The attachment ability of ladybird beetles Coccinella septempunctata was systematically investigated on eight types of surface, each with different chemical and topographical properties. The results of traction force tests clearly demonstrated that chemical surface properties, such as static/dynamic de-wettability of water and oil caused by specific chemical compositions, had no significant eff...

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Background: The removal of toxic metals from sewage and wastewaters is one of the most important concerns in the twenty first century. The removal of poisonous Cr(VI) from aqueous solution by different low-cost available nanoporous adsorbents was investigated in the present study.  Methods: Fumed silica, bentonite (BN), hydrotalcite (HT), MCM-41, Na-Y, mordenite (MOR) and SAPO-34 were ...

We consider liquid drops or crystals lying in equilibrium under the action of a potential energy. For small masses, the proximity of the resulting minimizers from the Wulff shape associated to the surface tension is quantitatively controlled in terms of the smallness of the mass and with respect to the natural notions of distance induced by the regularity of the Wulff shape. Stronger results ar...

Availability of highly reactive halogen ions at the surface of aerosols has tremendous implications for the atmospheric chemistry. Yet neither simulations, experiments, nor existing theories are able to provide a fully consistent description of the electrolyte-air interface. In this Letter a new theory is proposed which allows us to explicitly calculate the ionic density profiles, the surface t...

Superrepellency is an extreme situation where liquids stay at the tops of rough surfaces, in the so-called Cassie state. Owing to the dramatic reduction of solid/liquid contact, such states lead to many applications, such as antifouling, droplet manipulation, hydrodynamic slip, and self-cleaning. However, superrepellency is often destroyed by impalement transitions triggered by environmental di...

Over the last two decades, there has been an increasing awareness of, and interest in, the use of spatial moment techniques to provide insight into a range of biological and ecological processes. Models that incorporate spatial moments can be viewed as extensions of mean-field models. These mean-field models often consist of systems of classical ordinary differential equations and partial diffe...