The laser damage resistance of coatings in high-power laser systems depends significantly on the surface quality of the substrate. In our experiment, pits were precisely fabricated on the surface of fused silica substrate using a femtosecond laser processing bench. The HfO2/SiO2 high-reflective coatings at 1064 nm were deposited by conventional e-beam evaporation onto fuse...

The growth of network availability has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of on-line information users can access remotely. However, users often have difficulty locating the details they require due to the manner in which this information is provided. One reason for this difficulty is that limited facilities are provided which allow users to exploit their existing spatial skills in managi...

Replacement of cysteine at position 543 by tyrosine in the influenza virus hemagglutinin (HA) protein enables the endocytosis of the mutant protein (Tyr 543) through coated pits (Lazarovits, J., and M. G. Roth. 1988. Cell. 53:743-752). To investigate the interactions between Tyr 543 and the clathrin coats in the plasma membrane of live cells, we performed fluorescence photobleaching recovery me...

On-farm manure storage pits contain both toxic and asphyxiating gases such as hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia. Farmers and service personnel occasionally need to enter these pits to conduct repair and maintenance tasks. One intervention to reduce the toxic and asphyxiating gas exposure risk to farm workers when entering manure pits is manure pit ventilation. This article ...

Clathrin lattices at the plasma membrane coat both invaginated and flat regions forming clathrin-coated pits and clathrin plaques, respectively. The function and regulation of clathrin-coated pits in endocytosis are well understood but clathrin plaques remain enigmatic nanodomains. Here we use super-resolution microscopy, molecular genetics and cell biology to show that clathrin plaques contain...

Signaling from the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) via phosphorylation on its C-terminal tyrosine residues requires self-association, which depends on the diffusional properties of the receptor and its density in the plasma membrane. Dimerization is a key event for EGFR activation, but the role of higher order clustering is unknown. We employed single particle tracking to relate the mob...

The Concept of Populated Information Terrains (PITS) aims to extend database technology with key ideas from the new fields of Virtual Reality (VR) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). PITS are virtual data spaces which support visualisation of, and cooperative work within, shared data. This paper identifies key techniques for building PITS for various types of database, including mul...

We show that our recently reported microwave photonic jet technique for detection of deeply subwavelength pits in a metal substrate can be extended to optical wavelengths for purposes of high-density data storage. Three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain computational solutions of Maxwell's equations are used to optimize the photonic nanojet and pit configuration to account for the Drude...

We have examined, by analyzing thin (15-20 nm) serial sections, whether coated pits involved in adsorptive pinocytosis in cultured fibroblasts give rise to free coated vesicles or represent permanently surface-associated structures from the neck of which uncoated receptosomes pinch off and carry ligand into the cell. Human skin fibroblasts and mouse L-929 fibroblasts were incubated with cationi...