Ice nucleation and growth is an important and widespread environmental process. Accordingly, nature has developed means to either promote or inhibit ice crystal formation, for example ice-nucleating proteins in bacteria or ice-binding antifreeze proteins in polar fish. Recently, it was found that birch pollen release ice-nucleating macromolecules when suspended in water. Here we show that birch...

This paper presents a hypothesis on how new particles may be formed from organic precursors in the absence of sulphuric acid. The authors propose a secondary ozonide, which is the product of a stabilized Criegee intermediate and a carbonyl compound, to be the nucleating agent, and peroxy radicals to be responsible for the initial growth. At a later stage “regular” condensation is assumed to tak...

The sinter-crystallisation was investigated in three model glasses (G1, G2 and G3) belonging to the diopside–albite system and forming between 30 and 60% diopside, respectively. The effect of bulk crystallisation on the sintering was studied by the addition of 0.7 wt.% Cr2O3 as nucleating agent to the G2 glass. The degree of sintering was evaluated by the variation of the apparent density while...

*Correspondence: Miroslav Slouf , Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Heyrovsky Sq. 2, 162 06 Prague 6, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] We introduce a dynamic sandwich method, which can be used for in situ observation and quantification of polymer crystallization nucleated by micro/nanoparticles. The method was applied on polyoxymethylene (P...

Most studies of the role of biological entities as atmospheric ice-nucleating particles have focused on relatively rare supermicron particles such as bacterial cells, fungal spores and pollen grains. However, it is not clear that there are sufficient numbers of these particles in the atmosphere to strongly influence clouds. Here we show that the ice-nucleating activity of a fungus from the ubiq...

A novel ice-nucleating bacterium (INB) was isolated from Ross Island, Antarctica. INBs could be isolated more frequently than was generally thought. INB strain IN-74 was found in the white colony group. Strain IN-74 was identified from its taxonomic characteristics as a novel INB, Pseudomonas antarctica IN-74. When strain IN-74 was cultured aerobically in a medium consisting of the ice-nucleati...