To develop long-term high quality communication between brain and computer, a key issue is how to reduce the adverse foreign body responses. Here, the impact of probe flexibility and gelatine embedding on long-term (6w) tissue responses, was analyzed. Probes of same polymer material, size and shape, flexible mainly in one direction, were implanted in rat cerebral cortex (nimplants = 3 x 8) in t...

Two masked priming experiments examined behavioural and event-related potential responses to simplex target words (e.g., flex) preceded by briefly presented, masked, derived word primes (flexible-flex), complex nonword primes formed by an illegal combination of the target word and a real suffix (flexify-flex), and simplex nonword primes formed by adding a nonsuffix word ending to the target (fl...

BACKGROUND The Flex Robotic System is a new robotic device specifically developed for transoral robotic surgery (TORS). METHODS We performed a prospective clinical study, assessing the safety and efficacy of the Medrobotics Flex Robotic System. A total of 40 patients required a surgical procedure for benign lesions (n = 30) or T1 and T2 carcinomas (n = 10). Access and visualization of differe...

In the framework of the candidate EE-8 ESA/FLEX mission, different Solar-Induced Fluorescence (SIF) retrieval algorithms are under implementation and testing. The Spectral Fitting Method is the baseline for the fluorescence retrievals for FLEX, since it is a powerful technique to decouple canopy reflected radiance and SIF by exploiting the high-resolution observations in the red/far-red spectra...

Plates of 3–5 mm in thickness were extracted from an AZ91D ingot and then butt joints of the plates were produced using tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding method. The TIG arc was also used to deposit welding beads on some of the thin plates. No cracking was found in the butt joints. However, hot cracking was always observed to propagate from the heat affected zone (HAZ) under the welding bead int...

This study investigated the effect of oxygen and micro-cracking on the flotation of low grade nickel sulphide ore. The ore treated contained serpentine minerals which have a history of being difficult to process efficiently. The use of oxygen as a bubbling gas has been noted to be effective because it increases the pulp potential. The desired effect of micro cracking the ore is that the nickel ...

(This is part 2, continued from “Use of harsh Wafer Probing to Evaluate Traditional Bond Pad Structures”). Goals for circuit under pad (CUP) in aluminum – silicon dioxide (Al – SiO2) based IC pad structures include the design of metal interconnects in all layers beneath the pad Al, and the ability to withstand harsh probing and wirebonding stress without SiO2 cracking, without deforming or bend...

Brittle materials propagate opening cracks under tension. When stress increases beyond a critical magnitude, then quasistatic crack propagation becomes unstable. In the presence of several precracks, a brittle material always propagates only the weakest crack, leading to catastrophic failure. Here, we show that all these features of brittle fracture are fundamentally modified when the material ...

Password policies alone do not stand a chance of securing computer systems which rely on the use of secretbased, password authentication methods. The enforcement of “strong” passwords via pro-active password strengthening utilities and password cracking tools should be employed by system administrators to reduce the number of “weak” passwords in a computer system. With the availability of low-c...