Many insects use nectar as their principal diet and have mouthparts specialized in nectarivory, whereas most nectar-feeding vertebrates are opportunistic users of floral resources and only a few species show distinct morphological specializations. Specialized nectar-feeding bats extract nectar from flowers using elongated tongues that correspond to two vastly different morphologies: Most specie...

Ideas based on constitutional supercooling suggest that the periodic steady state cellular patterns seen in the directional solidification of systems with small partition coefficient may be unstable if the impurity concentration in the melt just in front of the tips falls into the two phase (miscibility gap) region of the phase diagram. This gives a simple stability criterion relating the posit...

Surfaces designed to reduce the contact time of impacting droplets are potentially of great importance for fundamental science and technological applications, for example, anti-icing, self-cleaning and heating transfer applications. Previous studies have shown that the contact time can be reduced via introducing one or several crossing macroscale wires on superhydrophobic surfaces (SHSs). Howev...

To mimic the uniformly elongated endothelium in natural linear vessels, bovine aortic endothelial cells (BAECs) are cultured on micro- to nanogrooved, model poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) substrates preadsorbed with about 300 ng/cm(2) of fibronectin. BAEC alignment, elongation, and projected area were investigated for channel depths of 200 nm, 500 nm, 1 microm, and 5 microm, as well as smooth su...

Objective. To estimate if there is a relationship between the results of tests of neurocognition and performance on a laparoscopic surgery simulator. Methods and Materials. Twenty participants with no prior laparoscopic experience had baseline cognitive tests administered (Trail Making Test, Part A and B (TMT-A and TMT-B), Grooved Peg Board Test, Symbol Digit Modalities Test, Symbol Digit Recal...