles entrapped in the hollow polymer nanocapsules undergo pH-mediated controlled aggregation. Encapsulated clusters of nanoparticles show absorbance at higher wavelengths compared with individual nanoparticles. The size of the aggregates is controlled by the number of nanoparticles entrapped in individual nanocapsules. Such controlled aggregation may permit small biocompatible nanoparticles exhibit desirable properties for biomedical applications that are typically characteristic of large nanoparticles

Mechanical safety of reinforced concrete structures at all stages of the life cycle

Ensuring the mechanical safety of operated buildings at all stages of the life cycle is an urgent task. This is especially important when planning major repairs and reconstruction in buildings, as well as determining the period of safe operation from the moment of the survey, i.e. clarification of the remaining service life. The total service life at the design stage is set by the customer and the general designer in accordance with the recommendations of GOST 27751-2014 «Reliability for constructions and foundations. General principles». Mechanical safety and durability are ensured when calculating structures using the limit state method, assigning protection measures depending on the operating conditions, as well as complying with the requirements of SP 255.1325800.2016 «Buildings and structures. Operating rules. General Provisions». A method for preliminary assessment of the mechanical safety of buildings and their structures is proposed for consideration, which eliminates some of the shortcomings of existing methods for calculating the residual life by physical wear (damage) of building structures based on the results of a visual inspection, the basis of which is the dependence of the allowable safe operation period on the percentage of reduced bearing capacity. It is proposed to use the results of a visual inspection performed in accordance with GOST 31937-2011 «Buildings and constructions. Rules of inspection and monitoring of the technical condition»

Facile directed assembly of hollow polymer nanocapsules within spontaneously formed catanionic surfactant vesicles

Surfactant vesicles containing monomers in the interior of the bilayer were used to template hollow polymer nanocapsules. This study investigated the formation of surfactant/monomer assemblies by two loading methods, concurrent loading and diffusion loading. The assembly process and the resulting aggregates were investigated with dynamic light scattering, small angle neutron scattering, and small-angle X-ray scattering. Acrylic monomers formed vesicles with a mixture of cationic and anionic surfactants in a broad range of surfactant ratios. Regions with predominant formation of vesicles were broader for compositions containing acrylic monomers compared with blank surfactants. This observation supports the stabilization of the vesicular structure by acrylic monomers. Diffusion loading produced monomer-loaded vesicles unless vesicles were composed from surfactants at the ratios close to the boundary of a vesicular phase region on a phase diagram. Both concurrent-loaded and diffusion-loaded surfactant/monomer vesicles produced hollow polymer nanocapsules upon the polymerization of monomers in the bilayer followed by removal of surfactant scaffolds. © 2013 American Chemical Society

The CRISPR Spacer Space Is Dominated by Sequences from Species-Specific Mobilomes

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein (CRISPR-Cas) systems store the memory of past encounters with foreign DNA in unique spacers that are inserted between direct repeats in CRISPR arrays. For only a small fraction of the spacers, homologous sequences, called protospacers, are detectable in viral, plasmid, and microbial genomes. The rest of the spacers remain the CRISPR “dark matter.” We performed a comprehensive analysis of the spacers from all CRISPR-cas loci identified in bacterial and archaeal genomes, and we found that, depending on the CRISPR-Cas subtype and the prokaryotic phylum, protospacers were detectable for 1% to about 19% of the spacers (~7% global average). Among the detected protospacers, the majority, typically 80 to 90%, originated from viral genomes, including proviruses, and among the rest, the most common source was genes that are integrated into microbial chromosomes but are involved in plasmid conjugation or replication. Thus, almost all spacers with identifiable protospacers target mobile genetic elements (MGE). The GC content, as well as dinucleotide and tetranucleotide compositions, of microbial genomes, their spacer complements, and the cognate viral genomes showed a nearly perfect correlation and were almost identical. Given the near absence of self-targeting spacers, these findings are most compatible with the possibility that the spacers, including the dark matter, are derived almost completely from the species-specific microbial mobilomes

Unraveling the Single-Nanometer Thickness of Shells of Vesicle-Templated Polymer Nanocapsules

Vesicle-templated nanocapsules have emerged as a viable platform for diverse applications. Shell thickness is a critical structural parameter of nanocapsules, where the shell plays a crucial role providing mechanical stability and control of permeability. Here we used small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) to determine the thickness of freestanding and surfactant-stabilized nanocapsules. Despite being at the edge of detectability, we were able to show the polymer shell thickness to be typically 1.0 ± 0.1 nm, which places vesicle-templated nanocapsules among the thinnest materials ever created. The extreme thinness of the shells has implications for several areas: mass-transport through nanopores is relatively unimpeded; pore-forming molecules are not limited to those spanning the entire bilayer; the internal volume of the capsules is maximized; and insight has been gained on how polymerization occurs in the confined geometry of a bilayer scaffold, being predominantly located at the phase-separated layer of monomers and cross-linkers between the surfactant leaflets

Machine-learning approach expands the repertoire of anti-CRISPR protein families

CRISPR-Cas is a host adaptive immunity system and viruses harbor diverse anti-CRISPR proteins (Acrs). Here, the authors develop a random forest machine-learning approach to predict Acrs, identifying 2500 candidate Acr families, which expand the current repertoire of predicted Acrs by two orders of magnitude