Preterm births occur in 9.7% of all US singleton births. The rate for blacks is double that of whites and the rate is 25% higher for Hispanics than for whites. While a number of individual correlates with preterm birth have been identified, race and ethnic differences have not been fully explained. Influenced by a growing body of literature documenting a relationship among health, individual in...

This paper investigates how high-speed home Internet has impacted married women’s labor force participation. I estimate the net effect of individual Internet usage on labor supply using an instrumental variables strategy which exploits cross-state variation in supply-side constraints to residential broadband Internet access. Results indicate that married women who use the Internet are more like...

This work demonstrates the preparation of spherical nanocellulose from microcrystalline cellulose by controlled hydrolysis using anaerobic microbial consortium. The nanocellulose formed during the degradation of microcrystalline cellulose was separated by ultra filtration membrane and purified by differential centrifugation. The purified nanocellulose was characterized by nanoparticle size anal...

Energy harvesting is a conventional method to collect the dissipated energy of a system. In this paper, we investigate the optimal location of a piezoelectric element to harvest maximum power concerning different excitation frequencies of a vibrating cantilever beam. The cantilever beam oscillates by a concentrated sinusoidal tip force, and a piezoelectric patch is integrated on the beam to gen...

The influence of nanoparticle shape, in particular the sphere to rod transition, on surface forces and consequently the properties of colloidal fluids is an interesting but not well investigated phenomenon. Here, the surface force behaviour of concentrated surfactant solutions containing cetyltrimethylammonium bromide and sodium salicylate with micelle shapes varying from slightly prolate to hi...

Nonmuscle myosin IIA (NMM-IIA) is involved in the formation of focal adhesions and neurite retraction. However, the role of NMM-IIA in these functions remains largely unknown. Using RNA interference as a tool to decrease NMM-IIA expression, we have found that NMM-IIA is the major myosin involved in traction force generation and retrograde F-actin flow in mouse embryonic fibroblast cells. Quanti...

We propose a finite elements algorithm to solve a fourth order partial differential equation governing the propagation of time-harmonic bending waves in thin elastic plates. Specially designed perfectly matched layers are implemented to deal with the infinite extent of the plates. These are deduced from a geometric transform in the biharmonic equation. To numerically illustrate the power of ela...

We investigate the 1S0 neutron and proton superfluidity in isospin asymmetric nuclear matter. We have concentrated on the isospin dependence of the pairing gaps and the effect of a microscopic three-body force. It is found that as the isospin asymmetry goes higher, the neutron 1S0 superfluid phase shrinks gradually to a smaller density domain, while the proton one extends rapidly to a much wide...

We investigate the 1S0 neutron and proton superfluidity in isospin asymmetric nuclear matter. We have concentrated on the isospin dependence of the pairing gaps and the effect of a microscopic threebody force. It is found that as the isospin asymmetry goes higher, the neutron 1S0 superfluid phase shrinks gradually to a smaller density domain, while the proton one extends rapidly to a much wider...

Concentrated particulate suspensions under vibrations can support stable, localized, vertically oriented free surfaces. The most robust of these structures are persistent holes: deep and stable depressions of the interface. Using a reduced model of the hydrodynamics we show that a rheology with hysteresis can lead to motion opposite to the time-averaged applied force. Moreover, we show experime...