The answer given to my Letter to the Editor' was quite unsatisfactory.2 By going to a doubly connected region containing the plasma' the requirements for nuclear fusion for practical power applications may be met. Other important papers and books make the same mistake of omitting from their equations the term -nmivi* Vv.4 5 1 Slepian, J., Physics of Fluids, 3, 490 (1960). 2 Simon, A., Physics o...

The crystal structure of walstromite, ideally BaCa2Si3O9, was refined with data from single-crystal X-ray diffraction on a natural specimen from the type locality Esquire No. 8 claim, Big Creek, Fresno County, California, U.S.A. It is triclinic, with space group P1 and unit-cell parameters a = 6.7335(2), b = 9.6142(3), c = 6.6859(2) Å, = 69.638(2) , = 102.281(2) , = 96.855(2) , and V = 396.01(2...

Crystals of xonotlite from Heguri, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, which exhibit relatively sharp k odd reflections have been found to be a triclinic variant having dimensions; a 8.712(2)'\, b 7.363(2)'\, c 14.023(4)'\, a=89.99(2)" (3= 90.36(2) °,7=102.18(2) 0, and space group Al; Z=2CCa6Si60,7(OH)2]' The average structure which was determined using only even order reflections in k is similar to the r...

BACKGROUND Exposure to mineral fibers is of substantial relevance to human health. A key event in exposure is the interaction with inflammatory cells and the subsequent generation of pro-inflammatory factors. Mast cells (MCs) have been shown to interact with titanium oxide (TiO₂) and asbestos fibers. In this study, we compared the response of rat peritoneal MCs challenged with the asbestos croc...

Thirteen different cement-clinker crystalline phases present in the lime-silica-alumina system have been systematically modeled using a simple and general force field. This constitutes a new type of approach towards the study of lime-silica-alumina systems, where the simpler and more transferable Lennard-Jones potential was used instead of the more traditional Buckingham potential. The results ...

The mineral-based sorbents Filtra P, Polonite, natural wollastonite and water-cooled blast furnace slag (WCBFS) were studied in terms of their PO(4) removal performance. Results from a long-term column experiment showed that both Filtra P and Polonite removed >95% of PO(4) from the applied synthetic solution, and that the used filter materials had accumulated several (1.9-19) g kg(-1)P. Phospho...

It is widely recognized that carbonic anhydrase (CA) participates in silicate weathering and carbonate formation. Nevertheless, it is still not known if the magnitude of the effect produced by CA on surface rock evolution changes or not. In this work, CA gene expression from Bacillus mucilaginosus and the effects of recombination protein on wollastonite dissolution and carbonate formation under...

Highly porous wollastonite-diopside glass-ceramics have been successfully obtained by a new gel-casting technique. The gelation of an aqueous slurry of glass powders was not achieved according to the polymerization of an organic monomer, but as the result of alkali activation. The alkali activation of a Ca-Mg silicate glass (with a composition close to 50 mol % wollastonite-50 mol % diopside, w...

Fiber size is an important factor in the tumorigenicity of various mineral fibers and asbestos fibers in animal experiments. We examined the time course of the ability to induce lucigenin-dependent chemiluminescence (CL) from human monocyte-derived macrophages exposed to Japan Fibrous Material standard reference samples (glass wool, rock wool, micro glass fiber, two types of refractory ceramic ...