OBJECTIVE To compare the tensile strength of nylon, polypropylene, and fast-absorbing gut sutures treated with either 3% hydrogen peroxide or water for a period of 5 days to emulate a wound care regimen. METHODS An In-Spec 2200 bench-top tester was used to find the maximum load that a particular suture could sustain prior to breaking. RESULTS Analysis of the data showed a statistically sign...

We investigate the performance of a variant of Axelrod's model for dissemination of culture--the Adaptive Culture Heuristic (ACH)--on solving an NP-Complete optimization problem, namely, the classification of binary input patterns of size F by a Boolean Binary Perceptron. In this heuristic, N agents, characterized by binary strings of length F which represent possible solutions to the optimizat...

A one-way wave equation is a partial differential equation which, in some approximate sense, behaves like the wave equation in one direction but permits no propagation in the opposite one. Such equations are used in geophysics, in underwater acoustics, and as numerical "absorbing boundary conditions". Their construction can be reduced to the approximation of vl s2 on [-1,1] by a rational functi...

We study the first passage time problem for a diffusing molecule in an enclosed region to hit a small spherical target whose surface contains many small absorbing traps. This study is motivated by two examples of cellular transport. The first is the intracellular process through which proteins transit from the cytosol to the interior of the nucleus through nuclear pore complexes that are distri...

we discuss the asymptotic behaviour of solutions for the nonlocal quasilinear hyperbolic problem of kirchhoff type [ u_{tt}-phi (x)||nabla u(t)||^{2}delta u+delta u_{t}=|u|^{a}u,, x in mathbb{r}^{n} ,,tgeq 0;,]with initial conditions $u(x,0) = u_0 (x)$ and $u_t(x,0) = u_1 (x)$, in the case where $n geq 3, ; delta geq 0$ and $(phi (x))^{-1} =g (x)$  is a positive function lying in $l^{n/2}(mathb...

The absorbing "ricepile" model with stochastic toppling rules has been numerically studied. Local limited, local unlimited, nonlocal limited, and nonlocal unlimited versions of the absorbing model have been investigated. Transport properties and different dynamical regimes of all of the models have been analyzed, from the point of view of self-organized criticality. Phase transitions between di...

Microwave absorbing materials are usually designed to solve protection against electromagnetic interference in wireless communication systems and high frequency circuit mechanisms. In this research polystyrene (PS) nanocomposites containing various nano-fillers were successfully synthesized. The novelty of this work is comparing of three various nanostructures: non-metallic conductive graphene ...

We present an imaging and spectroscopic survey of galaxies in fields around QSOs HE 0226−4110, PKS 0405−123, and PG 1216+069. The fields are selected to have ultraviolet echelle spectra available, which uncover 195 Lyα absorbers and 13 OVI absorbers along the three sightlines. We obtain robust redshifts for 1104 galaxies of rest-frame absolute magnitude MR −5log h . −16 and at projected physica...

We present generic scaling laws relating spreading critical exponents and avalanche exponents (in the sense of self-organized criticality) in general systems with absorbing states. Using these scaling laws we present a collection of the state-of-the-art exponents for directed percolation, dynamical percolation, and other universality classes. This collection of results should help to elucidate ...