Bacterial endotoxins have strong affinity for metallic biomaterials because of surface energy effects. Conventional depyrogenation methods may not eradicate endotoxins and may compromise biological properties and functionality of metallic instruments and implants. We evaluated the solubilization and removal of E. coli endotoxin from smooth and porous titanium (Ti) surfaces and stainless steel l...

The biology of the nomadine bee, Epeolus compactus Cresson, is described based on composite notes taken from field, laboratory, and greenhouse studies of the host bee, Colletes kincaidii Cockerell. Details of Epeolus egg deposition are described and compared with other known noma dine bees. We document the release of a glandular secretion during egg deposition by E. compactus which dissolves th...

VoD System is a system that transfers enormous amount of video data, its important task is to save the video and decrease the load of VoD Server that processes the client’s request. When the users use VoD Service, getting the simultaneous and continuous service is important, and providing the user’s interactivity such as VCR becomes one of the study area of VoD system. In this paper, MCVoD (Vid...

Each plant production system must foster the availability of oxygen to the plant roots. This includes every plant production system, ranging from the garden or agricultural field outside to the commercial and hobby hydroponics system in the greenhouse. In successful production systems, this happens. It may be due to a favorable air/water relationship in the media or a media component. It may be...

Parties in pluralist democracies face numerous political issues that citizens may be split on, but most models of party competition assume a simple, often one-dimensional structure. We develop a new, inherently multidimensional model of party strategy in which parties compete by emphasizing policy issues. Issue emphasis is determined by two distinct goals: mobilizing the party’s core voters and...

We use direct N-body simulations to study the inspiral and internal evolution of dense star clusters near the Galactic center. These clusters sink toward the center due to dynamical friction with the stellar background, and may go into core collapse before being disrupted by the Galactic tidal field. If a cluster reaches core collapse before disruption, its dense core, which has become rich in ...

Collagen gels are flowable, suggesting the possibility of an easily injectable, biocompatible drug delivery matrix. Sustained release of therapeutic molecules from collagen matrices, however, is beset with difficulties. Fibrillar collagen gels have an effective pore size of several tens of nanometers, too large to control release by hindered diffusion. To control release, it is necessary to rel...

We propose a unified framework which combines a novel color representation, i.e. spatial color descriptors, and a post-refinement process to detect various types of shot boundaries, including abrupt shot changes, flashlights, dissolves, fade-ins and fade-outs. The spatial color descriptor involving color adjacency and color vector angle histograms incorporates spatial information into color rep...

We review evidence that visual transient channels responding to temporal change of luminance provide inputs to motion mechanisms, and also play a part in judgments of static brightness. These channels can be adapted to give after effects of apparent dimming or brightening. Nonlinearity in these channels causes a sawtooth grating to look dark (or light) while it is moving to the left (or right)....

A novel method has been developed for preserving molecules in microfluidic devices that also enables the control of the spatial and temporal concentrations of the reconstituted molecules within the devices. In this method, a storage cavity, embedded in a microchannel, is filled with a carbohydrate matrix containing, for example, a reagent. When the matrix is exposed to flowing liquid, it dissol...