T he first programmable computers were rather nasty beasts. These giant 1940s machines occupied entire rooms and consumed kilowatts of electricity. The computation problems engineers faced more often involved failed machine hardware components than the short and mostly unchanging programs engineers fed to those machines. Engineers viewed computers and their programs as unified entities. Over th...

Extracellular matrix stiffness influences biological functions of some tumors. However, it remains unclear how cancer subtypes with different oncogenic mutations respond to matrix stiffness. In addition, the relevance of matrix stiffness to in vivo tumor growth kinetics and drug efficacy remains elusive. Here, we designed 3D hydrogels with physical parameters relevant to hematopoietic tissues a...

The softening of fleshy fruits, such as tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), during ripening is generally reported to result principally from disassembly of the primary cell wall and middle lamella. However, unsuccessful attempts to prolong fruit firmness by suppressing the expression of a range of wall-modifying proteins in transgenic tomato fruits do not support such a simple model. 'Delayed Fruit ...

The United States Environmental Protection Agency Contaminant Candidate List 3 lists strontium as a contaminant for potential regulatory consideration in drinking water. Very limited data is available on strontium removal from drinking water and as a result, there is an immediate need for treatment information. The objective of this work is to evaluate the effectiveness of coagulation/filtratio...

In a globalized economy, the control of fruit ripening is of strategic importance because excessive softening limits shelf life. Efforts have been made to reduce fruit softening in transgenic tomato through the suppression of genes encoding cell wall-degrading proteins. However, these have met with very limited success. N-glycans are reported to play an important role during fruit ripening, alt...

146401-1 The phonon density of states and adiabatic sound velocities were measured on fcc-stabilized Pu0:95Al0:05. The phonon frequencies and sound velocities decrease considerably (soften) with increasing temperature despite negligible thermal expansion. The frequency softening of the transverse branch along the [111] direction is anomalously large (~30%) and is very sensitive to alloy composi...

The interaction between two associating hydrophobic particles has traditionally been explained in terms of the release of entropically frustrated hydration shell water molecules. However, this picture cannot account for the kinetics of hydrophobic association and is therefore not capable of providing a microscopic description of the hydrophobic interaction (HI). Here, Monte Carlo simulations of...

Most softening agents, such as rinse cycle fabric softeners, used by consumers at home contain cationic surfactants that have two long alkyl chains as their main component. The softening mechanism on fibers, especially cotton, has not yet been scientifically established, despite the market prevalence of fabric softeners for decades. One explanation for the softening effect is that the friction ...

After transecting the squid giant axon in the presence of an artificial external medium, which was composed of the ions normally present in squid blood, the cut ends of the axon constrict. This constriction could be completely blocked by cutting the axon in the presence of an artificial internal medium composed of the ions normally present inside the axon. By interchanging the ions in the inter...

Fruit softening in apple (Malus x domestica) is associated with an increase in the ripening hormone ethylene. Here, we show that in cv Royal Gala apples that have the ethylene biosynthetic gene ACC OXIDASE1 suppressed, a cold treatment preconditions the apples to soften independently of added ethylene. When a cold treatment is followed by an ethylene treatment, a more rapid softening occurs tha...