Increasing numbers of hospital-acquired infections have generated much attention over the last decade. The public has linked the so-called 'superbugs' with their experience of dirty hospitals but the precise role of environmental cleaning in the control of these organisms remains unknown. Until cleaning becomes an evidence-based science, with established methods for assessment, the importance o...

Black crust, or gypsum crust, is a surficial accumulation of atmospheric deposits in a gypsum matrix, which is often firmly bonded to the substrate. This condition is ubiquitous on marble buildings, not only threatening the historic fabric, but also leading to aesthetic damage. Laser ablation cleaning has become a popular method to remove black crust from masonry surface. This study focuses on ...

In the cleanerfish–client mutualism involving the Indo-Pacific cleaner wrasse Labroides dimidiatus and its reef fish clients, mechanisms such as ‘tactile stimulation’, partner switching and punishment are used by clients to control cheating by cleaners. We sought to establish whether these behaviours are general features of cleaning mutualisms by examining their presence in interactions between...

Data cleaning has become an indispensable part of data analysis due to the increasing amount of dirty data. Data scientists spend most of their time preparing dirty data before it can be used for data analysis. At the same time, the existing tools that attempt to automate the data cleaning procedure typically focus on a specific use case and operation. Still, even such specialized tools exhibit...

The radioactive tracer technique was applied to investigate the out-diffusion of the transition metals (Cu, Fe and Co) from deep ultraviolet (DUV) photoresist into underlying substrate. Two important process parameters, viz., baking temperatures and substrate types (i.e., bare silicon, polysilicon, silicon oxide and silicon nitride), were evaluated. Results indicate that the out-diffusion of Co...

The cleaning of mirrors in large, remote telescopes is essential if these telescopes are to meet their performance goals, including low (2%) thermal emissivity in the infrared. Aluminum-coated mirror samples, which were naturally or artificially contaminated with materials representative of those at observatories, were cleaned with a UV laser beam or CO2 snow. Cleaning effectiveness was determi...

This study compared the efficacy of an antimicrobial mouthrinse (0.12% chlorhexidine gluconate) plus toothbrushing (mouthrinse group), mechanical interdental cleaning plus toothbrushing (mechanical group), and toothbrushing alone (control group), at reducing and preventing interdental gingival inflammation. 92 male subjects were examined for interdental inflammation using the Eastman interdenta...

Perchloroethylene (PCE) is a highly utilized solvent in the dry cleaning industry because of its cleaning effectiveness and relatively low cost to consumers. According to the 2006 U.S. Census, approximately 28,000 dry cleaning operations used PCE as their principal cleaning agent. Widespread use of PCE is problematic because of its adverse impacts on human health and environmental quality. As P...

In this work, the development of an integrated decision-making system for the assessment of cleaning interventions on marble architectural surfaces is presented. The suggested system resulted by the incorporation of a fuzzy logic model into GIS and its architecture includes: (a) a GIS based graphical user interface for features and attributes retrieval, management comparison, analysis and corre...

To verify the process of laser-cleaning on metal cathodes we performed a combined photoemission (PE) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) study. We followed the laser-cleaning procedure on thin Lead films arc-deposited on Mo-substrates by means of photoemission in the photon energy range of 16 – 140 eV and determined the surface roughness before and after laser irradiationwith whitelight-inte...