C. Navío,1,* M. J. Capitán,2 J. Álvarez,1 F. Yndurain,1 and R. Miranda1 1Departamento de Física de la Materia Condensada e Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales Nicolás Cabrera, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Cantoblanco, 28049 Madrid, Spain 2Instituto de Estructura de la Materia-CSIC, c/Serrano 119, 28006 Madrid, Spain Received 8 March 2007; revised manuscript received 31 May 2007; published 6 A...

We propose an eecient and exible scheme to fairly interpolate or approximate the vertices of a given triangular mesh. Instead of generating a piecewise polynomial representation, our output will be a re-ned mesh with vertices lying densely on a surface with minimum bending energy. To obtain those, we generalize the nite diierences technique to parametric meshes. The use of local parameterizatio...

The linear dichroism is calculated for DNA fragments in their thermal bending equilibrium. These calculations are given for relatively short fragments, where bent molecules can be described by an arc model. Using the measured value of 350 A for the persistence length, the limit dichroism (corresponding to complete alignment) decreases due to thermal bending, e.g., for a fragment with 100 base p...

The Multi-DOF forceps manipulator we developed has two additional DOF of bending on the tip of forceps, and provides new surgical fields and techniques for surgeons. The most remarkable characteristics of the prototype described in this paper are: 1) the small diameter and the small radius of curvature of bending; 2) the confirmation of perfect cleanness and sterilization of this manipulator. I...

In this paper, a comparison of weak-form Galerkin and least-squares finite element models of Timoshenko beam theory with the von Kármán strains is presented. Computational characteristics of the two models and the influence of the polynomial orders used on the relative accuracies of the two models are discussed. The degree of approximation functions used varied from linear to the 5th order. In ...

The wormlike-chain (WLC) model is widely used to describe the energetics of DNA bending. Motivated by recent experiments, alternative, so-called subelastic chain models were proposed that predict a lower elastic energy of highly bent DNA conformations. Until now, no unambiguous verification of these models has been obtained because probing the elasticity of DNA on short length scales remains ch...

In this study we used Triton X-100 extracted sea urchin spermatozoa to investigate the mechanical behavior of the basic 9+2 axoneme. The dynein motors were disabled by vanadate so that the flagellum is rendered a passive structure. We find that when a proximal portion of the flagellum is bent with a glass microprobe, the remainder of the flagellum distal to the probe exhibits a bend in the oppo...

The study of the tensile behaviour of clay is one of the topics which requires a specific lighting especially when one pays a close attention to the pathology of work built with or on clays subjected to significant tensile forces. Therefore, failure or damage of clay, under specific conditions, can be related to tensile stress limit and not to shear stress limit. It is the case of compacted cla...