12,994 research outputs found
Geometric bionics: Lotus effect helps polystyrene nanotube films get good blood compatibility
Various biomaterials have been widely used for manufacturing biomedical applications including artificial organs, medical devices and disposable clinical apparatus, such as vascular prostheses, blood pumps, artificial kidney, artificial hearts, dialyzers and plasma separators, which could be used in contact with blood^1^. However, the research tasks of improving hemocompatibility of biomaterials have been carrying out with the development of biomedical requirements^2^. Since the interactions that lead to surface-induced thrombosis occurring at the blood-biomaterial interface become a reason of familiar current complications with grafts therapy, improvement of the blood compatibility of artificial polymer surfaces is, therefore a major issue in biomaterials science^3^. After decades of focused research, various approaches of modifying biomaterial surfaces through chemical or biochemical methods to improve their hemocompatibility were obtained^1^. In this article, we report that polystyrene nanotube films with morphology similar to the papilla on lotus leaf can be used as blood-contacted biomaterials by virtue of Lotus effect^4^. Clearly, this idea, resulting from geometric bionics that mimicking the structure design of lotus leaf, is very novel technique for preparation of hemocompatible biomaterials
MSSM Anatomy of the Polarization Puzzle in B --> phi K* Decays
We analyze the polarization puzzle in the Minimal
Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) including the neutral Higgs boson (NHB)
contributions. To calculate the non-factorizable contributions to hadronic
matrix elements of operators, we have used the QCD factorization framework to
the order. It is shown that the recent experimental results of the
polarization fractions in decays, which are difficult to be
explained in SM, could be explained in MSSM if there are flavor non-diagonal
squark mass matrix elements of 2nd and 3rd generations, which also satisfy all
relevant constraints from known experiments (, etc.). We have shown
in details that the experimental results can be accommodated with the flavor
non-diagonal mass insertion of chirality RL, RL+LR, RR, or LL+ RR when the NHB
contributions as well as corrections of hadronic matrix
elements of operators are included. However the branching ratios for the decay
are smaller than the experimental measurements.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, minor revision and references adde
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