Techniques for separating bundles of carbon nanotubes into homogeneous dispersion are still under development, although a few methods have been successful at the laboratory scale. Understanding the effective interactions between carbon nanotubes in the presence of dispersing agents will provide the necessary information to develop better methods and also to refine the existing ones. We present ...

Pigment-dispersing factors (PDFs) are octadeca-peptides widely distributed in insect optic lobes and brain. In this study, we have purified PDF and determined its amino acid sequence in the cricket Gryllus bimaculatus. Its primary structure was NSEIINSLLGLPKVLNDA-NH(2), homologous to other PDH family members so far reported. When injected into the optic lobe of experimentally blinded adult male...

We report new measurements of single particle dispersion in turbulent two-dimensional (2D) flows. Laboratory experiments in electromagnetically driven and Faraday wave driven turbulence reveal a transition from weakly dispersing superdiffusive regime to strongly dispersing Brownian diffusion as the flow energy is increased in a broad range. The transition to fully developed 2D turbulence is cha...

During natal dispersal, young animals leave their natal area and search for a new area to live. In species in which individuals inhabit different types of habitat, experience with a natal habitat may increase the probability that a disperser will select the same type of habitat post-dispersal (natal habitat preference induction or NHPI). Despite considerable interest in the ecological and the e...

This demo presents SicsthSense, our open cloud platform for the Internet of Things. SicsthSense enables low power devices such as sensor nodes and smartphones to easily store their generated data streams in the cloud. This allows the data streams, and their history, to be made permanently available to users for visualisation, processing and sharing. Moving sensor data computation and monitoring...

We examine how the choice of the movement algorithm can affect the success of a swarm of simple mobile robots attempting to disperse themselves in an unknown environment. We assume there is no central control, and the robots have limited processing power, simple sensors, and no active communication. We evaluate different movement algorithms based on the percentage of the environment that the gr...

Dispersing billiards with cusps are deterministic dynamical systems with a mild degree of chaos, exhibiting “intermittent” behavior that alternates between regular and chaotic patterns. Their statistical properties are therefore weak and delicate. They are characterized by a slow (power-law) decay of correlations, and as a result the classical central limit theorem fails. We prove that a non-cl...

Let T be a measure-preserving and mixing action of a countable abelian group G on a probability space (X, S, μ) and A a locally compact second countable abelian group. A cocycle c : G × X 7−→ A for T disperses if limg→∞ c(g, ·) − α(g) = ∞ in measure for every map α : G −→ A. We prove that such a cocycle c does not disperse if and only if there exists a compact subgroup A0 ⊂ A such that the comp...

Synthetic biology involves the engineering of biological organisms by using modular and generalizable designs with the ultimate goal of developing useful solutions to real-world problems. One such problem involves bacterial biofilms, which are crucial in the pathogenesis of many clinically important infections and are difficult to eradicate because they exhibit resistance to antimicrobial treat...

Since the discovery of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), researches of field emission display (FED) have been mainly focused on it, because of their high-aspect configuration, low work function, high mechanical stability and high conductivity. For CNTs to become a viable engineering material for FED applications, efficient assembly and integration processes for large size are required that are currently...