The strength retention characteristics of oriented semicrystalline polylactides were monitored during hydrolytic degradation in vitro. The effects of the polymer type, the material's initial inherent viscosity (iv), the sample diameter and the residual monomer content on strength retention were analyzed. The analyzed polylactides had similar, but not identical, strength retention characteristic...

Aggregation of Cu, Zn superoxide dismutase (SOD1) is often found in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. The fibrillar aggregates formed by wild type and various disease-associated mutants have recently been found to have distinct cores and morphologies. Previous computational and experimental studies of wild-type SOD1 suggest that the apo-monomer, highly aggregation prone, displays substant...

To compare force levels obtained from glass fibre-reinforced composite (FRC) archwires. Specifically, FRC wires were compared with polymer matrices having different dimethacrylate monomer compositions. FRC material (E-glass provided by Stick Tech Ltd, Turku, Finland) with continuous unidirectional glass fibres and four different types of dimethacrylate monomer compositions for the resin matrix ...

This paper presents an understanding of how initial molecular weight and initial monomer fraction affect the degradation of bioresorbable polymers in terms of the underlying hydrolysis mechanisms. A mathematical model was used to analyse the effects of initial molecular weight for various hydrolysis mechanisms including noncatalytic random scission, autocatalytic random scission, noncatalytic e...

The Brownian kernel is usually assumed to describe pure diffusion-limited cluster-aggregation processes. In this work, we show that this assumption is correct for simulated data. For experimental data, however, significant deviations were observed although the system was aggregated at an electrolyte concentration well above the critical coagulation concentration. This indicates that residual cl...

This article reports on a 60-year-old woman who had an allergic reaction to methylmethacrylate self-curing acrylic resin during orthodontic treatment. A localized hypersensitive reaction appeared on the palate after an orthodontic retainer was placed. Samples of the acrylic were removed and analyzed with gas chromatography to evaluate the residual monomer level. The residual monomer content was...