The main objective of this paper is to provoke and stimulate debate on the health effects of long-term, low-level exposure of human populations to toxic metals. Over one billion (10(9)) human guinea pigs are now being exposed to elevated levels of toxic metals and metalloids in the environment. The number of persons suffering from subclinical metal poisoning is believed to be several million. A...

In part 1 of this review, emerging practice to realise nanostructured metallic coatings by electrodeposition, anodising and electrophoresis has been considered. Conventional, aqueous electrolytes may be utilised in some cases if workpiece preparation and process conditions are well controlled. Such coatings can provide wear and corrosion resistance or a catalytic or high active area compared to...

2014 Metal-dielectric inhomogeneous media exhibit contrasted physical properties according to the nature of the metallic inclusion : noble or transition. A comparison between Au-MgO and Pt-Al2O3 thin films (prepared by sputtering), based on their optical, electrical and structural properties, is presented. The optical properties are analysed using two effective medium theories : Maxwell Garnett...

Polymers have lower resistance to scratching and wear than metals. Liquid lubricants work well for metals but not for polymers nor for polymer-based composites (PBCs). We review approaches for improvement of tribological properties of polymers based on inclusion of fillers. The fillers can be metallic or ceramic-with obvious consequences for electrical resistivity of the composites. Distinction...

We show that light tunneling inhibition may take place in suitable dynamically modulated waveguide arrays for light spots whose features are remarkably smaller than the wavelength of light. We found that tunneling between neighboring waveguides can be suppressed for specific frequencies of the out-of-phase refractive index modulation, affording undistorted propagation of the input subwavelength...

A spot that flickers at 16 Hz between two luminance levels (on a grey surround) has an appearance of metallic lustre, which we call 'monocular lustre'. Binocular and monocular lustre were measured in comparable conditions by a rating procedure, and both were reported only when the light and dark values of the flickering (or binocularly fused) spot straddled the surround luminance, so that the s...

A positive response from a metal detector when run over an area of the body is a strong positive indicator of the presence of a metallic object. If there is a possibility of a buried metallic foreign body this positive finding should not be ignored.

Non-metallic inclusions influence the properties of steel and finished steel products. The methods relating to statistics of extremes are effective for the purpose of predicting the size of the maximum inclusion, which is an important parameter in the quality control and lifetime estimation. A steel sample with two types of inclusions is used to demonstrate the use of the extreme value theory i...

Kohn-Sham (KS) density functional theory (DFT) describes well the atomistic structure of molecular junctions and their coupling to the semi-infinite metallic electrodes but severely overestimates conductance due to the spuriously large density of charge-carrier states of the KS system. Previous works show that inclusion of appropriate amounts of nonlocal exchange in the functional can fix the p...