Reciprocating contacts occur in a wide variety of practical wear situations including hip joints and electrical contacts. In developing tribological tests for candidate materials with improved durability these it is beneficial that the contact conditions (e.g. sliding speed) can be reproduced. Hence, fully instrumented capability rapid high-cycle linear reciprocating nano-scale has been develop...

The stability of three ultrathin TiO(x)/Pt(111) films with different stoichiometry and defectivity and the corresponding Au/TiO(x)/Pt(111) model catalysts in CO or a CO-O(2) (1 : 1) gas mixture up to a pressure of 100 mbar has been investigated. According to previous studies, the ultrathin films proved to be effective substrates to deposit in UHV Au nanoparticles with specific morphologies and ...

This work presents a highly effective approach for the chemical purification of directly written 2D and 3D gold nanostructures suitable for plasmonics, biomolecule immobilisation, and nanoelectronics. Gold nano- and microstructures can be fabricated by one-step direct-write lithography process using focused electron beam induced deposition (FEBID). Typically, as-deposited gold nanostructures su...

With the fast development of intensive poultry and aquaculture, consumption antibiotics has ever been increasing. Absorbed or metabolized usually enter water environment in form active drugs metabolites, which can enhance resistance pathogenic microorganisms even cause serious pollution. Considering bacteriostatic activity antibiotics, main biological method used to treat organic waste limited ...

DEAR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE American Science Community: As I write this from my troubled home state of Kansas, the State Board of Education is debating once again whether to de-emphasize the theory of evolution. Those in the majority on the Board have stated that they are considering changing the very definition of science to allow for science classes to discuss the merits of intelligent d...

Following rapid developments in biotechnology and medicine, optical sensing promises to be extremely important in various applications such as drug discovery, environmental monitoring, etc. Refractive index (RI) based optical sensing is straightforward to monitor or analyze the physical and chemical properties of substances. Among diverse configurations developed for RI detection, plasmonics de...