A G-rich nucleic acid-tethered acrylamide/N-isopropylacrylamide (NIPAM) copolymer is prepared. The nucleic acid-modified pNIPAM chains assemble, in the presence of K ions, into a stimuli-responsive G-quadruplex-crosslinked pNIPAM hydrogel undergoing cyclic and reversible solution/hydrogel/solid transitions. Addition of kryptofix [2.2.2], CP, to the K-stabilized G-quadruplex-crosslinked hydrogel...

Background & Aims of the Study:  Collection and transportation of municipal solid waste (MSW) for various reasons, especially economic and social are considered as one of the most important elements of the solid waste management system. More than sixty percent of the costs in solid waste management systems in different countries are due to the collection and transportation...

We present a solid state accelerator concept utilizing particle acceleration along crystal channels by longitudinal electron plasma waves in a metal. Acceleration gradients of order 100 GV/cm are theoretically possible, but channeling radiation limits the maximum attainable energy to lo5 TeV for protons. Beam dechanneling due to multiple scattering is substantially reduced by the high accelerat...

Emission and absorption spectra of many organic dyes in liquid solutions depend on the local electric fields generated by the surrounding polar solvent molecules. This “solvation effect” is a result of intermolecular solutesolvent interaction forces (such as dipole-dipole or dipole-induced dipole) that tend to stretch molecular bonds and shift charge distribution on molecules, altering the ener...

Some years ago I developed an interest in Tesla coils. I was teaching a senior elective course at Kansas State University where we talked about power MOSFETs and topics related to high voltages and currents. I decided to use a Tesla coil as a class project. We would talk about design aspects, then design, build, and test a coil. The best description of the results of that plan was fiasco, or ma...

The dimer method is a minimum mode following algorithm for finding saddle points on a potential energy surface of atomic systems. Here, the dimer method is extended to include the cell degrees of freedom for periodic solid-state systems. Using this method, reaction pathways of solid-solid phase transitions can be determined without having to specify the final state structure or reaction mechani...

The well known phenomenological theory of F. and H. London leads to rather severe restrictions for the electronic wave functions which might possibly account for the phenomenon of superconductivity. Yet all attempts to construct such wave functions according to the principle of quantum mechanics have been so far unsuccessful. This failure seems to stem from the use of one-electron functions for...

The Grey group tackles a broad range of materials science and energy storage challenges that include various aspects of solid state chemistry, spectroscopy, and theoretical studies. To understand and control the materials that are desirable for energy storage applications, we use a suite of synthetic and analytical techniques, including diffraction, microscopy, solid state NMR, and computation....