BACKGROUND The carnivorous plants of the genus Nepenthes, widely distributed in the Asian tropics, rely mostly on nutrients derived from arthropods trapped in their pitcher-shaped leaves and digested by their enzymatic fluid. The genus exhibits a great diversity of prey and pitcher forms and its mechanism of trapping has long intrigued scientists. The slippery inner surfaces of the pitchers, wh...

a frequency-wavenumber-domain formulation is presented in this paper for calculation of the green's functions and wave propagation modes in a stratified fluid body underlain by a layered viscoelastic soil medium. the green's functions define the solid and fluid displacements and fluid pressures due to uniform disk loads acting in either the soil or fluid media. the solution is in the frequency ...

INTRODUCTION Articular cartilage is known to exhibit strong transient mechanical behavior. When subjected to high strainrate loading, its apparent stiffness can be 10 times greater than its stiffness at equilibrium. However, the mechanism of this strain-rate dependent response is not completely understood. While some studies have shown evidence of a fluid-flow dominant mechanism of the strain-r...

INTRODUCTION: Tendon viscoelastic behaviors are due to frictional losses that may arise from several sources: fluid flow, internal friction between aligned collagen fibers, intrinsic friction in extrafibrillar matrix components (e.g., proteoglycans and glycosaminoglycans), or interactions between the fibers and extrafibrillar matrix (1-4). While it is generally accepted that these are the poten...