For several years we used rayon or Dacron swabs with liquid transport media for collection and transport of throat swab specimens for testing with the Gen-Probe Group A Strep Direct Test (GASDT). A report of favorable results with a Dacron swab without any transport media for GASDT by another laboratory prompted us to compare detection of group A streptococci (GAS) with and without transport me...

We measure experimentally the penetration depth d of spherical particles into a water-saturated granular medium made of much smaller sand-sized grains. We vary the density, size R, and velocity U of the impacting spheres, and the size δ of the grains in the granular medium. We consider velocities between 7 and 107 m/s, a range not previously addressed, but relevant for impacts produced by volca...

In this work the likelihood of asphaltene deposition problems during dynamic displacement of oil by natural gas in unconsolidated porous media is experimentally inspected. The two different rock materials, limestone and sandstone, are used as a representative of porous media. Dynamic flow experiments indicate that the increase of natural gas injection inc...

The Ultra-nanocrystalline diamond (UNCD) was synthesized by the detonation of a high explosive mixture in water confinement. The presence of a diamond phase was revealed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). X-ray line broadening (XRLB) was used to evaluate the peak profiles of diamond nanoparticles and their corresponding average crystallite sizes. The micro st...

Athermal two-dimensional granular systems are exposed to external mechanical noise leading to Brownian-like motion. Using tunable repulsive interparticle interaction, it is shown that the same microstructure as that observed in colloidal suspensions can be quantitatively recovered at a macroscopic scale. To that end, experiments on granular and colloidal systems made up of magnetized particles ...

We imaged an oil-wet sandstone at residual oil saturation (S(or)) conditions using X-ray micro-tomography with a nominal voxel size of (9 μm)(3) and monochromatic light from a synchrotron source. The sandstone was rendered oil-wet by ageing with a North Sea crude oil to represent a typical wettability encountered in hydrocarbon reservoirs. We measured a significantly lower S(or) for the oil-wet...