Smectites or swelling clay minerals are naturally occurring nanomaterials that can be fully delaminated to elementary clay mineral platelets in dilute aqueous dispersion. This review article gives an overview of the recent progress on how the elementary clay mineral platelets can be reorganized in monolayered or multilayered hybrid nanofilms by layer-by-layer assembly or the Langmuir-Blodgett t...

-The addition of a 10% talc internal standard to North Pacific sediments allows the relative abundances of clay minerals to be determined both accurately and precisely by X-ray powder diffractometry. Linear programming can be used to generate factors for converting talc-normalized peak areas to weight percentages; hence, absolute clay-mineral abundances can be estimated. This procedure minimize...

OBJECTIVE To understand the significance of clay art therapy for psychiatric patients admitted in a day hospital. METHODOLOGY Qualitative, descriptive and exploratory research, undertaken with 16 patients in a day hospital in Londrina, in the state of Parana, Brazil, who participated in seven clay therapy sessions. Data collection took place from January to July 2012 through interviews guided...

Simulated through a 3D grid storing the density of clay in each cell (0 for an empty cell, and 1 for a full cell). The surface is defined as the iso-surface at 0.5 of clay density. Clay behavior is captured by a layered model ensuring 3 properties: Large scale deformations (fig.1) Mass conservation by pouring the excess of matter in neighbouring cells (fig.2) Surface tension for preventing the ...

Bottlenose dolphin stock structure in the northeast Atlantic remains poorly understood. However, fine scale photo-id data have shown that populations can comprise multiple overlapping social communities. These social communities form structural elements of bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) [corrected] populations, reflecting specific ecological and behavioural adaptations to local habitat...

Examines what avenues are open to establish a legal procedure to ensure compensation for parties injured as the result of accidents caused by offshore drilling rigs. Concludes that there is a need to impose strict liability standard on those parties engaged in offshore drilling for damages caused by such activities. THE CAMPECHE BAY BLOW-OUT: A STRICT LIABILITY APPROACH TO DAMAGES RESULTING FRO...

The spatial organisation of swelling clay platelets in a suspension depends on the chemical composition of the equilibration solution. Individual clay platelets can be well dispersed, with surfaces entirely in contact with the external solution, or be stacked in tactoids, where part of the surfaces forms parallel alignments embedding interlayer water and cations. External and interlayer surface...

Besides having a large capacity for taking up organic molecules, clay minerals can catalyze a variety of organic reactions. Derived from rock weathering, clay minerals would have been abundant in the early Earth. As such, they might be expected to play a role in chemical evolution. The interactions of clay minerals with biopolymers, including RNA, have been the subject of many investigations. T...

A conventional liner with a good performance against inorganic contaminants with a minimal hydraulic conductivity does not usually perform well for retention/removal of leachates containing organic contaminants. Organic modification of clay can render the naturally organophobic clay to be organophilic. Incorporation of modified organo clay along with unmodified inorganic clay in liner systems c...

Molecular dynamics simulations together with micromechanics method have been proven an effective approach to assess the elastic moduli of either partially or fully exfoliated (i.e. single-layer) effective clay (montmorillonite) cluster. In this work, similar approach was adopted to estimate the overall compressive modulus of nylon 6/montmorillonite nanocomposites. In detail, the compressive mod...