Staphylococcus aureus is a common cause of bacterial infections in respiratory diseases. It secretes molecules to dampen host immunity, and the recently identified adenosine is one of these molecules. The type IIA secretory phospholipase A2 (sPLA2-IIA) is a host protein endowed with antibacterial properties, especially against Gram-positive bacteria such as S. aureus. However, the role of adeno...

Reviewed, accepted August 29, 2005 Rapid prototyping (RP) technologies have been widely used to reduce the lead-time and development cost of new products. The VLM-ST process has been developed to overcome the currently developed RP technologies such as a large building time, a high building cost, an additional post-processing and a large apparatus cost. However, the VLM-ST process has the limit...

Abstract An optical model is established to investigate the effects of refractive index changes on measurement interfacial tension by pendant drop method with axisymmetric shape analysis. In such measurements, light passes from through a surrounding bulk phase, an window and air reach lens camera system. The relation between object image size typically determined calibration and, if indices any...

In this work, we introduce the novel technique of in-chip drop on demand, which consists in dispensing picoliter to nanoliter drops on demand directly in the liquid-filled channels of a polymer microfluidic chip, at frequencies up to 2.5 kHz and with precise volume control. The technique involves a PDMS chip with one or several microliter-size chambers driven by piezoelectric actuators. Individ...

Scleral buckling is a surgical technique to treat rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD). Vision may be affected by the scleral buckle. Since the buckle is pushed into the sclera towards the detached retina, it may change the shape and the focal length of the eyeball. A paradigm mathematical model of human eyeball is set up to examine how the focal length of the eye is affected under the actio...

We propose a scheme to interpolate between a set of two or more 3-dimensional triangulated meshes with corresponding connectivity. The principle behind this is that meshes, when viewed as vectors of edge lengths, can be seen as points in a Euclidean shape space. Within this space, mesh interpolation corresponds to traversing straight lines between points, and due to the Euclidean structure of t...

IV. Pressure Drop Definition In our experiments we measure the total pressure drop across the axisymmetric abrupt contraction-expansion geometry. We then systematically correct this to report an ‘extra pressure drop’ associated with the contraction-expansion alone. Table 1 shows the axial distance of each possible pressure transducer location from the contraction plane. For clarity, it is usefu...