W hile working in the classroom with orthopedically handicapped and multihandicapped pre-school children, the need arose for a piece of equipment that would permit a child to work with tactile stimulation activities as independently as possible while also freeing the teacher and aide to move about and work with several children simultaneously instead of being restricted to a one-to-one si tuation.

Distillation has remained an important separation technology for the chemical process industries. In 1997 it was reported in the journal Chemical Engineering that about 95% of all worldwide separation processes use this technology. In the USA alone, some 40000 distillation columns represent a capital investment of about US $8 billion. They consume the energy equivalent of approximately 1 billio...

Macro-sieve electrodes were implanted in the sciatic nerve of five adult male Lewis rats following spinal cord injury to assess the ability of the macro-sieve electrode to interface regenerated peripheral nerve fibers post-spinal cord injury. Each spinal cord injury was performed via right lateral hemisection of the cord at the T9-10 site. Five months post-implantation, the ability of the macro...

According to an established concept, injury of the phloem triggers local sieve plate occlusion including callose-mediated constriction and, possibly, protein plugging of the sieve pores. Sieve plate occlusion can also be achieved by distant stimuli, depends on the passage of electropotential waves (EPWs), and is reversible in intact plants. The time-course of the wound response was studied in s...

In biodiesel preparation from vegetable oils and alcohol through transesterification process in the presence of a catalyst, excess alcohol, typically 100% more than the theoretical molar requirement, is used in existing batch and continuous-flow processes in order to drive the reversible transesterification reaction to a high enough conversion rate. The excess alcohol needs to be recovered in a...

In this paper, novel equipment for laboratory studies of heterogeneously catalyzed reactive distillation is described. The so called D+R tray equipment consists of a combination of conventional bubble cap trays with sections that are filled with catalyst and through which the liquid flows when it passes from one distillation tray down to the next. It is designed so that the catalyst can be easi...

A robust nonlinear control law is designed to reject unknown feed composition disturbances with overall stability. Implementation to real columns as well as comparisons with classical control strategies, show the robustness and flexibility improvements of the method. Almtracq-Using singular perturbation techniques on a physical model of distillation column, an aggregated model is proposed for c...

We report the factorization of a 135-digit integer by the triple-large-prime variation of the multiple polynomial quadratic sieve. Previous workers [6][10] had suggested that using more than two large primes would be counterproductive, because of the greatly increased number of false reports from the sievers. We provide evidence that, for this number and our implementation, using three large pr...

Sieve tubes are comprised of sieve elements, enucleated cells that are incapable of RNA and protein synthesis. The proteins in sieve elements are supplied from the neighboring companion cells through plasmodesmata. In rice plants, it was unclear whether or not all proteins produced in companion cells had the same distribution pattern in the sieve element-companion cell complex. In this study, t...

Phytoplasmas, biotrophic wall-less prokaryotes, only reside in sieve elements of their host plants. The essentials of the intimate interaction between phytoplasmas and their hosts are poorly understood, which calls for research on potential ultrastructural modifications. We investigated modifications of the sieve-element ultrastructure induced in tomato plants by 'Candidatus Phytoplasma solani,...