Rubber-based (Hevea brasiliensis) agroforestry systems are regarded as the best way to improve the sustainability of rubber monocultures, but few reports have examined water use in such systems. Accordingly, we tested whether interplanting facilitates water utilization of rubber trees using stable isotope (δD, δ(18)O, and δ(13)C) methods and by measuring soil water content (SWC), shoot potentia...

This paper presents three selection techniques (called Rubber-lingsweep, Line-string and Coupling-with-pressure) to enhance multi-target acquisition in GUIs and to overcome the drawback of the standard rubber-band box technique, i.e., the limitation of not being able to select an irregular layout of targets. Rubber-line-sweep utilizes a rubber-band line to select targets by “sweeping” them. Lin...

Cytotoxicity of 14 glove materials representing 4 natural rubber latex, 6 synthetic rubber and 4 synthetic polymeric materials was evaluated using dimethylthiazol diphenyltetrazolium (MTT), agar overlay and filter diffusion tests. Cell responses after contact with extracts of glove materials and contact with glove materials were assessed. One synthetic rubber glove (nitrile rubber) and 2 synthe...

Commercially useful rubber products viz. gloves, condoms, tyres, and rubber hoses used in high temperature environments, etc., require efficient thermal conductivity, which increases the lifetime of these products. Graphene can fetch this property, if it is effectively incorporated into the rubber matrix. The great challenge in preparing graphene-rubber nanocomposites is formulating a scalable ...

In this work, we report about the mechanical relaxation characteristics of an intrinsically self-healable imidazole modified commercial rubber. This kind of self-healing rubber was prepared by melt mixing of 1-butyl imidazole with bromo-butyl rubber (bromine modified isoprene-isobutylene copolymer, BIIR). By this melt mixing process, the reactive allylic bromine of bromo-butyl rubber was conver...

A common tactile display design uses an array of mechanical pins covered by a rubber layer which acts as a spatial low pass filter. To characterize the perceptual relationship between this rubber layer and shape rendering, we conducted psychophysical experiments to examine the perception of a vertical line stimulus felt using rubber covers of varying thickness and stiffness. We found no signifi...

A common tactile display design uses an array of mechanical pins covered by a rubber layer which acts as a spatial low pass filter. To characterize the perceptual relationship between this rubber layer and shape rendering, we conducted psychophysical experiments to examine the perception of a vertical line stimulus felt using rubber covers of varying thickness and stiffness. We found no signifi...

For individuals with vision-touch synaesthesia, the sight of touch on another person elicits synaesthetic tactile sensation on the observer's own body. Here we used the traditional rubber hand paradigm (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998) and a no-touch rubber hand paradigm to investigate and to authenticate synaesthetic tactile sensation. In the traditional rubber hand paradigm, the participant views a...

nanocomposite vulcunizates based on styrene-butadiene rubber (sbr), organoclay and a conventional sulfur curing system were prepared by melt blending process in an internal mixer. in order to study the effects of the type of interfacial compatibilizer on the properties of sbr and clay nanoparticles,three types of compatibilizers, maleic anhydride grafted ethylene-propylene diene rubber (epdm-g-...

Natural rubber from Hevea brasiliensis is a high molecular mass polymer of isoprene units with cis-configuration. The enzyme responsible for the cis-1,4-polymerization of isoprene units has been idengified as a particle-bound rubber transferase, but no gene encoding this enzyme has been cloned from rubber-producing plants. By using sequence information from the conserved regions of cis-prenyl c...