Aluminium, the third most abundant element in the earth’s crust, occurs in nature in combination with silicon and oxygen (i.e. as aluminium silicate). When subject to tropical weathering, aluminium silicate may react to form aluminium hydroxide. Rock containing high concentrations of aluminium hydroxide is called bauxite. This rock is the usual starting material for the production of aluminium....

Steel-lined pressure tunnels and shafts are used to convey water from the reservoir to the turbines in high-head hydroelectric power plants. An axisymmetrical multilayer model is often considered by engineers for the design of the steel liner. Stresses and deformations can then be computed with a closed-form analytical solution in isotropic rock. When the rock is anisotropic, the lowest elastic...

The lack of continuity conditions of the rock materials presents a serious challenge for the continuum mechanics approach, hindering the effective use of the well-established methods such as the finite element method and the boundary element methods. In the presented paper a discrete technique based on molecular dynamics approach is used for computer constructing of polycrystal materials. On th...

Female rock musicians have had difficulty making it in the predominantly white male rock world. Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald note that women’s participation in rock music usually consists of bolstering male performance, in the roles of groupie, girlfriend, or back-up singer (257). Even in punk rock, women are often treated as a novelty by the music press and cultural critics. Male bands such ...

Rotary drills, diamond drills and percussive drills have been extensively used in open pits, quarries and construction sites. The prediction of the penetration rate of drilling machines is very important in the cost estimation and the planning of the rock excavation projects. The rock modulus ratio, which is the ratio of elastic modulus to compressive strength, indicating the deformability, is ...

Living cells communicate and cooperate to produce the emergent properties of tissues. Synthetic mimics of cells, such as liposomes, are typically incapable of cooperation and therefore cannot readily display sophisticated collective behavior. We printed tens of thousands of picoliter aqueous droplets that become joined by single lipid bilayers to form a cohesive material with cooperating compar...

Due to their stem-like characteristics and their resistance to existing chemo- and radiation therapies, there is a growing appreciation that cancer stem cells (CSCs) are the root cause behind cancer metastasis and recurrence. However, these cells represent a small subpopulation of cancer cells and are difficult to propagate in vitro. Glioblastoma is an extremely deadly form of brain cancer that...

To solve the problem of rutting and fatigue damage to asphalt pavement, rutting and fatigue performances of Qingchuan rock asphalt modified asphalt were studied, based on the dynamic shear rheometer test, the dynamic creep test, the rutting test, the indirect tensile fatigue test, the small-sized acceleration loading test, the compressive resilient modulus test, the BISAR3.0 Program and the rut...