Low yields in ornamental rock mining remain one of the most important problems in this industry. This fact is usually associated with the presence of anisotropies in the rock, which makes it difficult to extract the blocks. An optimised planning of the exploitation, together with an improved geological understanding of the deposit, could increase these yields. In this work, marble mining in Mac...

The particle size distribution of fragmented rock in mines significantly affects operational performance of loading equipment, materials handling and crushing systems. A number of methods to measure rock fragmentation exist at present, however these systems have a number of shortcomings in an underground environment. This paper outlines the first implementation of high resolution 3D laser scann...

Cognitive development is a process from an initial knowledge state at birth to a later mature one. The problem of developmental psychology is to describe and explain the intricacies of this process. In “The Scientist in the Crib”, Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl approach this problem from the perspective of one theory in developmental psychology — the theory theory. The b...

An investigation is made into the effects of water jet pressure, nozzle diameter, traverse speed of the nozzle over the rock surface and the number of times the jet passes over the same area on the penetration of a water jet into Indiana limestone. The effectiveness of the cut is judged on the depth of cut established and the specific energy of rock removal. Pressure is varied in the range from...

Smooth muscle is a major component of most hollow organ systems (e.g., airways, vasculature, bladder and gut/gastrointestine); therefore, the coordinated regulation of contraction is a key property of smooth muscle. When smooth muscle functions normally, it contributes to general health and wellness, but its dysfunction is associated with morbidity and mortality. Rho-associated protein kinase (...

BACKGROUND Pharmacological inhibition of arginase and remote ischemic perconditioning (RIPerc) are known to protect the heart against ischemia/reperfusion (IR) injury. PURPOSE The objective of this study was to investigate whether (1) peroxynitrite-mediated RhoA/Rho associated kinase (ROCK) signaling pathway contributes to arginase upregulation following myocardial IR; (2) the inhibition of t...

Drilling into a rock massif is energetically extremely consumptive process. Hence the optimization of drilling regime with objective of energy consumption minimization, is very important. Proposed article discusses partial problem of this problem. During the drilling process it is useful to know the drilled rock type, whereas to particular drilled rock needs convenient drilling regime, which is...

Production scheduling (planning) of an open-pit mine is the procedure during which the rock blocks are assigned to different production periods in a way that the highest net present value of the project achieved subject to operational constraints. The paper introduces a new and computationally less expensive meta-heuristic technique known as imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) for long-term...

In 3-D analyses of rock slopes there’re can be numerous sliding paths a long a coplanar nonpersistent discontinuity with a known strike. This paper describes an approach for the determination of a most probable sliding path. For this particular study, several blocks of gypsum with the dimensions of 15×15×15 cm containing coplanar non-persistent open joints were fabricated. The models have vario...