The efficient conversion between thermal and electrical energy by means of durable, silent and scalable solid-state thermoelectric devices has been a long standing goal. While nanocrystalline materials have already led to substantially higher thermoelectric efficiencies, further improvements are expected to arise from precise chemical engineering of nanoscale building blocks and interfaces. Her...

OBJECTIVE Contact of blood with artificial surfaces and air as well as ischemia/reperfusion injury to the heart and lungs mediate systemic and local inflammation during cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). Activation of complement and coagulation cascades leads to and accompanies endothelial cell damage. Therefore, endothelial-targeted cytoprotection with the complement inhibitor and endothelial prote...

Nonlinear polarization evolution based on beam splitter (PBS) is a classical technique for passive mode-locking of fiber lasers. Different from commonly used bulky PBS, in this paper all-fiber PBSs composed two parallel coupled microfibers have been proposed and fabricated under the condition appropriate microfiber diameter coupling length. Using our PBSs, passively mode-locked lasers also demo...

In this study, we examined electrical stability of the p-channel feedback field-effect transistors (FBFETs) under negative bias stress (NBS) and positive (PBS). The intact FBFETs have a subthreshold swing (SS) 0.12 mV/dec, an on-current ~10-4 A, threshold voltage (VTH) -0.76 V. There is negligible change in SS when are stressed by gate-bias corresponding to electric field 5.4 MV/cm across gate ...

conclusions il-33 may be a potential new agent to attenuate rir injury by reducing inflammatory cell infiltration and preventing apoptosis. results our data revealed that il-33 pretreatment maintained a better retinal structure, inhibited leukocyte infiltration (il-33 vs. mg with p < 0.01 and il-33 vs. pbs group with p < 0.01), and reduced the apoptosis of retinal ganglion cells (il-33 vs. mg w...

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) exclusively uses tRNA3 Lys to initiate reverse transcription. A novel HIV-1 mutant which stably utilizes tRNA rather than tRNA3 Lys as a primer was previously identified [HXB2(Met-AC] (S.-M. Kang, Z. Zhang, and C. D. Morrow, J. Virol. 71:207–217, 1997). Comparison of RNA secondary structures of the unique sequence (U5)-primer binding site (PBS) viral ...

Exponentially growing Chinese hamster V79 cells were exposed to Adriamycin either in phosphate buffered saline (PBS) or fresh growth medium (F-med) supplemented with various amounts of NaCl in the range between 50-1000 mM and survival was measured by the colony forming assay. Compared to the survival obtained after exposure of cells to isotonic (140 mM NaCl) PBS (Da = 0.16 /ig/ml, Z), = 0.49 Mg...

STUDY QUESTION What is the reliability of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) based on polar body (PB), blastomere or trophectoderm (TE) analysis in a heteroplasmic mitochondrial mouse model? SUMMARY ANSWER The reliability of PGD to determine the level of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) heteroplasmy is questionable based on either the first or second PB analysis; however, PGD based on blastomer...

We have built and characterized batch-processed polarization beam splitters (PBS), important optical components to separate the orthogonal TE and TM components of light. The devices were fabricated from thin-film, low-stress silicon nitride membranes and showed excellent performance. By stacking membranes, and a triple-layer PBS produced extinction ratios of 21 and 16dB for reflected and transm...