Membrane electroporation is the method to directly transfer bioactive substances such as drugs and genes into living cells, as well as preceding electrofusion. Although much information on the microscopic mechanism has been obtained both from experiment and simulation, the existence and nature of possible intermediates is still unclear. To elucidate intermediates of electropore formation by dir...

Every time we blink our eyes, the image on the retina goes almost completely dark. And yet we hardly notice these interruptions, even though an external darkening is startling. Intuitively it would seem that if our perception is continuous, then the neuronal activity on which our perceptions are based should also be continuous. To explore this issue, we compared the responses of 63 supragranula...

The rapid growth of data traffic, caused mainly by increasing use of the Internet including recent expanded use of multimedia services and wireless access, has stimulated the demand for high-capacity photonic network systems. High capacity optical networks are based on a combination of wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) and time-division multiplexing (TDM) for purposes ranging from long dis...

This paper presents a new method, based on a multiple-model adaptive estimation approach, to determine the most probable shape of a resident space object among a number of candidate shape models while simultaneously recovering the observed resident space object’s inertial orientation and trajectory. Multiple-model adaptive estimation uses a parallel bank of filters, each operating under a diffe...

The ongoing interest in fast liquid crystal (LC) modes stimulated by display technology and new applications has motivated us to study in detail the in-plane switching (IPS) vertically aligned (VA) mode. We have studied how the decrease of the period of the interdigitated electrodes (down to sub-micrometer scale) influences the switching speed, especially the LC relaxation to the initial homeot...

Topological defects that form on surfaces of ordered media, dubbed boojums, are ubiquitous in superfluids, liquid crystals (LCs), Langmuir monolayers, and Bose-Einstein condensates. They determine supercurrents in superfluids, impinge on electrooptical switching in polymer-dispersed LCs, and mediate chemical response at nematic-isotropic fluid interfaces, but the role of surface topology in the...

Diagnostic devices to precisely measure the longitudinal electron beam profile and the bunch arrival time require elaborate new instrumentation techniques. At FLASH, two entirely different methods are used. The bunch profile can be determined with high precision by a transverse deflecting RF structure, but the method is disruptive and does not allow to monitor multiple bunches in a macro-pulse ...

We are currently developing a technology called “electrooptical stomatography” to measure and visualize articulatory movements within the vocal tract using electrical contact sensors and optical proximity sensors. To measure tongue movements with the optical sensors in this system, a mapping between the raw sensor values and actual tongue positions has to be determined. This mapping is non-line...