Plant cuticles are covered by epicuticular waxes with considerable ultrastructural and chemical diversity and have great systematic significance. Pinus elderica is a rare pine found naturally only in desert environment southeast of Tbilisi (Georgia). This tree have been probably introduced to Iran about 800 years ago and gradually altered in both shape and size in Nashtifan-Khaf, and changed in...

A 26-year-old man was admitted for follow-up after VSD closure without any symptoms. Echocardiography showed a mobile mass of the tricuspid valve (Fig. 1). The peduncu-lated ball-shaped mass was attached to the anterior leaflet of the tricuspid valve (Fig. 2). Histopathological examination revealed an organized thrombus without any tumor components. Fig. 1. Preoperative transthoracic echocardio...

The widely used K-means clustering deals with ball-shaped (spherical Gaussian) clusters. In this paper, we extend the K-means clustering to accommodate extended clusters in subspaces, such as lineshaped clusters, plane-shaped clusters, and ball-shaped clusters. The algorithm retains much of the K-means clustering flavors: easy to implement and fast to converge. A model selection procedure is in...

The spring-driven ball-type check valve is one of the most important components of hydraulic systems: it controls the position of the ball and prevents backward flow. To simplify the structure, the spring must be eliminated, and to accomplish this, the flow pattern and the behavior of the check ball in L-shaped pipe must be determined. In this paper, we present a full-scale model of a check bal...

Gold nanostructures, particularly Au nanoparticles (NPs) have attracted significant scientific and technological interest due to their physical properties and applications in electronics, optics, catalysis, biology, and sensing. The sizes, shapes, and surface features of Au NPs constitute the fundamental parameters affecting their properties and applications. Accordingly, broad research efforts...

The intersection body of a ball is again a ball. So, the unit ball Bd ⊂Rd is a fixed point of the intersection body operator acting on the space of all star-shaped origin symmetric bodies endowed with the Banach– Mazur distance. E. Lutwak asked if there is any other star-shaped body that satisfies this property. We show that this fixed point is a local attractor, i.e., that the iterations of th...

The activity-guided chromatographic purification of the methanol extract of Knema hookeriana, using pine wood nematodes Bursaphelenchus xylophilus has successfully led to the isolation and characterization of two phenolic antinematodal compounds with minimum effective dose (MED) of 4.5 and 20 microg/cotton ball (microg/bl.) or 0.018 and 0.073 microM/cotton ball (microM/bl.), respectively. Based...

Enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose in plant and wood cell walls is expected to be affected by its chemical composition as well as structural and morphological features. In the present study, different crystallinity cellulose samples and varying size fractionated loblolly pine wood cell wall particles were hydrolyzed using a mixture of Celluclast and Novozyme 188. In pure cellulose samples of Wha...