In awake animals, the activity of the cerebral cortex is highly complex, with neurons firing irregularly with apparent Poisson statistics. One way to characterize this complexity is to take advantage of the high interconnectivity of cerebral cortex and use intracellular recordings of cortical neurons, which contain information about the activity of thousands of other cortical neurons. Identifyi...

Although there is an abundance of evidence which indicates that ATP is released as well as taken up by cells, the concept that ATP cannot cross the cell membrane has tended to prevail. This article reviews the evidence for the release as well as uptake of ATP by cells. The evidence presented by various investigators clearly indicates that ATP can cross the cell membrane and suggests that the re...

Osmotically-driven membrane processes, including forward osmosis (FO) and pressure retarded osmosis (PRO), are emerging technologies that have come under renewed interest and subjected to numerous investigations in recent years. In FO, water is extracted from a feed solution utilizing the high osmotic pressure of a concentrated draw solution (DS) that flows on the opposite side of an FO membran...

Compositional heterogeneities of cell membranes are thought to play an important role in many physiological processes. We study how variations in the membrane composition can be driven by nonthermal fluctuating forces and therefore show how these can occur relatively far from any critical point for the membrane. We show that the membrane steady state is not only controlled by the strength of th...

The rising demand for clean water and the environmental challenges associated with fossil fuels have encouraged application of renewable greener energy systems in desalination. Moreover, small footprint high productivity favored membrane-based process industry. In past few decades, noticeable work has been performed on development applicability desalination processes powered by sources such as ...

Several emerging technologies, such as membrane biofermentation, oxidation processes, among others, are currently attracting interest in different areas of biotechnological and chemical engineering [...]

A polypropylene microporous membrane (PPMM) was fabricated by thermally induced phase separation (TIPS) method. The effects of protein size and structure as well as filtration pressure on the membrane performance and fouling mechanisms were investigated using two different proteins, bovine serum albumin (BSA) and collagen, in dead-end filtration setup. Obtained results showed that, for each pro...

Intercellular communication between bacterial cells belonging to the same population is well documented in Microbiology, sporulation and cannibalism in B. Subtilis and genetic competence and fratricide in S. pneumoniae being deeply studied in the last years. The investigation of individual cell behavior has revealed that populations of these bacteria sometimes bifurcate into phenotypically dist...

Reliable estimation of the porous membranes neck-pore size distribution (NPSD) is the key element in the design and operation of all membrane separation processes. In this paper, a new approach is presented for reliable of NPSD of porous membranes using wet flow-state bubble point test data. For this purpose, a robust method based on the linear regularization theory is developed to extract NPSD...