Strong and tough natural composites such as bone, silk or nacre are often built from stiff blocks bound together using thin interfacial soft layers that can also provide sacrificial bonds for self-repair. Here we show that it is possible exploit this design in order to create self-healing structural composites by using thin supramolecular polymer interfaces between ceramic blocks. We have built...

Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications & CNRS URA 820 Dept. INFRES, 46 rue Barrault, 75013 Paris, France EMail: [email protected] URL: http://www.enst.fr/-elc This paper presents “Ubit”, a new graphical toolkit that is based on the “brick construction game” model. This approach makes it possible to create sophisticated application-specific components by combining simple “basic bricks”. All...

In this work, three samples of municipal solid waste incinerators fly ash (MSWI-FA) have been stabilized in systems containing coal fly ash to create geopolymers through a polycondensation reaction. Monolithic products have been obtained with both MSWI fly ash as received and after the partial removal of chloride and sulfate by water washing. The polycondensation products have been characterize...

BACKGROUND Brick tea type fluorosis is a public health concern in the north-west area of China. The association between SNPs of genes influencing bone mass and fluorosis has attracted attention, but the association of SNPs with the risk of brick-tea type of fluorosis has not been reported. OBJECTIVE To investigate the modifying roles of GSTP1 rs1695 polymorphisms on this association. METHOD...

This paper proposes, for low buildings, an integrated wall structure of a brick-stem-insulating layer, which plays a major part in both heat preservation and force bearing. The research team has tested the thermal performance of the structure, the results of which are satisfying. To further study the force-bearing performance, the paper carries out compressive tests of specimens of different st...

The associahedron is a polytope whose graph is the graph of flips on triangulations of a convex polygon. Pseudotriangulations and multitriangulations generalize triangulations in two different ways, which have been unified by Pilaud and Pocchiola in their study of pseudoline arrangements with contacts supported by a given network. In this paper, we construct the “brick polytope” of a network, o...

There are laws which protect and prevent the teenage girls from working. But still in the developing countries like India, Bangladesh, etc. teenage girls coming from low socio-economic background work, to add to the family income. There is dearth of data regarding the ergonomic studies of the teenage girls working in the manual brick manufacturing units of the unorganized sectors in India. Ther...

Organizational knowledge resources typically exist in specialized pockets scattered across the firm. As distributed knowledge systems, firms’ capacity to manage their knowledge resources is linked with their ability to integrate these pockets of specialized knowledge. Firms are increasingly depending on teams to strategically consolidate their dispersed knowledge into productive outcomes. Teams...

A large group of robots will often be partitioned into subgroups, each subgroup performing a different task. This paper presents four distributed algorithms for assigning swarms of homogenous robots to subgroups to meet a specified global task distribution. Algorithm Random-Choice selects tasks randomly, but runs in constant time. Algorithm Extreme-Comm compiles a complete inventory of all the ...

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