In this project the efforts were geared towards building and testing a high aspect ratio (HAR) microfluidic device to concentrate microalgae in a continuous flow microfluidic chip. This project was made possible through funding from USDA, SBIR phase-I grant to Phycal, Inc. Algae are a promising candidate for large-scale production of biofuels, an important source of renewable energy. However, a...

In deduplication-based backup systems, the chunks of each backup are physically scattered after deduplication, which causes a challenging fragmentation problem. The fragmentation decreases restore performance, and results in invalid chunks becoming physically scattered in different containers after users delete backups. Existing solutions attempt to rewrite duplicate but fragmented chunks to im...

Human activities recognition (HAR) enabling the understanding of basic human actions from still images has overriding importance in computer vision and pattern recognition for sundry applications. We propose a novel method for HAR by taking out the skeleton from the image for extracting useful features. This approach comprised of two steps namely (i) an automatic skeletal feature extraction and...

We have previously described 2 strains of New Zealand White rabbits with a high (HAR) or low (LAR) atherosclerotic response to hypercholesterolemia. In the present study, we focused on class A scavenger receptor (SR-A) activity and ApoE expression in macrophages from both rabbit strains. These parameters play a crucial role in maintaining cholesterol homeostasis in the arterial wall and may be ...

Substrate specificity in the aldo-keto reductase (AKR) superfamily is determined by three mobile loops positioned at the top of the canonical (α/β)(8)-barrel structure. These loops have previously been demonstrated to be modular in a well-studied class of AKRs, in that exchanging loops between two similar hydroxysteroid dehydrogenases resulted in a complete alteration of substrate specificity (...

The ideas of Benôıt Mandelbrot, about the geometrical properties of sets which he called fractal, was published as late as 1975. Since then, there have for fractals, and most commonly the estimation of the fractal dimension, been found uses in the most diverse applications. Fractal geometry has been used in information theory, economics, flow dynamics and image analysis, among many different ar...