In the chemical industry, asbestos gaskets have been used extensively to prevent leakage between solid surfaces. The purpose of this study was to assess the potential personal exposure to asbestos fibres during gasket removal and thus to determine what is reasonably required in terms of protective regime and work method. Two groups were studied: group A, who only removed gaskets if they could b...

Hydromedusan jellyfish swim by rhythmic pulsation of their mesogleal bells. A single swimming muscle contracts to create thrust by ejecting water from the subumbrellar cavity. At the end of the contraction, energy stored in the deformation of the mesogleal bell powers the refilling stage, during which water is sucked back into the subumbrellar cavity. The mesoglea is a mucopolysaccharide gel re...

Most of everyday clothing consists of textile fibres woven together to produce a fabric. Their primary purpose is structural and aesthetic. Fibres can have added functionality by the integration of computing power into the material that forms them. The purpose of the ‘fibre computing’ concept is to integrate this new dimension of functionality into fibres, thus turning everyday clothing objects...

The ratio of the surface area to the volume of materials increases in inverse proportion to their size and therefore the surface area of nanostructures and nanomaterials is extremely large compared to that of macroscopic materials of the same volume, thanks to which it is supposed that chemical and biochemical reactions may be greatly enhanced and target molecules and cells may be efficiently t...

BACKGROUND Structural constitutive models of vascular wall integrate information on composition and structural arrangements of tissue. In blood vessels, collagen fibres are arranged in coiled and wavy bundles and the individual collagen fibres have a deviation from their mean orientation. A complete structural constitutive model for vascular wall should incorporate both waviness and orientation...

Polymers reinforced with high performance fibres are successfully replacing metal alloys in lightweight aircraft structures. A critical factor in structural design is the resistance of a structure to progressive damage which develops during its service time. The brittle nature of matrix cracking is the main source of composite failure initiating ply delamination and fibre to matrix debonding. B...

fibre type-dependent differences in high-energy phosphate (HEP) content at rest. Most often, type I fibres have been found to contain lower absolute amounts of phosphocreatine (PCr) and ATP compared with type II fibres (Söderlund et al. 1992; Greenhaff et al. 1994; Sant’Ana Pereira et al. 1996). Among pools of type II fibres an increasing resting PCr content has been reported as expression of m...

This is the first of three papers on the application of enzyme histochemical techniques to the study of developing and diseased muscle. This paper will deal with developing muscle in various laboratory animals, the second with developing human muscle, and the third with hereditary neurogenic atrophies in infancy and childhood. In 1678 Stefano Lorenzini had already observed that animal muscle co...

Atrophy of the nerve fibres in the retina visible by direct ophthalmoscopy using red-free illumination, together with corresponding scotomata in the visual fields, signified retrograde degeneration of retinal nerve fibres from multiple sclerosis. Defects in medullated retinal nerve fibres were continous with arcuate nerve fibre bundle defects. These myelin defects exemplify secondary demyelinat...

Oriented fibres in the intercisternal regions of plant dictyosomes are usually associated with flattened portions of cisternae. In outer cap cells of maize roots, however, the intercisternal fibres are associated mainly with unique secretory vesicles which are elongate or kidney-shaped during their formative stages. Fibres are oriented parallel with the long axes of the vesicles even at early s...