Search

The efficient storage of energy combined with a minimum carbon footprint is still considered one of the major challenges towards the transition to a progressive, sustainable and environmental friendly society on a global scale. The energy storage in pure chemical form using gas carriers with high heating values, including H-2 and CH4, as well as via electrochemical means using state-of-the-art devices, such as batteries or supercapacitors, are two of the most attractive alternatives for the combustion of finite, carbon-rich and environmentally harmful fossil fuels, such as diesel and gasoline. A few-step, reproducible and scalable method is presented in this study for the preparation of an ultra-microporous (average pore size around 0.6 nm) activated carbon cloth (ACC) with large specific area ( GT 1200 m(2)/g) and pore volume (similar to 0.5 cm(3)/g) upon combining chemical impregnation, carbonization and CO2 activation of a low-cost cellulose-based polymeric fabric. The ACC material shows a versatile character towards three different applications, including H2 storage via cryo-adsorption, separation of energy-dense CO2/CH4 mixtures via selective adsorption and electrochemical energy storage using super-capacitor technology. Fully reversible H-2 uptake capacities in excess of 3.1 wt% at 77 K and similar to 72 bar along with a significant heat of adsorption value of up to 8.4 kJ/mol for low surface coverage have been found. Upon incorporation of low-pressure sorption data in the ideal adsorbed solution theory model, the ACC is predicted to selectively adsorb about 4.5 times more CO2 than CH4 in ambient conditions and thus represents an appealing adsorbent for the purification of such gaseous mixtures. Finally, an electric double-layer capacitor device was assembled and tested for its electrochemical performance, constructed of binder-free and flexible ACC electrodes and aqueous CsCl electrolyte. The full-cell exhibits a gravimetric capacitance of similar to 121 F/g for a specific current of 0.02 A/g, which relative to the ACCs specific area, is superior to commercially available activated carbons. A capacitance retention of more than 97% was observed after 10,000 charging/discharging cycles, thus indicating the ACCs suitability for demanding and high-performance energy storage on a commercial scale. The enhanced performance in all tested applications seems to be attributed to the mean ultra-micropore size of the ACC material instead of the available specific area and/or pore volume.

Estrogen receptor alpha (ERalpha) is a modular protein of the steroid/nuclear receptor family of transcriptional regulators that upon binding to the hormone undergoes structural changes, resulting in its nuclear translocation and docking to specific chromatin sites. In the nucleus, ERalpha assembles in multiprotein complexes that act as final effectors of estrogen signaling to the genome through chromatin remodeling and epigenetic modifications, leading to dynamic and coordinated regulation of hormone-responsive genes. Identification of the molecular partners of ERalpha and understanding their combinatory interactions within functional complexes is a prerequisite to define the molecular basis of estrogen control of cell functions. To this end, affinity purification was applied to map and characterize the ERalpha interactome in hormone-responsive human breast cancer cell nuclei. MCF-7 cell clones expressing human ERalpha fused to a tandem affinity purification tag were generated and used to purify native nuclear ER-containing complexes by IgG-Sepharose affinity chromatography and glycerol gradient centrifugation. Purified complexes were analyzed by two-dimensional DIGE and mass spectrometry, leading to the identification of a ligand-dependent multiprotein complex comprising beta-actin, myosins, and several proteins involved in actin filament organization and dynamics and/or known to participate in actin-mediated regulation of gene transcription, chromatin dynamics, and ribosome biogenesis. Time course analyses indicated that complexes containing ERalpha and actin are assembled in the nucleus early after receptor activation by ligands, and gene knockdown experiments showed that gelsolin and the nuclear isoform of myosin 1c are key determinants for assembly and/or stability of these complexes. Based on these results, we propose that the actin network plays a role in nuclear ERalpha actions in breast cancer cells, including coordinated regulation of target gene activity, spatial and functional reorganization of chromatin, and ribosome biogenesis.

The complex hierarchical structure in biological and synthetic fibrous nanocomposites entails considerable difficulties in the interpretation of the crystallographic texture from diffraction data. Here, we present a novel reconstruction method to obtain the 3D distribution of fibres in such systems. An analytical expression is derived for the diffraction intensity from fibres, explaining the azimuthal intensity distribution in terms of the angles of the three dimensional fibre orientation distributions. The telson of stomatopod (mantis shrimp) serves as an example of natural biological armour whose high impact resistance property is believed to arise from the hierarchical organization of alpha chitin nanofibrils into fibres and twisted plywood (Bouligand) structures at the sub-micron and micron scale. Synchrotron microfocus scanning X-ray diffraction data on stomatopod telson were used as a test case to map the 3D fibre orientation across the entire tissue section. The method is applicable to a range of biological and biomimetic structures with graded 3D fibre texture at the sub-micron and micron length scales.

The number of mobile-connected devices has been growing at a tremendous rate in recent years. These increasingly powerful tablets and smartphones are portable and personal, giving advertisers the potential to reach consumers on a one-on-one basis with personalized advertisements based on location, recent behaviors, and much more. A substantial difference between mobile media usage and mobile advertising spending suggests a significant growth opportunity in the mobile advertising market. Our work involves improving the decision-making technology used by Advertising.com, a large online advertising network, as it attempts to increase its presence in the mobile advertising market. We examined the factors that differentiate mobile consumers in order to target them more effectively, and drive the direction of Advertising.com's future mobile optimization technology development. Data was available to us from Advertising.com's back-end database, as well as in its front-end campaign reporting system. To investigate this data and determine the most valuable mobile variables, we performed data analysis utilizing tools including Microsoft Excel, R, SQL, and Minitab. We also leveraged Advertising.com's existing decision algorithm, AdLearn, as well as looked to existing mobile advertising studies. Our analyses indicate several factors are influential in the effectiveness of mobile advertisements including hour of day, day of week and device type. We found that mobile campaigns perform best during the morning hours and late at night in terms of both impressions and conversions. Also, we found that weekends have statistically superior conversion rates.

Virtual agency, the perceived intentional initiation of movement by an amputee of his or her phantom limb, can help reduce pain associated with the missing limb. One key aspect of enhancing virtual agency may lie in recreating a realistic residual limb in an immersive virtual environment. The apparatus described herein seeks to track an amputee's residual forearm and virtually render its restored movement. Specifically, magnetic position sensors and surface electromyography signals are used to track the absolute position of the residual forearm and the intentional grasp from the residual muscles. This information is inputted to software that creates the visual rendering. In the X3D virtual environment, the amputee user interacts with balls in a task that involves picking up one of six colored balls and dropping it into a bin. The image is produced by reflecting projected light off of a mirror and onto a tabletop where the user views the virtual environment. Use case studies indicate that this device can successfully detect when a user attempts to grasp his or her hand and provides visual feedback collocating the virtual limb with the missing limb. Thus, this device gives the user a sense of proprioceptive control of his or her phantom limb, enhancing virtual agency, and increasing the likelihood pain relief.

Mirror box therapy helps reduce phantom limb pain by enhancing virtual agency, the intentional initiation of movement by an amputee of his or her missing limb. However, mirror box therapy is limited by a restriction to symmetrical movement and by the lack of user interaction with objects, making it difficult for the user to remain engaged. As an emerging therapy, the addition of virtual reality more readily offers an environment that is immersive and reconfigurable. The virtual reality therapy described herein seeks to provide an engaging, therapeutic illusion that allows asymmetric limb movement. In the virtual environment, the amputee user interacts with balls in a task that involves picking up one of six colored balls and dropping the ball into a bin. The image is produced by reflecting projected light off of a mirror and onto a tabletop where the user views virtual environment. The particular training procedures were designed to incorporate two separately controllable motor actions, afford immersive feedback through the visual channel, give the user a sense of hand to object interaction, and account for user comfort and sustained attention engagement. This task poses minimal strain on the residual limb and minimizes the number of non-invasive sensors. Future testing will determine the device's effectiveness in alleviating phantom limb pain in transradial individuals.

The high-performance potential of parallel and distributed computation can only be realized with significant computation speed-ups from the coordinated action of many processors. A basic problem that has to be addressed, in order to realize this potential, is the unreliability of the resulting (highly complex) systems of many processors. The research of N00014-91-J-1613 'Principles of Fault-Tolerant and Efficient Parallel Computation bas focused, primarily. on the algorithmic Principles of fault-tolerant and efficient parallel computing. The desirable combination of reliability and performance is nontrivial since efficiency implies removing redundancy, whereas fault-tolerance requires adding some redundancy to computations