The production of zinc sulfate is important both medically and agriculturally. If zinc sulfate is produced without agglomeration at the nanoscale, its absorption in the body is more and faster. In this research, the induction time parameter is assessed for nucleation of zinc sulfate nanoparticles at room temperature and various supersaturations using acetone (as anti-solve...

We study the nucleation of a new thermodynamic phase in pores and find that the nucleation often proceeds via two steps: nucleation of pore filling, and nucleation out of the pore. These two rates have opposing dependencies on pore size, resulting in a pore size at which the nucleation rate of the new phase is maximal. This finding is relevant to attempts to design and use porous media to cryst...

Airborne dispersal of microalgae has largely been a blind spot in environmental biological studies because of their low concentration in the atmosphere and the technical limitations in investigating microalgae from air samples. Recent studies show that airborne microalgae can survive air transportation and interact with the environment, possibly influencing their deposition rates. This minirevi...

The actin cytoskeleton has long been believed to play a role in endocytosis, but its actual function in this process has been unclear. Now, three proteins that promote actin nucleation have been found to provide a link between the actin cytoskeleton and the endocytic machinery.

Centrosome- and chromatin-based microtubule nucleation pathways have been implicated in spindle assembly. Using total internal reflection fluorescent microscopy and Xenopus egg extracts, Petry et al. demonstrate that new microtubules can also nucleate and branch out from existing ones in animal cells.

Torsion of MWCNTs entails bumpy nanoscopic interwall phenomena, which gradually enhance the microscopic interwall coupling. This effect is likely to be confined at the ends of the suspended portions of the CNT, the structural changes required to link the outer wall to the inner ones being probably triggered by a complex interaction with the metal deposited onto the nanotube.

Amoeboidal cell crawling on solid substrates is characterized by protrusions that seemingly appear randomly along the cell periphery and drive the cell forward. For many cell types, it is known that the protrusions result from polymerization of the actin cytoskeleton. However, little is known about how the formation of protrusions is triggered and whether the appearance of subsequent protrusion...

A liquid subjected to negative pressure is thermodynamicallymetastable. Confinedwithin a small volume, negative pressure can build up until cavities form spontaneously. The critical negative pressure for cavitation in water has been theoretically predicted to be in the range of −100 to −200 MPa at room temperature,whereas values around−30MPahave been obtainedbymany experiments. The discrepancy ...