The oxidation of closo-heteroborates [GeB11H11](2-) and [SnB11H11](2-) is presented. Upon oxidation germa-closo-dodecaborate yields a symmetrical dimer exhibiting a Ge-Ge bond between two clusters. This dimer shows sulphur insertion into the Ge-Ge bond at room temperature. In contrast, oxidation of the homologous tin cluster results in an unsymmetrical dimer bearing an Sn-B bond between two clu...

Ammonia is an important component of the nitrogen cycle and because it is oxidized in the environment by microorganisms (i.e., nitrification), it is a large source of available nitrogen in the environment (Raven & Johnson 1989). The complexity of the nitrogen cycle, various rate determining environmental conditions for nitrification (e.g., pH, temperature), and the physical behaviour of ammonia...

An algorithm for detecting scene changes in compressed video streams is proposed. The proposed algorithm directly exploits the motion compensation information and the prediction error signal in the MPEG1coded video stream. By performing minimal decoding of the compressed video stream, the proposed algorithm results in signi cant savings in terms of execution time and memory requirement. Experim...

The stability and growth or dissolution of a single surface nanobubble on a chemically patterned surface are studied by molecular dynamics simulations of binary mixtures consisting of Lennard-Jones (LJ) particles. Our simulations reveal how pinning of the three-phase contact line on the surface can lead to the stability of the surface nanobubble, provided that the concentration of the dissolved...

In this paper, we describe a new approach of shot boundary detection in digital videos which is able to detect not only hard cuts but special effects like wipes, fades, and dissolves as well. Our approach is divided into two steps – feature extraction and shot boundary detection. First, three different features for the measurement of shot boundaries within the video are extracted. Second, detec...

A unique approach was used in which polyoxometalate-based ionic liquids (POM-IL) were synthesized and employed for the one-pot dissolution and conversion of biomass. A library of four functional POM-IL compounds was synthesized using two cationic organic groups (1-butyl-3methylimidazolim and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium) and two anionic POMs (phosphotungstate and tungstosilicate). The POM-IL com...

We introduce a new approach to the detection and the classification of effects in video sequences. We deal with the effects such as cuts, fades, dissolves, and camera motions. A global motion compensation based on block matching and a measure of block mean intensities are used to detect all the effects. We determine the dominant motion vectors to detect the camera motions for each shot and obse...

Fractionation is considered to be one promising strategy to utilize raw biomass to its fullest and produce chemicals with high selectivity. Herein, ethanol/H2O (1/1, v/v) co-solvent with 0.050 M oxalic acid is used to simultaneously fractionate 88.0 wt% of hemicellulose and 89.2 wt% of lignin in corn stover, while cellulose is not obviously degraded. H2O dissolves hemicellulose, G unit and thos...

Water and alcohol, such as methanol or ethanol, are miscible and, individually, good solvents for poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAm), but this polymer precipitates in water-alcohol mixtures. The intriguing behaviour of solvent mixtures that cannot dissolve a given polymer or a given protein, while the same macromolecule dissolves well in each of the cosolvents, is called cononsolvency. It is ...

We demonstrate that DNA sediments in the presence of millimolar concentrations of zinc or related metal cations and that EDTA entirely dissolves the sediment. The sedimentation is promoted by alkaline pH but the pH dependence is abolished by submillimolar concentrations of phosphate anions. We suspect that the metal cations generate sedimenting particles of insoluble hydroxides or phosphates fo...